CV NEWS FEED // Law enforcement officials are investigating reports that communion wafers were spread around a parking lot at a Catholic church in West Virginia on Easter Sunday, local media reported April 3.
Parishioner Richard Laurine and Fr. Timothy Grassi, the pastor of St. James the Greater Catholic Church in Charles Town, said that people leaving Easter Mass at an area historical chapel found communion wafers in the parking lot and on the road leading to the lot, according to an article in The Herald-Mail. The Chapel of St. Peter, which is in Harpers Ferry National Park, is under the care of St. James the Greater Catholic Church.
According to the article, Laurine said that the wafers were mostly around the vehicles’ driver’s side doors. The people who attended Mass would have to step on the hosts to enter their vehicles. There were enough wafers to fill four large plastic cups.
Fr. Grassi said that while he suspects the wafers were not consecrated, church officials buried them, following Church practices, just in case, The Herald-Mail reported. The priest said he believes that the perpetrator is trying to scare people and to do something evil by having people believe that they were desecrating consecrated hosts.
“More than anything else, it’s just a way to put fear into people or to make some sort of a statement. What the statement is, we don’t know. We haven’t received anything,” Fr. Grassi said, according to the article.
Fr. Grassi said “in a certain sense, I think it is,” when he was asked if it might be a hate crime, the article said.
The church’s parking lot is owned by the National Park Service, the article said.
Harpers Ferry National Historical Park Interpretation and Education Program Manager Kristen Maxfield said law enforcement park rangers with the Division of Visitor and Resource Protection are investigating.
Fr. Grassi said in the article that his top concern is where the wafers came from. They did not come from the church, he and Maxfield said in the article.
“We were in the church at the time this was done,” Fr. Grassi said, according to the article. “While we were having the Easter Mass, someone must have apparently come and thrown these hosts around.”
Investigators want anyone who may have witnessed activity in the area between 9 and 11:30 a.m. March 31 to call 304-535-6029.
The post National Park Service investigates incident in West Virginia involving communion wafers as possible ‘hate crime’ appeared first on CatholicVote org.