The following is a Catholic Action League of Massachusetts news release…
For the second time in less than two years, Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross has been the target of vandalism.
In the overnight hours, sometime before 7am on August 14th—the Vigil of the Assumption—a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the Cathedral grounds was defaced with graffiti.
The statue, which remains on its pedestal, is located on the Union Park Street side of the Cathedral, near the corner of Washington Street. There was no other reported damage.
City Councilor Edward Flynn, the district city councilor for Boston’s South End, has called for a hate crime investigation of the incident.
The Cathedral has been attacked before.
On October 23, 2023, a career criminal, Michael Patzelt, was videotaped while breaking the arms and attempting to tear the corpus off the cross of a 150 year old crucifix on the Cathedral grounds.
Patzelt, who was subsequently arrested, inflicted an estimated $20,000 of damage on the crucifix.
On September 21, 2016, a rock was hurled through an original, 19th century, stained glass window of the Cathedral, causing $3,000 worth of damages. The perpetrator was never found.
Since the beginning of 2020, there have been, at least, 37 attacks on Catholic churches, institutions and religious iconography in Massachusetts, including an arson fire, last October, in Saint Mary’s Church in Franklin.
The Catholic Action League called the vandalism “the latest in a long series of criminal, anti-Catholic incidents in the Commonwealth, going back more than fifteen years, which have, in the vast majority of cases, gone unsolved and unpunished.”
Catholic Action League Executive Director C. J. Doyle made the following comment:
“Councilor Ed Flynn is to be commended for his call for a hate crime investigation of this incident.”
“The Catholic Action League joins him in calling upon the Boston Police, Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden, and Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell, to initiate such a probe and dedicate the resources necessary to identify, locate and prosecute the offender.”
“Once again, unfathomably, the Archdiocese of Boston, instead of expressing outrage and demanding a vigorous response from public authorities, has chosen to minimize this crime, and adopt the passive posture of a spectator in an assault on its own spiritual headquarters.”
“In a statement to the Boston Herald, Terrence Donilon, the Archdiocesan Secretary for Communications and Public Affairs, said the chancery was ‘aware of the vandalism,’ and that it is ‘a police matter,’ and ‘we are praying for whoever is responsible.’
“It is difficult to comprehend how any organization governed by rational actors could respond with such diffidence to a probable hate crime directed against its premier institution.”
“Sadly, these incidents will continue until the Catholic Church in Massachusetts learns to take them seriously.”
The sign on the front of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, Massachusetts. Image credit: Farragutful, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
