A local parish was vandalized today.
Chris and I were out running errands when I noticed a sign on the door of a local Church that didn't look quite right.
We stopped the car, got out, and beheld this oddly worded mess, securely glued to the door.
There was another note on the ground held down by a rock (unreadable thanks to a recent downpour...pro tip, don't leave terroristic messages in washable marker), and a...Bible.
There was a bookmark in it, so we flipped it open to that, but didn't immediately see anything. There was just this Bible sitting there, in the rain, next to very nasty graffiti. We took it with us, it didn't seem right to leave it there.
We texted a couple friends and asked them to notify the pastor, included pictures of the damage, and headed home.
It wasn't until we got home that we realized the Bible was defaced inside the front cover.
By this point, I was pretty upset. We don't attend that parish, but we know a fair amount of people who do. Our town is a pretty socially conservative, culturally Catholic place, and something like this happening here was unexpected.
Granted, it looked like a trying -to-be-edgy 13 year old had done it, but still. It was jarring.
I decided to take a closer look at the bookmark. It was one of those magnetic sandwich types that clamp down on a page so it doesn't slip out. It had a cartoon Christmas three kings scene on it, which seemed an odd choice for a defaced Bible meant to protest the overturning of Roe, and it had several pages caught in between it. I'm guessing the book was stolen from mom or grandma's shelf.
I looked at the verses immediately below one side of the bookmark and began to laugh.
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| Highlights added by me |
Chris came over to see what I was looking at and chuckled too. Then he looked below the other side and started laughing so hard he doubled over.
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| Highlights added by me |
A Bible, used in an attempt to intimidate and scandalize a parish in retaliation for Dobbs, being bookmarked with something commemorating the Nativity and marking two verses that condemn wicked people and praise God for destroying evil laws.
God has a very sharp sense of humor.
Yuck. If it was an adolescent, though, it seems likely he or she did indeed steal Grandma's Bible. And maybe Grandma was reading (and praying with) those very passages because of the recent news. So that kid is really trying to rebel against not only an abstract law, but a family member's faith. Seems pretty likely, but still upsetting, yes.
ReplyDeleteYeah. This is a pretty solidly Catholic blue collar area too, so I imagine several people in the community would be pretty upset to find out about this too.
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