(LifeSiteNews) — A Catholic Church in New York is on the lookout for a man who knocked the head off a statue of the Child Jesus that has been on its property for more than 40 years.
In late June, a security camera caught a man pummeling a statue of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph outside the Queens-based Church of the Holy Family in Flushing.
The footage shows the man exiting his taxi at 5:30 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, May 31. He then took off his shoe and began hitting the face of St. Joseph, followed by Mary, then the Child Jesus until its head was knocked off.
“My heart just broke, and of course I’m asking the question: Why? Why did this guy do this?” Father Sean Suckiel told ABC-7 New York. “Certainly, the statue is not in his way, it was very deliberate for him to do this, so the big question is why?”
The attack at Holy Family is the latest in a string of vandalism on Catholic churches across the United States. In June, St. Michael the Archangel parish in Portland, Oregon had its tabernacle stolen by a burglar who broke into the church after midnight. Nearby St. Patrick’s in northwest Portland had its doors and sidewalk spray painted with the message “My Body, My Choice” on April 27. The church was reportedly attacked twice previously, once in June 2021 and again in July 2021 during a crime wave carried out on four Catholic churches in Portland over a six-week period that summer.
CatholicVote.org has reported that there has been over 400 attacks on Catholic churches in the U.S. since 2020. The website’s “Violence Tracker” has found that more than 27 attacks have occurred in 2024 alone and that of only 25 percent of cases end in an arrest. The report says that the top 10 states with the most attacks on Catholic churches are California (55), New York (46), Pennsylvania (25), Texas (22), Colorado (17), New Jersey (17), Ohio (16), Florida (16), Massachusetts (16), and Oregon (15).
The attack at Holy Family was not the first time it was targeted. A similar incident took place last year when an assailant tore down an angel statue from its pedestal. Police are still seeking to identify the man who carried out the attack on the Child Jesus statue.