Father, Sorry In Advance For Cursing, But What The Fuck Is Wrong With Some People?

Even if you don’t believe in hell, there should be a special place there for certain degenerates:

The morning heist in Flushing, Queens, yesterday seemed too bad to be true.

It happened at the Church of St. Mel during the 9 a.m. Christmas Mass, which was said in Italian. The parishioners had helped fill the safe in the sacristy with something north of $20,000, including money for needy children. The thieves, according to police and witness accounts, opened the safe, and lugged a heavy metal box with the money to a white sport utility vehicle with Vermont license plates.

There are, certainly, much more heinous offenses, especially considering that the collection in the safe consisted mostly of checks that could be stopped, and that the whole amount was insured. But the nerve shown by the thieves made it hard — especially for parishioners who had attended the church for decades — to imagine a worse transgression.

. . .

The Rev. Christopher J. Turczany, who was saying Mass at the time of the theft, still sounded shaken in an interview after the noon service. “They were very bold — not even scared,” said Father Turczany, who believes he saw one of the thieves about an hour before the robbery. That it happened on Christmas, he added, “is heartbreaking.”

. . .

[Father Turczany] said that about 8:30 a.m., as he was preparing for Mass, he saw a man in a striped gray winter hat — “full faced,” as he put it, with an olive complexion — wandering near a staircase close to the sacristy. Nearby was the safe, which contained church valuables, including money from collections and a gold chalice.

“He said, ‘I’m looking for a bathroom,'” Father Turczany said. “I told him, ‘Well, you’re going the wrong way.’ My suspicion was aroused.”

After directing the man, who he said weighed more than 200 pounds, to the bathroom, Father Turczany warned the sacristans, Nicholas Nangino, 19, and Christopher Urena, 20, to keep an eye out. Then he went into the sanctuary to start the Mass. “I spoke about the shepherds who came to see the newborn Christ,” he said.

Perhaps half an hour later, the sacristans, looking down a hallway, heard sounds and saw lights flickering on and off. Already on their guard, they went to investigate.

“It was a diversion,” Mr. Nangino said. “We find nothing downstairs. We find the safe open upstairs.”

It was unclear how someone had been able to open the safe. Father Turczany said that a lever on the safe was “in an open position — but locked,” without elaborating. The chalice was left behind, but a box, described by Father Turczany as a 2-foot cube and an “absolute heavy dead weight,” was gone.

The police said a witness, whom they would not identify, watched the men take the box to their car, a white Lincoln Navigator. The witness apparently asked them about the box, and the men said it was equipment used to install an elevator.

All this occurred during Mass, causing some confusion. As Father Turczany, standing at the altar, prepared to deliver the final blessing, an usher frantically signaled him.

The box contained cash and checks from the last four collections, between $20,000 and $30,000, though Father Turczany said it had not been counted. Some of the money was earmarked for church expenses, while the rest was intended for poor children in Brooklyn and Queens.