Police arrested a 23-year-old man accused of attacking a Virgin Mary statue with a hammer at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Waterbury, Connecticut.
Officers responded at around 8 a.m. Oct. 1 after receiving reports of a disturbance involving a weapon, and they found the suspect, later identified as Kyran Atkinson, striking the statue, FOX61 reported. Police said they used a taser after Atkinson ignored their commands.
Atkinson was charged with breach of peace, criminal mischief, interfering with an officer, and deprivation of rights, and his bond was set at $100,000, according to FOX. In court, his attorney said he suffers from mental health issues.
Father Jim Sullivan, rector of the basilica, told CatholicVote that the 100-year-old statue had never been damaged before. Church staff were cleaning when Atkinson — whom Fr. Sullivan also noted has a mental illness — jumped onto the altar and began swinging a hammer.
FOX reported that before the attack, Atkinson shouted that one of his prayers had gone unanswered.
Fr. Sullivan said the attack left parishioners with “great sadness,” comparing the damage to seeing one’s mother assaulted “because we love our own mother Mary, of course.” Only the statue’s garment was damaged; its face and hands were unharmed.
The pastor said the basilica has preserved the statue’s broken fragments and contacted a restoration expert who is expected to assess the damage in the coming days. The repairs, he said, could take about four to six weeks and will likely be covered by insurance, though parishioners have offered to help pay out of love for whom the statue represents and the basilica.
Fr. Sullivan explained that the incident can serve as a spiritual reminder for Catholics to renew their faith.
“The Church is being tested at this time,” he told CatholicVote. “Religion in general is being tested. As Tertullian once said, ‘The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church.’ Sometimes persecution actually helps people draw closer to a deeper awareness of their own spiritual life and where they might need to grow and how much they truly do love faith even when it’s being persecuted.”
Peter Wolfgang, a parishioner of five years, told CatholicVote the community is “shaken up” by the attack.
“That statue has stood there for 100 years, unmolested. There has never been an incident like that in the history of that church, in the century-long history of that particular building, so people are shaken up by it,” Wolfgang said. “It was a shock.”
Wolfgang noted that the attack comes amid rising concern over the safety of religious spaces nationwide, pointing to the mass shooting at the Minneapolis Catholic Church, the recent attack at the Michigan Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the more than 500 attacks on Catholic parishes throughout the U.S. that CatholicVote has documented over the past five years.
>> Tracker: 500 Attacks on U.S. Catholic Churches Since May 2020 <<
“Even though this young man appears to have been a lone wolf with mental problems, one does wonder if the basilica — because there are so many good things happening there — is on the devil’s radar,” he added.
Wolfgang, who heads the Family Institute of Connecticut Action, said parishioners are now discussing stronger safety measures with church leadership.
“The police are really the second responders,” he explained. “We need to think more about the first responder — how we can have systems in place inside the church to make sure a tragedy does not occur in the first place.”
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