As Catholics around the world eagerly awaited white smoke from the Sistine Chapel, a pastor in rural Pennsylvania watched a very different kind of white smoke pouring from a humble chapel at his church.
At 9:02 p.m. May 6, a 32-year-old man named Kyle Kuczynski allegedly detonated a stick of dynamite on the altar of the chapel at St. Teresa of Calcutta Church — so named because Mother Teresa once visited it — in Mahanoy City. Surveillance footage turned over to law enforcement revealed that Kuczynski had been casing the chapel, entering at least three other times earlier in the week.
It is high time for the federal government to take real action that will deter violence and ensure the safety of its churches.
The bombing marked the 500th documented act of violence or vandalism against a Catholic church in the United States in the last five years.
CatholicVote, the nation’s largest lay Catholic advocacy organization, has tracked each incident, from the destruction of a Nativity scene at a church in the Florida Keys to the smashing of the crucifix at a church in Emmonak, Alaska.
