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A MAN IN his 80s and a woman in her 60s have been arrested in France after thousands of stolen church artefacts were found in their homes.
The man reportedly has anti-clerical views and the woman was recently baptised.
Police confirmed that the pair were picked up after the detective work of a cleric in a Paris suburb correctly predicted when they would return to his church.
More than 3,000 religious objects — including crosses, statues, candles and rosary beads — were recovered from the homes of the man and his neighbour in the southern suburb of Bagneux during a search late last week.
“At the home of the octogenarian the toilets were absolutely full of crucifixes, there wasn’t so much as a square centimetre of space,” Ludovic Serre, a priest whose parish was among those targeted, said.
He has now managed to recover some of the lost items.
Serre spoke of the frequent disappearance of objects from his Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes church in Chaville since last November.
“As soon as I put a cross out on the altar of confession, it would disappear,” he said, adding that when the crib was taken from the Christmas nativity display in December “it was too much and I filed a complaint”.
€10,000-worth
Police said that other religious buildings had been targeted by the same criminals over several weeks, with everything from cheap candles to old Russian icons disappearing, with the total worth of the stolen items put at around €10,000.
Serre, whose church is now protected by a video surveillance system, said the robbers appeared to have a quite precise method of operating, arriving “every four or five weeks, on Sundays between 4-4:30 pm”.
“I told the police that, according to my calculations, they should return on 21 February. And they did. Although half an hour early,” he added.
The investigators then followed the two suspects to their homes where they were quickly arrested.
The police had expected that the church thieves would be youngsters, the priest said.
“In fact they found an 80-year-old … a revolutionary who believes that church property should be taken away” and a woman in her sixties who “had recently been baptised”.
The pair have been released pending trial.
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Can you just imagine what the cross examination will be like?
They’ll be crucified by the barrister…
They’ll probably get nailed for it though…
They haven’t a prayer.
The French government should just cover it up by moving them around from parish to parish and let them keep stealing for the next decade or two.
These people make me very cross.
Holy shite
Headcases
Straight to hell for that!
Straight to Atheist heaven.
Stealing the innocence of a child and traumatising a child could be perceived as a much worse crime than stealing a few church artefacts of a superstitious nature.
Those crucifixes must be handy for constipation,
Catholicism really is gone down the jacks
One would need to be mentally unstable to actually steal that creepy crap and take it home!
Or sell it at Knock for a hefty profit. Wait a minute…
Here come the red thumbs! Sinead, was that you?!
Its almost as if no one has ever contemplated ripping off gullible religious fools.
I’d say that’s probably the case, John.
Seems a bit strange for someone with anti-Church views to go around stealing things and even more strange to hole such views and live with someone newly baptised.
The priest here reminds me of Father Dowling Mysteries.
Method actors for the upcoming les miserables
Jesus Christ!!!
Father Dowling solves another mystery!
Where’s Onan and the rest of the god botherers on an article like this?
have your say