Break-In Mars Holiday at Ventura Catholic Church

Preparing for Christmas Eve Masses early Friday morning, parishioners and priests at Our Lady of Assumption Catholic Church were surprised to learn that a thief had broken into their church.

Opening the Ventura church early for the regular 6:30 a.m. Mass, an altar boy discovered that the doors to the church’s sacristy, where the sacred chalices and vestments are kept, had been pried open.

The spindle and handle of a closet-sized antique safe, where the religious articles were kept, were broken. Church officials are still not sure if the safe actually stopped the thief because the door of the safe was jammed closed by the intruders.

A locksmith worked much of Friday morning trying to open the safe, but said he would have to wait until early next week to open it with a large drill.

“I think they thought what we have is more valuable than it really is,” said a slightly anxious Monsignor Donal Mulcahy, pastor at the church. “It’s valuable to us of course, but they were probably after money or gold or some such.”

As priests conducted their regular morning Masses on Friday, detectives from the Ventura Police Department scoured the church for clues to the break-in. Five or six separate doors were forced open, the intruders broke open a poor box and rifled through drawers containing the priests’ vestments.

In the meantime, church officials looked for alternate chalices, and Mulcahy readied the church for the thousands of people expected to attend one of the three Christmas Eve Masses or the four Masses on Christmas Day. His biggest anxiety was finding replacement chalices for the ones he hopes are still locked in the safe.

“I don’t know what we’ll do--improvise I guess,” Mulcahy said. “We might borrow some from the seminary in Camarillo or pinch hit using some bowls.”

Mulcahy left the sacristy, the anteroom where the locksmith worked on the safe, and walked out into the church to hear confessions and clean up the remnants of the break-in. He said he was still in the process of mentally outlining his Christmas sermon and thought the break-in might influence the message.

“You know when Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem on Christmas, they had a difficult time getting in anywhere,” he said, speculating that he could work off that theme, “but of course they weren’t safecrackers.”