Pastor Stiekema found out about the theft when he received a message from two organists who were rehearsing in the church. “I find it horrible and I am really shocked,” said the pastor.
The door of the church was open. They also saw that two candle boxes had been broken open at the Mary and St. Gerard altars. The change has been taken. “That can never be much, because we empty them regularly,” Stiekema explains.
The thief then smashed the glass of the reliquary and took the box with the relic of Saint Gerard. A relic is a remains of a saint, for example a piece of bone or an object that has come into contact with the person in question.
The box contains a silver-plated reliquary with the Latin words: ‘ex ossibus St. Ger. Maj.’, ‘from the bones of Saint Gerard Majella’.
According to Stiekema, the box cannot be purchased at any gold dealer. Because it is made of wood and then gilded, “the yield is zero”. According to the pastor, this makes the box less valuable and tradable. However, the value for the church is great: “It is very sad that the object has disappeared,” says the pastor.
Stiekema has filed a report with the police, but he hopes that the thief will bring back the loot himself: “I don’t think they are experienced burglars.”
