Stealing the 800-year-old skull of a beloved saint from a basilica in broad daylight really raises questions about whether your priorities are in line. There are better things to steal. Money, for instance. A candy bar. It also raises some questions of personal taste. If you’re stealing the thing, you had better not put it in an empty apartment next to the flat screen TV sitting on the floor.
And yet these thoughts and more did not prevent such a crime from happening, as The Guardian reports that police in the Czech Republic are searching for a suspect accused of snatching the skull of Saint Zdislava of Lemberk from a display box inside the Basilica of Saint Lawrence and Saint Zdislava in Jablonne v Podjestedi. That’s a small town just north of Prague, in case you were wondering.
Security footage reportedly shows a person dressed in black sprinting through the church pews carrying the stolen skull of a canonized saint. It’s the kind of crime that, if there were objectively no such thing as an afterlife, a hell would instantly be created just so this person could be sent there.
Police Are Searching for Someone Who Stole a Saint’s 800-Year-Old Skull From a Basilica
Saint Zdislava was a 13th-century noblewoman known for caring for the poor and sick. The kind of bighearted selflessness that gets you turned into a saint. She was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1995, and her remains became an important pilgrimage site for Czech Catholics. As such, her remains held an enormous spiritual and historical significance.
Police initially identified the suspect as a man, but later admitted they weren’t entirely sure. Makes sense, considering the one image they released, taken from the surveillance cam footage, is fairly useless. From the image in question, surprised they didn’t conclude that the culprit was Slender Man.
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