Greg DalySallynoggin parish rallies after episode during adoration
The parish priest at a south Dublin church where the Eucharist was desecrated has praised how parishioners have responded to the sacrilege.
Fr Pádraig Gleeson, of Sallynoggin’s church of Our Lady of Victories, told The Irish Catholic that “we have an adoration chapel, and are always depending on people to turn up on time,” but that one evening “it happened that the person who was supposed to be on was sick.
“There was a short time with nobody officially in the chapel – the previous person had stayed longer than usual – and someone came in, found the place empty, took the host, broke the host and scattered it on the carpet.”
It was not long before the sacrilege was discovered, Fr Gleeson said, saying that “we were just lucky that people were around.”
One called the Gardaí, he said, and after the guards had done their work, one, who was a sacristan, “knew what to do with the host”.
Describing the attack as “a once-off thing” by “someone very unwell”, Fr Gleeson said that he was enormously encouraged by how “the one thing everyone wanted to do was to pray for that person”, which he said was “a very Christian response”.
“Security has upped a couple of hundred percent” since the attack, Fr Gleeson added, pointing out that this had been under consideration anyway, as he sees the adoration chapel as “a real treasure”, and that the parish had “already been asking some questions about safety, to make it a safe and secure place for sacrament and people”.
Although he says “the whole parish is shocked at what happened”, Fr Gleeson nonetheless has been impressed by how people have reacted to the attack. Explaining that the parish is “planning a vigil involving all-night prayer on May 8,” he stressed that this response was “coming from the people of the parish”, with there being “a sense that we need to make reparation for this awful sacrilege”.
Praising his parishioners for their “ideal Christian response to a shocking sacrilege”, he thanked them for how he has had “a sea of support all round” him, saying “and I was worried about them!”