St. Agnes Cathedral gets hit again

Rockville Centre and Nassau County detectives were called to St. Agnes Cathedral early Monday morning to investigate a reported theft after a church volunteer discovered that six collection boxes inside the cathedral had been pried open and emptied during the overnight hours.

According to police, the burglary occurred between 6:30 Sunday evening March 6 and 4:50 a.m. on Monday morning, March 7. A department spokesman said that approximately $600 was taken and that the church sustained an estimated $2,500 in damage.

The damage that police described as “substantial” occurred because the slots of the boxes, which collect parishioners’ donations for the poor, are built into the wall of the cathedral and when they were forced open, the wall was damaged.

According to detectives, who were working as fast as possible to gather evidence before a 10 a.m. funeral Mass at the cathedral on Monday, there was no sign of forced entry — and they don’t yet know how the thief or thieves got in.

This is the second time in recent weeks that St. Agnes Cathedral has been damaged. On the evening of Jan. 26, a bolt of lightning struck the bell tower of the church during a raging snowstorm. The electrical charge traveled along a grounded lightning rod through the church and underground, damaging parish equipment and causing an 80-year-old water main under adjacent Clinton Avenue to rupture.

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