A priest attacked at adoration: it was the monstrance the man was after

On 31 August, during a Holy Hour in a church in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a man walked in, overturned objects on the altar and tried to seize the monstrance in which the Blessed Sacrament was exposed for adoration. The parish priest stepped forward to stop him; struck in the face, first with a fist and then with a beer can, he suffered only a minor injury. A bystander subdued the assailant until the police arrived. Taken to hospital and then released, the priest forgave his attacker and asked that people pray for this man and for peace. The assailant, aged fifty-nine, was charged with assault and battery and several other counts, and then held for psychiatric observation.

What tradition measures

What was laid hands on here was not first a man, but the Sacrament. In the Eucharist, under the consecrated species, is contained truly, really and substantially the Body and Blood, together with the soul and divinity, of Our Lord Jesus Christ; to this Sacrament is due the worship of latria, the adoration that belongs to God alone.

To seek to wrench away the monstrance in order to steal the Host is not to attack a precious object: it is to lay hands on the Presence itself. Tradition names this kind of fault sacrilege, the violation of a sacred thing, place or person; and of all sacrileges, the one that touches the Eucharist is the gravest, for it reaches the very Author of all holiness. To this is added the violence done to a priest in a holy place, which the fifth commandment condemns.

The measure of the deed

We therefore measure this crime not by the lightness of the priest's wound—taken to hospital and then released—but by what was aimed at: the altar overturned, the Host coveted, the adoration interrupted. The charity of the priest, who forgave and asked for prayers for his attacker, is the Christian answer to the injury received in his person. It does not dispense from the other duty: the reparation owed to God offended, which is adoration renewed and the amends made to the outraged Blessed Sacrament. Where sacrilege has passed, it is adoration that repairs.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the sacrament of the Eucharist and the worship of latria due to the Blessed Sacrament, and on the nature of sacrilege; on the fifth commandment, on violence done to one's neighbour.