THE DEAN of Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin believes thieves who took the heart of St Laurence O’Toole may have slept in the cathedral before leaving with the relic.
The Very Rev Dermot Dunne believes “it took someone a few visits to size up the place and to be so specific. There were money boxes around and they were not touched.
“The vergers checked on Friday evening that it was there but it was gone on Saturday morning,” he added.
The heart was kept in a wooden heart-shaped container sealed within a small iron-barred box.
St Laurence O’Toole, the first Irish archbishop of Dublin, was born in Castledermot, Co Kildare, in 1128. He became archbishop in 1162 and died at Eu in Normandy in 1180.
Dean Dunne has also speculated that the heart may have been stolen to order, or that perhaps a religious fanatic wanted the relic and paid somebody to steal it.
“Nobody has ever attempted to steal the heart in the past, it was just there and it never crossed my mind that it might be stolen. It has no monetary value but we have loads of silver. It’s the last thing we thought would be stolen.”
He wondered whether there may be a gang at work stealing relics. He pointed to the robbery of a reliquary from St Brigid’s Catholic Church in Killester, Dublin on January 29th.
Valued at €10,000, it contained a relic of St Brigid which had been removed temporarily as the reliquary was being cleaned. That would not have been known to thieves.
Shortly beforehand, on January 19th, stolen relics of the “true cross” were returned by gardaí to Holy Cross Abbey in Co Tipperary. The three relics, believed to be part of the cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified, were stolen from Cashel abbey last October.
They were recovered by gardaí after searches in the midlands.
The relics had been stolen by three men using an angle-grinder, hammer and screwdriver to forcibly open the steel display cabinet they were contained in.
Over Christmas, several thousand euros were stolen from St Brigid’s Church in Limerick between Christmas night and St Stephen’s Day. A safe containing three chalices was also stolen from Parteen Church, Co Clare, between Christmas night and St Stephen’s Day.