Windows that thousands of visitors believed bore the image of the Virgin Mary were discovered broken recently. The three top panes that showed what appeared to be the Virgin Mary’s veiled head were destroyed, with just shards of glass remaining in the window frames. The damage was discovered when a ministry worker arrived the next morning. The image first appeared a week before Christmas in 1996. Hundreds of thousands of people have since visited the church to worship and take pictures. The imagestretched 60 feet high and twenty feet across on nine bronze colored glass panels. The image was evocative of a stained glass portrait of Mary. Shades of purple, blue, yellow, and green washed across the mirrored surface and swirled into a robe-draped figure with downcast head. Unfortunately however, the upper panels of the glass image were destroyed by an 18 year old kid for no particular reason other than to be mean. The vandal received a jail sentence of 10 days and ordered to pay the ministry $1200 for the damage. “He took something that was irreplaceable to the community,” prosecutor Doug Ellis told the kid. The jail stay will be followed by two years of probation.
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