http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2595
Getting into the church was easy. The thieves probably walked in through the front door, posing as a few more of the faithful who come to bow their heads in St. John the Evangelist, the most important church in Capranica, 35 miles (56 km) north of Rome. They hid, waited to be locked in after the last people left, then went to work. They ignored the candlesticks, the alms box and the communion chalice: those are for amateurs — easy to grab, easy to sell. These were professionals, and they were after something specific: the Via Crucis, or Stations of the Cross, 14 paintings each depicting a moment in Jesus’ final hours. Painted in oil by an anonymous 18th century artist, these scenes were the church’s most glorious features, its aesthetic soul. And on the black market, they could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The thieves removed the framed canvases from the walls and lowered them through a window to the side street below. When they were done, they left the church through a tunnel that only a few people knew about. Once outside, they vanished, along with the paintings. That was November 2006, and Capranica’s Stations of the Cross are still missing. During pre-Easter celebrations, when parishioners would traditionally recite all 14 stations using the paintings as their guide, they had to pray before 14 small wooden crosses instead. The theft has left Capranica’s small community with a sense of loss that is deep and personal, as if an old friend had disappeared. “We grew up with those paintings,” says Marina, who owns a card shop across from St. John. “Yesterday,” adds her mother Maria, “I was looking at those nude walls and I felt as if someone had broken into my own home.”
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1702155,00.html
Image: Scores of Serb churches in Kosovo have been looted by Western backed Muslims