BY COLE SINANIAN | cole@queensledger.com
The Saint Rita Roman Catholic Church in Long Island City was vandalized for the fourth time in two years on August 1st, in an incident that saw the destruction of a Virgin Mary statue and is now being investigated as a hate crime.
Surveillance footage taken at 1:42am shows a young man dressed in dark shorts, a dark t-shirt and a surgical mask jump the fence around the church’s courtyard at 36-25 11th St. before pulling a hammer from his front pocket, which he uses to knock the statue off its pedestal. The man then jumps back over the fence and flees on foot. The incident was reported to the NYPD’s 114th Precinct and is currently under investigation by the Hate Crimes Task Force.
The incident marks the fourth act of vandalism at the church since 2024. In March of this year, a man defaced a statue of St. Francis of Assisi with blue spray paint and wrote the word PAGAN on the sidewalk. Prior to that, vandals smashed one of the church’s 60-year-old stained-glass windows and damaged a statue of St. Jude located inside.
According to John Quaglione, press secretary for the Diocese of Brooklyn — which also oversees Long Island City’s Catholic Churches — the statue of St. Francis has been repaired and restored, while the Virgin Mary will be replaced in the coming weeks.
“We have a situation on our hands with tolerance of religious freedom,” Quaglione said. “It’s a problem for other Christian denominations, as well as Muslims and Jewish.”
“It’s a sad state of affairs,” he continued. “People should not be afraid to go to church, or to mosque or temple.”
Father Boniface Ramsey, who serves as a priest at St. Rita, discovered the statue, which had been decapitated by the force of the blow and thrown into the bushes. Only the pedestal remained, etched with the words “All Women Should Be As Strong As The Blessed Mother.”
“I thought the statue was missing,” Ramsey said. “I put plastic cones around it so that nobody would touch it.”
Ramsey expressed gratitude that no one had been injured in the incident and optimism that investigators would catch the perpetrator before he acts again.
“Worse could happen,” he said. “Some individual person could be hurt. This kind of violence surfaces every now and then.”
The latest incident comes amid an uptick in hate crimes at houses of worship around the city. On July 7, a man called the Sunnyside Muslim Center and threatened to “shoot every Muslim.” And in May, a vandal spray-painted swastikas on the Rego Park Jewish Center in an attack that drew condemnation from Jewish community leaders and elected officials.
“It’s a sad state of affairs,” Quaglione added. “People should not be afraid to go to church or to mosque or temple.”
