During its 200-year history, in both good times and challenging times, St Peter’s has been blessed to be a place of prayer and a safe-haven for people to worship and gather as a community. 

But St. Peter’s also has seen some crime in its long history, mostly involving theft such as coins from the poor box, a candlestick from the altar, a purse from a coffee hour, and even an armed robbery by six men stealing $300 in prize money from a “Petro” game in the parish hall.

However, thank God, St. Peter’s has had only one known serious crime, an attack on an administrative aide to a New York congressman. The female victim stopped in the church to pray one afternoon in 1962 and was attacked in the church by a man who was later apprehended and then indicted by a D.C. grand jury, as reported in the Catholic Standard and Washington Star newspapers.

The Standard noted that the victim was hospitalized and her condition upgraded from serious to fair the day after the attack. But news clips of this bit of parish history in the Catholic Standard Archives end here, before the accused’s trial and before anything more was known of the victim’s recovery.

Any crime, but especially a serious one like this, made the church itself a victim. To bring reconciliation to the church and healing to the parish community, early on the morning of July 24, 1962, the day after the attack, then-Auxiliary Bishop Philip M. Hannan of Washington performed a  liturgical ceremony of “reconciliation” required by canon law in order to reopen the “violated” church, according to the Catholic Standard. The pertinent canon said, “a church is violated if there is a homicide, injurious and serious spilling of blood, impious or sordid use.”

In the liturgy that day, Bishop Hannan, who later became archbishop of New Orleans, prayed for cleansing and reconciliation, a blessing that has lasted a long time.