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>>21404434
https://bccatholic.ca/voices/j-p-sonnen/attack-on-piet-embodied-the-madness-of-the-world

Unfortunately, on May 21, 1972, Pentecost Sunday, a Hungarian-Australian geologist by the name of Lazlo Toth attacked the Pietà with his geologist’s hammer, striking it a dozen times.

As he raced at the statue with a hammer in raised arm, he shouted with crazed anger: “I am Jesus Christ, I have risen from the dead.”

Toth had moved to Rome the year before and was 33 years of age at the time of the attack, the same age Christ was when he died.

When the madman had finished his assault on the marble, the statue had sustained significant damage - Mary’s arm was broken at the elbow, her nose was left shattered, and a large piece was missing from one of her eyelids.

Toth spent two years in an Italian psychiatric hospital and was released in 1975, then deported to Australia where he died at age 74 in 2012.

Bob Cassilly, an American sculptor and artist from St. Louis, was one of the first responders who removed the attacker from the statue. He leapt up and grabbed him by the beard and they both fell into the crowd of security agents and alarmed tourists.

Onlookers scrambled to collect the pieces of marble that fell to the floor. Not all the pieces were returned, including Mary’s nose, which had to be reconstructed from a piece of marble discreetly cut from the back of the statue.

As Catholic commentator Dr. David Allen White opined, “This single act contains within it all the madness of recent centuries – a belief by man that he has become God, an assertion of the primacy of the individual will, a burning anger at the glories of the past and the beautiful art that embodies them, an attempt to remove the Blessed Virgin and Mother from her central place in God’s plan for man’s redemption, a lack of respect for the sacred sanctuary, and an assumption of innocence toward all the destroyers.”

don't forget, the shrunken heads parading through town are MURDERERS