{"id":5574,"date":"2006-09-26T15:48:12","date_gmt":"2006-09-26T15:48:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/justice.html"},"modified":"2006-09-26T15:48:12","modified_gmt":"2006-09-26T15:48:12","slug":"justice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/justice.html","title":{"rendered":"Justice…"},"content":{"rendered":"

A case with a twist:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

The nun was in a panic when Aliquippa police officers came to take her report of a mugging. The missing cash meant nothing — the 78-year-old had her wallet snatched years earlier on a mission in Brazil. This time the thief had made off with the Holy Eucharist. <\/p>\n

It took police just two hours to track down the robber and a few more for the security chief at the Beaver County Jail, who happened to be Catholic, to deliver a spiritual guilt trip powerful enough to bring the inmate to tears. <\/p>\n

Chief George David asked Toby Duran if he was Catholic. The suspect said "yes." <\/p>\n

Did he know he’d robbed a nun who just returned from delivering communion to the sick and convalescent? <\/p>\n

Mr. Duran did not. <\/p>\n

Did he know that Catholics believe the wafers do not represent God, but are thought to be the actual embodiment of Jesus Christ? <\/p>\n

"He [Jesus] is out there in the dark, in the cold, in the mud," Chief David said. <\/p>\n

Mr. Duran, a 37-year-old transient who had been squatting in a trailer down the street from the St. Titus convent, immediately told the jail official where to find the nun’s handbag.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A case with a twist: The nun was in a panic when Aliquippa police officers came to take her report of a mugging. The missing cash meant nothing — the 78-year-old had her wallet snatched years earlier on a mission in Brazil. This time the thief had made off with the Holy Eucharist. It took…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nJustice... - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/justice.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Justice... - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A case with a twist: The nun was in a panic when Aliquippa police officers came to take her report of a mugging. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5574\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}