As Fr. Whitfield has been occupying himself with cleaning and organizing around the parish property, he has occasion to stumble across hidden treasures! Today, cleaning rubbish out of a crawlspace adjoining the sacristy basement, and so beneath the sanctuary, he made a surprising discovery.
“I was getting out all this old insulation, a pile of rusted coat hangers and other rubbish when I saw there was something underneath it all,” he says.
It was a discovery that startled him at first.
“Well, you have to imagine me on my hands and knees in that crawlspace with just a headlamp for a light when I caught sight of what looked like two bodies!”
The parish pastor is making an appeal to anyone who might know something about these two substantial statues hidden away in the plenum between the church floor and its foundation.
“Please contact the parish by email or telephone. I’d love to know something more about these,” he said.
As for plans to extricate the two figures, that will wait until he can arrange for more help.
“Because they are lying on dirt and fill, there’s the problem of damaging them further by dragging them across this hard material. They already look like they will need some restoration work. They also look pretty heavy, so there’s no way one man can get them out,” he explained.
The space under the church contains other potential salvage. Fr. Whitfield also pulled out a large metal cross that he says would be ideal, once fixed and painted, for the parish garden.
