Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 10, 1993 TAG: 9302100323
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
FROM PRIEST TO PRIEST, TO MISSING
It is not becoming of a Roman Catholic priest to get worked up about material possessions, and so the Rev. Joseph Metzger is low-key about a problem that has nagged him since December.A prized part of his priestly garb, a stole that drapes around his neck and shoulders, has disappeared.
About 6 feet long, the stole is embroidered with gold thread. Stitched onto it are three rubies.
"I don't know if they're real," said Metzger. "I never had them checked because it never mattered."
A 1980 graduate of Roanoke Catholic High School, Metzger returned to serve at St. Andrew's in 1991, shortly after he was ordained. He'd been to Hampden-Sydney College and to seminary. He'd studied in Rome.
One of the friends he made during five years in Italy, Padre Antonio Evola, came to Metzger's ordination from his home and parish in Palermo, Sicily.
Immediately after the ceremony, Evola gave Metzger the stole.
"He said, `My mother had this made for my ordination, 41 years ago. Some nuns made it,' " said Metzger. "He told me to wear it and, when I was an old priest, to give it to a young priest."
The material value of the stole was insignificant. It carried emotional weight.
Metzger wore it to special occasions - weddings, baptisms, funerals and, once in a while, to Mass.
But during Advent, the four weeks leading up to Christmas, priests wear purple vestments. Metzger hung his special stole in the sacristy - the closet in the hallway behind the altar at St. Andrew's church.
"Around Christmas, I was going to wear it to a school Mass," he said, "and couldn't find it."
Metzger has tried mightily to disprove the obvious hunch.
He has called dry cleaners in the valley, hoping the stole was scooped up by accident with other altar linens. He has searched other closets.
But, inevitably, he has reached the same conclusion as those at the church who've heard the story: The stole has been stolen.
"Who would want it? What would anybody want it for?" he asks.
He's clueless.
"I'm hoping it's been misplaced, but the rational part of me says that things like this just don't leave the church," he says.
His mother keeps urging him to check inside a convertible he garages in Fincastle during the winter.
It has all proved fruitless.
In April, Metzger plans a trip to Italy for a visit and a reunion with his friend, Padre Evola.
What will he tell him? How will he report to his older friend that such a personally sacred gift was stolen from a closet behind the altar at his church?
It is a bind that few of us would envy, but many of us have felt. Theft is a reptilian act, committed in a vacuum of emotion, in cold blood. Rationalizing and coping and explaining and grieving are left to the victims.
Maybe the Rev. Joseph Metzger will devise an artful way to tell his friend that the stole sewed by Sicilian nuns in 1950 was swiped.
Better yet, maybe it'll turn up before he has to break that news.