A crowbar, a little gun, fast feet – and a God of mercy

I used to tell my son Peter – Father Peter Finney III – that squeezing information out of him was like trying to pry it loose with a crowbar. Peter has a delightful and occasionally maddening economy with words, and he never speaks without first thinking about what he has to say.

So it was that my wife and I scraped ourselves off the terrazzo last week upon hearing that two robbers, one wielding a pistol and the other a crowbar, broke into the St. Clement of Rome Parish center on Sunday evening, March 17, and demanded that Peter, doing computer work on the parish website and dressed in his priest’s clerics, open the safe containing the weekend collection.

We thought of everything that could have gone deadly wrong.

Worrying is a parent’s job, imprinted just as surely on our hearts as the piece of paper with the inked footprints, dated March 18, 1984, that we took home, along with our first child, from Mercy Hospital in Rockville Centre, N.Y.

I woke up early on Peter’s 29th birthday. Not wanting to call too early, I sent him a text message at 6:30 a.m. Then, at 8 o’clock, I called and got his voice mail. I thought, he’s probably celebrating Mass right now – I’ll call back later. I called at 10 and got his voice mail again.

Fifteen minutes later, Peter called back. I babbled on about his birthday and about March Madness and about how proud we were of him, etc., etc., etc.

I stopped, finally, and I heard silence.

“Dad, I just want you to know that everything is OK – I’m fine,” Peter said.

Translation: “Dad, are you sitting down?”

Actually, I stood up and began pacing, knowing something was coming, something deep from the crowbar zone.

Peter proceeded to tell me about the Sunday night attack. He had heard the parish center door open down the hall and thought it was his pastor, Father Luis Rodriguez. Suddenly, two men were behind him, and neither was wearing a Roman collar. Peter only saw four eyes. The men had their faces covered with bandanas and their heads with hooded sweatshirts.

They were on a Willie Sutton mission. “Why do you rob banks, Willie?” the career bank robber once was asked. Sutton replied, “Because that’s where the money is.”

Every Catholic church is a Chase mini-branch on Sunday evenings because the collection normally is put in the safe and counted on Monday mornings before it is deposited.

Peter had opened the safe before, but usually, that duty is handled by the ushers at each Mass. And now, literally, the pressure was on.

“I saw the gun,” Peter said. “It was a little gun.”

Try tying your shoelaces with a “little” gun and a steel crowbar in the hands of people without a real working knowledge of John 3:16. Your hands can get a little jumpy.

And so, try as he could, Peter couldn’t get the tumblers to line up. The robbers thought Peter was faking it, stalling for time. The man with the crowbar whacked him three times on the shoulder.

“When you think about it,” Peter said, with a smile, “that’s not something that was going to help me open the safe.”

“Shoot him! Shoot him in the leg!” the crowbar bandit shouted.

After several fumbled attempts on the combination, Peter sensed his visitors were close to losing their good manners. He thought to himself, “I know this place much better than they do.”

The man with the little gun kept walking up and down the long hall, either looking for things to take or just making sure no one uninvited was coming to the party. That left Peter temporarily alone with the man with the crowbar.

“I figured if I could beat him to the door, I could get out before he could catch me,” Peter said.

As Rommel Hernandez, one of Peter’s parishioners and a weekly basketball partner, said, “Father Peter’s a very athletic priest. He’s fast.”

How Peter Rabbit got out of that building without more serious injury is, to me, nothing short of a miracle. We are thankful to a God of mercy. The robbers escaped, empty-handed, and somehow our son had been spared.

Peter’s shoulder will heal, and he will need time, support and prayers to deal with the emotional trauma. It’s a trauma Peter shares with other victims of violence.

“It’s a sad situation,” Peter said. “I wonder what it was in their lives that got them to this point. This shows the need for us to engage – not to retrench, not to move back but to be in service to the poor, to be in service to our brothers and sisters. We need to engage those elements of society that need that service, particularly our youngest. We pray for those two men.”

We also pray for all victims of violence, that they find the strength to move, in faith, from Good Friday to Easter.

Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected].