Baby Jesus stolen from relocated Nativity
Police say teenage boy took it as a prank. It’s not 1st time in Valley.
An Emmaus church that provided room for a Nativity scene removed from borough land over a church-state complaint is turning the other cheek over the theft of the baby Jesus from the outdoor display.
Last Sunday, members of Emmaus Moravian Church arrived for service and noticed the baby Jesus had disappeared from the straw-lined manger that formed the centerpiece of the scene.
This Christmas season, the Nativity was moved to the church’s front lawn on Main Street after being on display outside the Emmaus Public Library for years. The borough owns the land where the library is located.
A letter sent to the borough from the Americans United for Separation of Church and State complained that the Nativity scene that stood alone, without displays representing other faiths, violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause.
Emmaus officials asked church members if they would display the Nativity outside their prominent white building.
But sometime on the night of Dec. 8, the baby Jesus was plucked from his manger.
The mystery of where it went may have gone unsolved but for the power of social media.
An unidentified teenage boy, a student at Emmaus High School, posted about the theft on his Instagram, Borough Manager Shane Pepe said.
The boy’s parents saw the post and turned him in, Pepe said.
“It was a group of teenage boys
and one of them, like a fool, decided to impress his friends and take it,” Pepe said.
But the baby Jesus was damaged and had to be replaced, he said.
It’s certainly not the first time the star of the Nativity has gone missing in the Lehigh Valley.
Two years ago in Bethlehem, a 49-year-old woman staged a prank version of a family intervention when she removed the replica of the baby Jesus from the Nativity outside City Hall.
Police charged Jacqueline Ross with institutional vandalism and theft after she stole the Christ child around 2 a.m. before leaving it at a hospital drop-off spot for mothers to safely give up newborns.
Bethlehem’s Nativity scene is
now under the watchful eye of the “baby Jesus camera,” a small surveillance device that records and broadcasts to detectives a 24/7 live feed, police Chief Mark DiLuzio said.
“I told police that protecting the baby Jesus is a high priority here,” DiLuzio said. “We are the Christmas City.”
He said the surveillance camera was installed to deter thefts after the 2016 incident. That theft damaged the Christ child, valued at more than $4,000, DiLuzio said.
“The baby is also bolted down with some metal tabs that are stuck into his diaper,” DiLuzio said. “We aren’t messing around.”
Several years ago in Bangor, police said a woman defaced a porcelain infant Jesus in a church Nativity.
The Emmaus caper ended Friday afternoon with a replacement baby Jesus, said the Rev.
Christine Johnson, the interim pastor at Emmaus Moravian Church.
“Really, the only outcome that we wanted was to have it replaced and that has happened,” Johnson said.
She said when the Nativity was recently moved from the library location, it was also missing the baby Jesus, a common target for pranks around the holidays, she said.
“Perhaps that baby had disappeared years ago,” she said. “This isn’t a new thing.”
Johnson said she was glad the teenage prank ended on a positive note.
“The church, we are about practicing forgiveness,” Johnson said. “We hope that doing the right thing feels better than doing the wrong thing.”