Repairs to marble altar rail complete

You may have heard we had a mishap a couple of weeks ago at the high altar when someone accidentally slipped and fell into the marble altar rail, installed in the 1927 construction. The marble gave way and crashed down, shattering into pieces. Fortunately there were no major injuries.

We called in a marble restoration specialist, John Smith, and he is truly a craftsman. He took all of the broken pieces, including a box of tiny chips, and he pieced the altar rail back together with special glue that matched the original marble.

He and an assistant re-installed the altar rail Thursday, and here are a few photos. It takes a skilled eye to see where the rail had shattered -- the repairs are that flawless. By the way, Church Insurance Co. covered the cost of the repairs minus a deductible.

As long as we had Mr. Smith in the

building, we had him repair our baptismal font which had developed numerous cracks over the years. We will replace the holy water in the font on Sunday.