Vandalized St. Patrick statue returns home

As Fr. Jorge Lopez and Mary Frances Skinner set to work before a handful of onlookers to remove the blankets, tape, and other protective wrapping around the newly repaired statue of St. Patrick, someone pondered aloud: “I wonder how long it took to unwrap Lazarus.”

Lazarus references seemed particularly apt, considering the state in which the plaster statue had been discovered on the morning of Saturday, March 15, 2025. A couple of cracks would have been almost nothing. A bullet hole would have been a mere trifle. A clean decapitation that left both head and body more or less intact would have been trickier, but still relatively straightforward.

But this beheading was far more brutal. Moreover, although much of the remaining body retained its original shape, portions of the shoulders, vestments, hands – even the shamrock – were missing or bore massive scars.

But now that the repaired statue is back in the sanctuary of Wichita’s St. Patrick Church, reflected Lopez, who serves as the parish’s pastor, the symbolism runs deeper than the joyful restoration of a previously profaned worship space. 

“It’s a good image of what God can do in our lives,” Fr. Lopez said. “Even if we get broken, he can restore us.”

Intricate work

Starting from scratch definitely would have been easier, acknowledges Skinner, except this undertaking wasn’t about taking the easy way. The sculptor says she heard from many who assumed it was the statue equivalent of totaled. 

“What takes so long to create takes only seconds to destroy, and most people who have spoken to me about it are amazed that it even could be repaired,” she said. “I have heard from a lot of people who found out I was working on it. Many of them are not St. Patrick parishioners – maybe their parents were – but they felt connected to it, and they contacted me.

“People get attached, so it’s very meaningful, especially when it has been vandalized,” she added. “It’s part of the healing, and making the statue whole helps make the community whole.”

“It means a lot for our community,” Fr. Lopez said. “Everyone is excited, knowing that it’s not a new statue, but the old statue, restored.”

According to Skinner, Parochial Vicar Fr. Jesus Banuelos sifted through thousands of shards to retrieve 25 large head fragments. She said Fr. Lopez contacted her about the project on March 26, 2025, and the statue pieces arrived in her garage studio about two months later. 

Although she has claimed three spaces in her home for sculpting – the third floor and her home office also serve as studios – some necessary materials for this job were sufficiently toxic that she needed three windows and a garage door to ensure sufficient ventilation. That was hardly its only disadvantage.  

“Clay can be sculpted and molded pretty easily,” Skinner said. “This material is more like silly putty that requires gloves: It sticks to them, sticks to all the tools, and is just harder to work with.” 

For five months, she sweated through the delicate work, starting by reassembling the head, using four types of glue to connect the fragments in what she likened to a 3-D puzzle. After that came the body, which meant filling more than 80 cracks and recreating missing pieces of ear, collar, beard, shamrock, crozier, and more.

Then came the biggest challenge. “I did the head and the body separately, and then put the head on,” she said. “Nothing ever fits quite right, and trying to find the exact angle of the head was tough enough even with both of the glass eyes still connected to the nose – but I was grateful for that because otherwise there could have been a million different ways to put it together.”

Throughout the process, she says she noticed herself becoming increasingly attached to the statue (“he sort of became part of the family while I worked on him”), and appreciated having an obvious advocate to whom she could turn for heavenly help. “I did ask St. Patrick to pray for me,” she said, and predicted that would continue as she worked to restore a vandalized statue and stations of the cross from Kingman’s St. Patrick Parish. 

After Skinner completed her portion of the project and prepared to hand it off to fellow artist Kathy Faulkner for painting, she noticed some protectiveness. “Handing him off was hard,” she said. “I worked on him every day for so many months that I was like, ‘Please be careful with him.’”

She confirms that Faulkner was more than careful. “She brought the statue to life by painting it with vibrant greens, warm flesh, and delicate details of gold,” Skinner said. 

Now, Fr. Lopez reports, the statue’s return constitutes what is essentially the church’s final missing piece. Some additional security measures are still being installed to counteract future attacks, Fr. Lopez relates, but St. Patrick’s return to his rightful place in the sanctuary returns it largely to what it was before the vandalism. 

“It has been a long year of waiting, with lots of questions from the community: ‘Father, how are we doing with the things that were broken and missing?’” he said. “Little by little, we have been putting everything back in order as it was. This time it means more. Now everything – the tabernacle, the pews, the candles – has been put back together one piece at a time, and we are coming to completion. The statue is the cherry on top.”