Editorial:

We suppose we ought to be happy that Our Lady Queen of Angels parish got its statue of the Virgin Mary back after it went missing last weekend. But something about how it went missing still sticks in our craw.

For a while, we worried the thieves found an unscrupulous junk dealer to melt down the bronze statue that was created by artist Victor Salmones and donated by a Newport Beach family eight years ago.

That was a horrifying thought to the parish’s worshipers and art lovers alike.

Could the economy be so bad that some rag-tag group of thieves would put their consciences on pause and do something that seems so, well, sacrilegious? It all sounds so Dickensian. Well, almost, as it turns out.

The Artful Dodgers in this case appeared to be some rascals who kidnapped the statue and “gifted” it to a Tustin woman. She found the nearly 5-foot-tall statue worth about $30,000 in her rose bed on Sunday, of all days. When she asked her son where that came from she was told: “It’s a gift. Don’t ask; just say thank you.”

Thanks, but, no thanks, the aggrieved Mom said. Thank goodness. When a friend called her early Wednesday morning to tell her it looked like the statue was the one reported missing from Our Lady Queen of Angels, she called Newport Beach police.

“I was just sick to my stomach it was here. The spiritual nature of it bothers me a lot. I mean, a church? Baby Jesus’ angel, I mean, I just felt literally ill,” she said.

We couldn’t have said it better. But at least it’s back home now. And to the parish’s credit, they took it all in stride.

“I wanted you to know Mary’s back,” Pastor Kerry Beaulieu dryly said in an e-mail to parishioners. “Mary took a weekend off and went to Tustin.”