Upon being alerted to the spent fire bomb, Fr. Schraplau, St. Paul's vicar, immediately called 9-1-1. He explained that during his early preparations for Mass he did not go down the outside aisle on the Gospel side of the church, so he did not personally discover the spent incendiary device; one of his parishioners found it during Mass.

Once the New York Police were alerted to the firebomb at the church, they responded, as did the police department's Hate Crimes Task Force and the Arson and Explosion Squad; the New York Fire Department with the Fire Marshall -- who is trained by the FBI; and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (AFT), a federal agency tasked with investigating acts of arson and bombings. Fr. Schraplau explained that before it was all over, more than 30 police, fire and various other agency investigators combed the church for clues, staying long into the night, then setting up a two-day 24-hour presence on the property, since the small congregation has no video monitoring equipment. Police are checking the neighborhood to see if anyone's security cameras were able to pick up felonious activity at the church.

"The crime scene unit came in and they spent hours gathering evidence," the vicar told VOL. "There were no fingerprints anywhere. The flames burned off the fingerprints from any glass shards that there were from the bottle."

The priest further noted that any footprints that may have been left outside the window were also obliterated by the weekend rain, giving the police little in physical evidence to work with.

The weekend firebombing is being considered a hate crime. Any acts or threats of violence, including those resulting in property damage, are automatically raised to the level of a hate crime if they occur at a building used primarily for religious purposes.

"Well, it's a church," Fr. Schraplau explained. "This is being considered a hate crime in the eyes of the police."

At this point, the police may not have any direct evident to point to a perpetrator, but the church thinks they might have a possible suspect.

During the winter months, a homeless man was sheltering in the church's dilapidated vine-covered carriage house, but as the weather warmed up, the church was forced to make him leave, fearing that the shed could collapse with him in it. This person was evicted two weeks ago and he is a possible person of interest in the attempted arson. The church has since fenced in and boarded up the decaying structure to prevent anyone else from entering it.

St. Paul's Memorial has a rich history. It is the second Episcopal congregation to be established in the Tompkinsville region of Staten Island and dates back to 1833. Caleb Ward, an astute Staten Island businessman, donated the land the church now sits on. Several lots were selected on Richmond Street because he felt that a church in the Stapleton area of the Island, which is closer to the water, would attract families and home buyers to the wealthy, 19th century Staten Island resort area. After St. Paul's was built, the city street was renamed St. Paul's Avenue, and it has become a part of the community's historic district.

The current church -- which was just firebombed -- was built, starting the year after the Civil War ended, and was completed in 1870. It was designed by the noted New York architect, Edward Tuckerman Potter, son of Episcopal Bishop Alonzo Potter (III Pennsylvania). He is also the nephew of Bishop Horatio Potter (VI New York) and the brother of Bishop Henry Potter (VII New York). Edward Potter was considered to be an architect with great expertise in Episcopal church design and, with many Episcopal bishops in his family tree, he had connections to other Episcopal congregations around the country in need of a church architect.

Some of his most notable Episcopal church edifices include: Christ Episcopal Church, Reading, Pennsylvania; the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd, Hartford, Connecticut; All Saints' Memorial Church, Providence, Rhode Island; the Episcopal Church of the Holy Innocents, Hoboken, New Jersey; Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, Davenport, Iowa; St. John's Episcopal Church, Yonkers New York; St. James Episcopal Church, Lewiston, Illinois; and St. John's Episcopal Church, East Hartford, Connecticut. He also designed Mark Twain's House -- also in Hartford, Connecticut -- where the celebrated American novelist lived from 1874 to 1891.

Caleb Ward's son, the Hon. Albert Ward, a prominent Staten Island jurist, was the first judge for the Richmond County (NY) Court of Common Pleas. The judge underwrote the reported $50,000 constriction cost of the new church, but only if a matching rectory was also built. Judge Ward's initial fifty thousand dollars would be in excess of $757,500 today.

Potter used dark gray tap rock, a common igneous rock in that part of New York, with brown sandstone trim. Both the church and its matching rectory were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 as "outstanding examples of Victorian Gothic church architecture on Staten Island." The matching structures are also two of only four surviving buildings in New York City designed by Edward T. Potter. The church's cornerstone was laid in 1866 by Episcopal Bishop Horatio Potter (VI New York), Edward Potter's uncle and Bishop Alonzo Potter's brother.

Bishop Horatio Potter is known for founding the Episcopal Community of St. Mary and he also called for the construction of an Episcopal cathedral in New York, which would rival the famed St. Patrick's Cathedral. St. Patrick's is a 70,500 square foot Neo-Gothic Catholic house of worship on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. It was started in 1858 and was completed 20 years later.

The Episcopal Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine is a 121,000 square foot edifice, built in the Gothic Revival style. Bishop Horatio Potter lived to see St. Paul's completed, but did not live to see his cathedral built; that task was overseen by his nephew, Bishop Henry Potter (VII New York). Henry is Bishop Alonzo's third son and older brother of Edward. However, since cathedrals of that size and scope usually take several centuries to complete, St. John the Divine -- considered the largest cathedral in the Western Hemisphere -- has yet to be fully completed. Through the years it has been tagged "St. John the Unfinished."

When St. Paul's "new" church was built, Judge Ward added "memorial" to the church's name -- St. Paul's Memorial Episcopal Church -- to honor his recently deceased sister, Mary Mann Ward. The judge had already been thinking of replacing St. Paul's Greek Revival-style building built in1835, with a new structure. However, his sister's death in December 1865, gave him the needed impetus to build a new church for St. Paul's congregation, of which he was a member and St. Paul's Memorial Episcopal Church came into being.

St. Paul's Memorial is an Anglo-Catholic congregation, one of only three in the Diocese of New York. The other two are: St. Mary the Virgin and Resurrection, both in different parts of Manhattan. Bishop Horatio Potter was instrumental in locating St. Mary's in Longacre Square which, in 1905, was renamed Times Square. Three lots on West 45th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues were donated for the building of the church by John Jacob Astor -- America's first multimillionaire. In 1870, when St. Mary's was complete, Bishop Horatio Potter was unable to attend the dedication service; that task fell to Bishop Horatio Southgate, the Episcopal Missionary Bishop to the Ottoman Empire.

The Church of the Resurrection is located on East 74th Street. It was originally called the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and was designed by James Renwick, Jr., who also designed St. Patrick's Catholic Cathedral and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Bishop Horatio Potter dedicated the church in 1869, then, in 1889, his nephew, Bishop Henry Potter, had to step in and deal with a church dispute with its clergy, resulting in the rector's resignation.

St. Paul's Anglo-Catholicity falls somewhere in between that of St. Mary's and Resurrection.

"St. Mary's isn't as Catholic as it used to be," Fr. Schraplau said about the Manhattan church, which once earned the reputation of being Smokey Mary's. "And Resurrection is the one that still makes the Pope look like a Protestant. It's very, very high church."

In 1978, Fr. Schraplau was ordained at St. Paul's by Bishop Paul Moore (XIII New York). One of the children at his ordination service now serves as his senior warden. Following his priestly retirement, he was asked by current Bishop Andrew Dietsche (XVI New York) to step back in and build up the dwindling congregation, which in recent years has been served by supply priests. Sunday attendance is inching up towards 50.

"For many, many years the largest portion of the congregation was West Indies-Caribbean," he explained about the eclectic make up of his little flock. "It's very mixed ... Blacks, whites, gay, Hispanics ... a little bit of everything; which is wonderful."

Since the church does not have air conditioning, the final spring midweek Mass and Bible study was held June 8. The Wednesday evening events are disbanded during the summer and will begin again in the fall when it is cooler.

It is because the church heats up during the day, that the bottom panel of the stained glass windows were kept open to regulate inside temperatures, which allowed for the arsonist to toss the Molotov cocktail through the open window.

Fr. Schraplau is glad that no windows were broken and that the incendiary device burned itself out without causing major damage to the church. The priest said he will no longer keep windows open overnight.

"We're going to have to get our outside lights working and we're going to have to keep the windows closed if no one is here," the priest said. "It's unfortunate, but that's the society we live in today."

The last time the church had a massive fire -- almost 30 years ago -- the fire department smashed all the stained glass windows to fight the blaze. The church was saved, but suffered major damage, including the total destruction of its 1900 Aeolian-Votey, two manual organ. When the church was restored, the congregation was able to remake the whole altar area, making it more Anglo-Catholic looking by enhancing the reredos with the addition of statues and the removal of the dossal altar curtains. A simple rood now separates the chancel from the congregation. The altar faces the wall, the priest celebrates Mass in an ornate fiddle back chasuble, and the choir knows how to sing plain chant.

In recent years, Episcopal congregations have dealt with homeless people with disastrous results. In May 2012, an Episcopal priest and her administrative assistant at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Ellicott City, Maryland, were shot dead when a homeless man became difficult, belligerent and argumentative with church staff and was asked to leave. He also committed suicide. Then, in November, 2013, an Ocean City, Maryland, homeless man set fire to Old Rectory at St. Paul's-by-the-Sea, destroying the iconic building. Both the homeless man, who set himself on fire to become a flaming torch, and the church's rector died.

Later this month, the 10 Episcopal churches on Staten Island: All Saints' Church, Christ Church - New Brighton, Church of St. Andrew, St. Alban's Church, St. John's Church, St. Mary's Church - Castleton, St. Simon's Church, St. Stephen's Church, Church of the Ascension, and St. Paul's Memorial have plans to come together as a group with the police and fire representatives, as well as a psychologist, to learn how to deal with interpersonal problems before they escalate.

"They are going to teach us how to deal with mentally deranged people who come to the church," Fr. Schraplau explained. "Whoever did it, we need to pray for them and pray that they realize that they did something wrong."

The 10-church meeting was already scheduled and in the works before the firebombing incident at St. Paul's happened.

ary Ann Mueller is a journalist living in Texas. She is a regular contributor to VirtueOnline