Sometime between Holy Saturday vigil services and Easter Sunday morning a vandal (or vandals) knocked the head off the statue of Our Lady of Grace outside St. Monica Church in Santa Monica. But by last weekend, the white marble figure - which has been vandalized three times since being installed in 1954 - had been restored.

The statue, which depicts the Blessed Virgin Mary crushing the serpent beneath her bare feet, was dedicated to former pastor Msgr. Nicolas Conneally, who served at the seaside parish for 26 years, from 1923 to 1949.

"We have no idea why that was done - it's a total mystery to us," parish administrator Mike Mottola told The Tidings recently. "There was no message, no event or situation leading up to it; we would have had some suspects. Just totally a random act."

Mottola arrived at the limestone church, rebuilt and renovated after the Jan. 13, 1994, Northridge Earthquake, a little after 5 a.m. Easter morning to find the statue's head broken on the ground in three big pieces. That was fortunate because it could be restored using mainly epoxy to fill in missing gaps instead of having to completely remold it.

The Santa Monica Police Department classified the destructive act as a hate crime. But the parish administrator said, "We don't know what was the motivation." He reported parishioners - especially old timers who could recall when both of the statue's hands were broken off in the early 1990s and when the left hand was severed again later that decade - were disturbed.

"Parishioners were kind of in shock, with feelings of anger, sadness," Mottola noted. "One person who was interviewed by CBS and Channel 9 on TV said he was first angered and then he felt forgiveness. So I thought that was a really neat response on his part. But people don't understand why it would happen."

The fate of Our Lady of Grace, which stands on a pedestal only 20 feet from the front of St. Monica Church at Seventh Street and California Avenue, remains unclear.

"Our plan in putting the head back together is just a temporary thing," Mottola said. "We thought of removing it and then figure out what to do. Should we replace it with a bronze statue? We haven't decided. But if we keep having problems with it, maybe we'll go to a bronze statue."