Father Charles Fitzgerald-Lombard from St Edmunds Roman Catholic Church in East Anglia was working on his books in the sacristy when he heard a large bang.
"It didn't worry me terribly much at the time, it's more in retrospect I realised how narrow it (his escape) was.
"All I was wondering was what on earth had happened, I thought a tree had fallen down but it was much more like a bang and what one would have expected from a tree falling, which I expect would have been more of a crunching noise.
"I wasn't actually in the church, I was in the sacristy (similiar to a vestry), right next to the high altar of the church and this cross blew off the top of the main church but it landed on the sacristy roof, right over where I actually happened to be standing at the time, I was marking up the books...this was last Saturday and there was a tremendous wind storm that lasted for about three-quarters of an hour."
When asked what his first reaction was, he said: "My first thought was that it was a bomb and then I thought well it couldn't be a bomb - people don't go around bombing churches very much in this country - and I was looking around and see if there was a table I could get under or something but of course, once it had fallen there was practically dead silence because there was nothing else to fall."
Father Charles was in the church on his own and went outside to see what had happened and eventually saw that it was a stone cross that had come clean off the other end of the church and been chucked by the wind at the roof of the sacristy, landing near a Victorian stained glass window - a valuable feature of St Edmund's, a grade two listed building.
"Miraculously, it didn't damage the stained glass, although there was little stones all over the place, nothing appears to have been damaged.
"It's a big feature of our church, which is much praised by church crawlers and architects and everybody - it's a very beautiful church indeed and it has very fine stained glass windows."
The cross did damage some of the tiles.
"I don't know whether they will insist that a new cross be made and put up there, or whether they've would accept something smaller and lighter that would be less of a threat for the future but it's been up for 100 years or so, so it isn't as if it was extremely vulnerable when it was put up but all these things do deteriorate and in time it becomes easier for them to snap off."
Stay up to date with the latest news stories from a Christian perspective. Sign up to our daily newsletter and receive more stories like this straight to your inbox every morning.
