Part of the bones of Saint Nicolas, the fourth-century bishop who inspired Father Christmas, has allegedly been destroyed in a church theft in France.

On 2 November priests at the Basilica of Saint-Nicolas-de-Port in Lorraine reported that a reliquary containing bone fragments of the saint had been stolen. Police have since arrested a suspect, who reportedly admitted acting spontaneously out of a “desire to destroy” the relic. 

 It was a secondary fragment rather than the basilica's famous finger bone relic. Saint Nicolas de Port is one of France's few sanctuaries to hold a relic of the saint.

An official public statement issued by the parish on 6 November 2026 stated the unnamed perpetrator admitted breaking the display case then burned and crushed the relic. His motivation was that he believed devotion to the bones was idol worship.

The parish said the attack was “a profound attack on our history, our faith."

Nicolas, who lived between 270 and 343 AD, was bishop of Myra in modern Turkey. He is best known for giving his inheritance to the poor, and for the story of how he gave three girls bags of gold to save them from prostitution.

The destroyed fragment had been placed beneath a statue of the saint in the patronal chapel in the early 2000s. The Association Connaissance et Renaissance de la Basilique, which works to preserve the building, said on 7 November that the basilica’s main relic is unharmed and remains in the treasury.

The town itself has a long history. Pilgrims have travelled there for almost 1,000 years. Italian sailors took Nicolas’ skeleton from Myra to Bari in 1087. In 1098, a knight, Aubert de Varangéville carried a bone fragment to Lorraine, traditionally identified as a finger from the saint’s right hand, the dextre bénissante, or “blessing right hand”.

This particular incident follows a string of thefts, vandalism and arson attacks on Christian heritage sites across France. It comes weeks before the saint’s feast, with the basilica’s torchlight procession planned for 5 December, the eve of the Feast of Saint Nicolas on 6 December.