When all the required ornaments are in place, each object holds its part, united with the others. If instead the liturgical harmony is broken, each piece loses its distinctive role and unforeseen assemblages are formed. This break-up occurs during a theft. Church robberies seem repetitive over centuries and yet stealing the ornaments reshaped their perception in a peculiar context. How did church thefts challenge the sacredness of the ornaments in eighteenth-century Italy? This interrogation has been implemented at a large area of Northern Milanese despoiled by the church robber Carlo Sala (1738-1775), a native from the Lakes region. His criminal trial is highly-detailed about the stolen ornaments. Whereas secular and ecclesiastical Milanese authorities faced each other in a battle to control the prosecution of “sacrilegious thefts”, church objects were locally evaluated, examined, touched by notaries and witnesses. During the investigation, sacred ornaments were repeatedly profaned and seen as corpus delicti. Performing the legal procedure to uphold the “sacred” went actually against the “sacral recharge”.