Washington D.C., Oct 5, 2017 / 05:05 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- When Monsignor Robert Weiss gathered with parents in Connecticut, after 11 children were killed in a nearby shooting, the room went silent and one person called for prayer.
“And so everyone just fell on their knees or joined hands with each other, or formed a circle,” Monsignor Weiss said. “I think they realized at that point anything else was beyond their control.”
Monsignor Weiss is the pastor of St. Rose of Lima parish in Newtown, Conn. The site of the shooting was Sandy Hook Elementary School, where in December of 2012, 26 people were killed.
Since then, other mass shootings have scarred the American psyche, occurring in places like San Bernardino, Calif., Orlando, Fla., and now Las Vegas, Nev., where on October 1, 58 people were killed. It has been called the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
On Wednesday, almost five years after the Sandy Hook shooting, Monsignor Weiss spoke with CNA about the importance of prayer after such a tragedy. Prayer is a necessary resort for all those affected by such tragedies, he said, when they can’t comprehend the evil and when human consolation can only do so much.
Prayer as a response to tragedies has been denigrated by some as meaningless or secondary, when compared to advocating for policy aimed at preventing gun violence or improving access to mental health care.
The day after a shooting in San Bernardino, Calif. killed 14 on Dec. 2, 2015, the cover of the New York Daily News said “God isn’t fixing this,” in response to politicians and public figures offering their “thoughts and prayers” to the victims of the tragedy, but allegedly taking insufficient action to prevent such tragedies from occurring in the future.
Yet, without discounting the role of human action in response to these tragedies, humans can only do so much, Monsignor Weiss told CNA.
“To whom do you go? Do you rely on yourself? Because there’s no way you can individually handle these kinds of experiences. Times like this is when you’re called to be a community,” he said. He recalled professionals telling him in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting that “we can only do so much for these people” to help them heal from the tragedy.
“There is only one place to turn, and it’s to turn to the Lord and find some sort of understanding of this,” he said.
On Sunday evening, 64 year-old Stephen Paddock shot and killed at least 58 people at a country music festival in Las Vegas, Nev. and wounded almost 500. He shot with high-powered rifles outfitted with “bump stocks” from his 32nd-floor suite at the Mandalay Bay Resort, across the street from the Route 91 Harvest Festival outdoor venue.
Paddock was retired and divorced, and had a girlfriend. He owned rental properties and was a frequent gambler at local casinos.
After he shot down at the concert venue, a SWAT team broke into Paddock’s room and found him dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Medical and mental health professionals went into action helping victims with physical and psychological wounds.
Dr. Stephen Sharp is a Las Vegas local and a faculty member of Divine Mercy University, a Catholic graduate school of psychology and counseling. Sharp commended the Las Vegas community for its proactive response to the tragedy.
The first responders in Las Vegas had trained for such a tragedy “for a long time,” he said, as authorities had predicted that the city could be a target for such an event. First responders and hospitals were prepared for the rapid influx of trauma patients, he said.
And, he noted, mental health and trauma professionals were able to provide a quick response.
In light of previous shootings, where the perpetrator was later judged to have serious mental health issues, the question of Stephen Paddock’s mental health has been asked in the wake of Sunday’s shooting.
There are reports, like ABC News’ citation of a person briefed on the investigation, that Paddock’s mental faculties had possibly deteriorated in the months leading up to the shooting, with his “increasingly slovenly” appearance and loss of weight, as well as an obsession with his girlfriend’s ex-husband.
Yet no official determination has been made about Paddock’s mental health, and Sharp cautioned against speculation
“To establish a mental health or mental illness issue or a diagnosis requires quite a bit of psychological input and assessment and testing,” he said. “It’s too early to jump to that conclusion, and by making that leap, I truly believe that we would be damaging the mental health community more than we would be helping.”
Rather, Sharp said, focus should be drawn to the provision of long-term mental health care to victims of the shooting and their families. “The effects of this kind of trauma go on for months, if not years, so people need to be in place to help folks for a long time,” he said.
Monsignor Weiss sees a need for professional care in the Newtown community years after the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting.
“We had issues in our schools starting Monday, with the whole thing coming back again,” he said of the Las Vegas shooting. High school students were crying after “they suppressed so much of the fear they experienced [in 2012],” he said. “It’s deadly to suppress the emotion, the grief.”
“You’ve got to get help, you’ve got to find someone you can trust, and you’ve got to talk about this. You just can’t suppress it and say it’s going to go away, because it’s not going away,” he said.
A mass shooting also has a ripple effect, Sharp said, because in addition to the 58 dead in Las Vegas and the hundreds injured, there were thousands of concert-goers who witnessed the atrocity and experienced the trauma of being in the line of fire.
And the many family and friends of the dead and injured are themselves affected by the tragedy, he said: “It’s like a pebble in the pond that creates a tsunami on the other side of the pond, because this will go on for a long time.”
“These lives will never be the same,” he reflected. “The 22,000 people who were at the concert will never be the same. It’s changed their life forever, on some level, that we can’t even predict or know how that’s going to turn out for them.”
Americans should explore the cultural or societal factors behind the number of mass shootings, he said.
“I think it’s more of a societal concern than it is of an individual’s mental health concern,” he stated. “My question is why are we seeing wave after wave of these kinds of events?”
Another issue usually debated in the wake of a mass shooting is access to guns, and gun laws.
Paddock reportedly had 23 guns with him in his hotel suite, and CNN reported he had 50 pounds of explosives and 1,600 rounds of ammunition in his car parked in the hotel lot. He passed gun background checks and did not possess a criminal record.
The U.S. bishops have stated their support for certain gun laws, like in April of 2013, four months after the Sandy Hook shooting, when then-chair of the domestic justice and human development committee Bishop Stephen Blaire of Stockton wrote members of Congress.
Among the policies Bishop Blaire cited for support were “universal background checks for all gun purchases,” restrictions on civilian purchases of “high-capacity ammunition magazines,” and an “assault weapons” ban. He cited Pope Francis’ call “to ‘change hatred into love, vengeance into forgiveness, war into peace’.”
In their 2000 statement “Responsibility, Rehabilitation and Restoration,” on crime and criminal justice, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops supported certain gun laws in the name of safety.
“As bishops, we support measures that control the sale and use of firearms and make them safer (especially efforts that prevent their unsupervised use by children or anyone other than the owner), and we reiterate our call for sensible regulation of handguns,” the bishops stated.
The bishops have been “clear that gun control policies are part and parcel of the common good,” Professor David Cloutier, a theology professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., told CNA.
In fact, the U.S. bishops have called for gun control measures since at least 1975, when they called for “a coherent national firearms policy responsive to the overall public interest and respectful of the rights and privileges of all Americans.”
Yet how should calls for gun control be interpreted in light of the Church’s recognition of a legitimate right to self-defense? Paragraph 2264 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “it is legitimate to insist on respect for one’s own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow.”
Just war theory presumes against violence, Cloutier said, but does not prohibit it absolutely, and using guns as a means of self-defense is seen in the same light.
“In terms of using weapons to defend yourself, there’s a presumption of civility,” he said, “that is, there’s a presumption that in a society, you have civil relationships with other people that won’t require violence.”
And this fundamental approach Catholics must have toward society is one of “civil friendship,” he said, which is taught in the Compendium on Social Doctrine of the Church.
Furthermore, he said, access to certain high-capacity or semi-automatic weapons, like those “that were used in Las Vegas,” he said, could be questioned outright.
“It’s hard for me to see what prudential judgement is possible in favor of the broad ownership of such weapons,” Cloutier said. The Compendium of Social Doctrine also states that the proliferation of these types of weapons around the world “exacerbates conflicts” and “encourages terrorism,” he said.
Ultimately, Cloutier said, “a presumption doesn’t indicate that there should be a ban on guns, it doesn’t indicate that there isn’t some sort of right to own certain kinds of guns.”
“It simply suggests that there is a certain vision of society that challenges certain presumptions about why we should own guns.”
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Apparently, the advertisements will include some refugee/open borders propaganda. Who needs George Soros when we have Christian conservatives?
We need more people in the U.S. If you and the rest of the country knew how short-staffed hospitals and clinics are, you and the rest of the country would panic. In my hospital lab, we went from 8 microbiology technologists to 3–and we were doing not only the workload previously done by 8 people, but also all of the new COVID testing. When we tried to send out the work to a reference lab, ALL 3 huge reference labs told us that they were too short-staffed to take on any more work. The same is true for most hospital departments (except for the administrative staff–not only over-staffed but overpaid). Our decreasing U.S. population due to legal abortion and baby boomers like me and my late husband choosing to only have 2 children has caused a critical decline in our population. Our two options are (1) actively encourage couples to have bigger families (won’t happen unless the government stops asking citizens for more money for junk projects like “climate change” and instead, gives citizens BACK the money they have earned, as well as helping the poor to rise out of poverty and (2) opening the borders to non-criminal immigrants who want to work for a living in the U.S. Yes, we need to turn away the criminals, especially the drug dealers, and those who want to overthrow the U.S. or establish a “country within our country”–but all the rest who want to work should be welcomed and assimilated as quickly as possible into our country so they can work! We desperately need them!!!!
I mostly agree Mrs. Sharon. But we need to look at the way Canada & other nations can attract immigrants without relying on drug & trafficking cartels to supply them. The cartels basically run our southern border & determines who & what enters the US.
I disagree that we need more people here. Saying we need more people is like supporting a ponzi scheme. People are not working because govt benefits are too generous and its possible to make more money sitting at home than working. See this article:
https://www.businessinsider.com/unemployment-benefits-versus-average-wages-across-the-us-2021-5
The significant influx of immigrants presents many problems. The fentanyl, sex trafficking, numerous terrorists who have been caught. . Adding millions of folks in s a short time means they are using scarce water, pushing up rents and shortening the housing supply. They are filling our hospitals with no means to pay and overburdening our schools. Depressing wages for Americans too . I mean, why would you pay someone $12 an hour if there are people lined up to do it for $7 an hour?? Many of these illegals arrive poorly educated in their own language and may not know english. They become permanent members of the welfare rolls, for life. In NYC, there was a recent near riot of illegals. They had been placed in a luxury hotel where the state paid $500 PER ROOM PER NIGHT for them to be housed there and filled the hotel. The result: fights, garbage in the halls, donated food thrown away, and sexual activity in the staircase. When they were evicted to go to less luxury options, needless to say they were not happy and “activists” arrived to conduct demonstrations. I say there is no reason to expend money in this way to people who do not appreciate it. It is time to close the borders, and evict those who came here illegally. Trump, no matter your personal feelings about the man, knew a national security problem when he saw it. These are not our citizens and we owe them nothing. Further, this soft democrat focus on MILLIONS of illegals has taken scarce resources which should be helping AMERICAN homeless, many of whom are mentally ill veterans.Two more years of DEM ineptitude will destroy the country and it’s economic base. We cannot afford to support the many billions of folks who live in the rest of the world on our dime. The sooner this is shut down, the better.
What to make of the NEW border crisis of spy balloons flying over the nation??? Just more partisan ineptness by liberals who will not face facts and protect our own people. Suppose a virus was in that first balloon? . Suppose it was a nuclear radioactive payload? Why, of course, just let the Chinese fly the balloon where they wish: maybe over a big city? Maybe over a city where someone you love might live?? If China was wondering about US weakness, they have their answer. Those of you who voted in these clowns, the blood is on your hands.
LJ,
It’s about demographics. Without immigration we will resemble Japan in the not too distant future.
There are better ways of bringing immigrants to the US than what’s going on now at the border but neither side of the political aisle really wants to find a lasting solution because the situation is too good of a way to score points and drive narratives. Not to mention a never ending source of cheap, exploitable labor.
The children of immigrants who attend US schools all learn English. They will grow up to enter the workforce and keep Social Security and Medicare afloat.
I don’t think they are Christian “conservatives”. To me, nondenominational means non-committal to any specific doctrine.
If it’s all about Jesus, I am all for it.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
As usual the modern marketing of Christianity glosses over Jesus’s radical call to repent and sin no more as well as to love Jesus one is called to pick up their cross and follow Him obediently in accordance with God’s definition of sin.
We went to a non-denominational church yesterday (we went to Liturgy out of town Saturday for the vigil service). The sermon was on mercy (the church is doing a series on the Beatitudes). It actually was not a bad sermon, but no mention of repentance or justice.
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Funny thing about the Beatitudes. Jesus goes from all this really nice Warm Fuzzy Happy Feelings in Matthew 5:3 to 11 to something similar to “The Rules Matter–and by the way, I am more strict than Moses: by Matthew 5:17 to 37.
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By Matthew 11:20, He is bringing the Hellfire on Chorazin and Bethsaida.
Hello Kathryn
I agree with you. I have heard many Catholic Priests homilies on how Christ’s whole New Testament message is summed up in this warm fuzzy feeling you get when reading Jesus’ Beatitudes. Well Christ’s Beatitudes are the Beatitudes of Armageddon. Yes! The whole world filled with only the meek, humble and pure of heart will be wonderful, once the unrepentant wicked are removed from the earth by Jesus.
Matthew 5:5 The Beatitudes
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land
Psalms 37:9
Those who do evil will be cut off, but those who wait for the LORD will inherit the earth. Wait a little, and the wicked will be no more; look for them and they will not be there. But the poor will inherit the earth,…
…The wicked perish, enemies of the LORD; They shall be consumed like fattened lambs; like smoke they disappear. The wicked one borrows but does not repay; the righteous one is generous and gives. For those blessed by the Lord will inherit the earth, but those accursed will be cut off….
…When the unjust are destroyed, and the offspring of the wicked cut off, The righteous will inherit the earth and dwell in it forever….
…Wait eagerly for the LORD, and keep his way; He will raise you up to inherit the earth; you will see when the wicked are cut off….
…Sinners will be destroyed together; the future of the wicked will be cut off. The salvation of the righteous is from the LORD, their refuge in a time of distress. The LORD helps and rescues them, rescues and saves them from the wicked, because they take refuge in him.
Divine Mercy in My Soul, 1146, “Write: before I come as a just Judge, I first open wide the door of My mercy. He who refuses to pass through the door of My mercy must pass through the door of My justice.”
Please everyone, receive Jesus recent, year 2000, gifts of Divine Mercy Sunday this coming April 16th!
Jesus does get us.
We all need to get Him.
This frail life we are given, is more than flesh, more than personal fun and pride.
Love and kindness are the health of ones heart.
We can choose the future of a loving heart, and maybe we can hangout with Jesus, which will bring eternal happiness to your soul.✝️
Exactly, Jesus would get their attention(drawing a line in the sand) then teach the compassionate lesson, then say “Sin No More.”
Our culture is so conflicted and distanced from God anything that may have some benefit seems justifiable. If the Catholic Church makes murmurs insofar as impact what else is there?
Addressed numerous times by this writer and others is the deleterious influence of an all power usurping papacy leaving bishops with the proverbial lack of clothes. It’s up to them [their personal responsibility is enormous] to take the manly, faithful initiative and assert their authority to preach the Gospel and admonish, to proclaim the truth, in season and out of season and to challenge any authority that presumes it can silence their Apostolic witness to Christ’s revelation.
Praise you Holy Spirit!
People today who are far from Jesus or who have been told he’s irrelevant, or worse, may be attracted by such hooks as these commercials. I praise the effort to draw people in. Who knows how many in Jesus’ time came to him incrementally rather than in a single encounter. The arts, broadly speaking, can do this too, even when not strictly Christian or Catholic.
Dear Brothers in Christ,
If the following comment is deemed worthy to be published, kindly carry it under the pseudonym of (Paterimon).
I am a retired (95) Catholic Melkite Priest of the Diocese of Newton.
I can end you my address if you like to.
Thank you:
It seems to me that the campaign is based on “Jesus Seminar”: they first set up a convenient paradigm that renders Jesus an appealing prophet who exclusively teaches love and mercy, unconditionally pardons the adulteress, and sends her home in peace to continue her dissolute life. As for “sin no more”, it’s clearly a posterior interpolation added by the Church to control people!
Nobody is excluded. “Woe to you…hypocrites: You lock the kingdom of heaven before human beings. You do not enter yourselves, nor do you allow entrance to those trying to enter” and the awesome rest is conveniently ignored because it’s simply not in the logic of the Gospel!
In the long run, Jesus is emptied of all divine attributes so he can fit into the Great Reset.
It is unfortunate, and unfortunately telling, that comments regarding the “He Gets Us” campaign in both America Magazine and here, are majority negative. The article itself was straightforwrd, and for that I give thanks!