September 7, 2025
Dear Friends,
I want to remind us that in the world envisioned by Jesus Christ in this weekend’s Gospel teaching we would only coincidentally know the name of Annunciation Parish and School in Minneapolis, and it is very unlikely that we would know of Fletcher Merkel or Harper Moyski and guns would not be important to anyone.
The capacity that we have to be tormented by the anguish of others is, in the words of Fintan O’Toole, “the beating heart of humanity,” but our “beating hearts” are being sorely tested and, more dangerously, being skillfully manipulated these days in a bait and switch, confusing real victims with individuals who identify themselves as “victims” who “believe” they have rights that are being denied them when the foundational rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are taken from defenseless children sitting in school desks and church pews…
The fact that this time it was a “Catholic” church and school and that the murderer identified as transgender will be masterfully exploited so that the common denominator in mass shootings in our country, 288 so far this year, will once again be successfully obfuscated and ignored and “thoughts and prayers” will once again suffice as our response.
Guns in their many forms, and their universal acceptance as solutions to problems, are the cause of mass shootings and the anguish that many of us still feel.
Without a gun, these murderers, almost always young men, correctly identified as “cowards” because they are terrified of life and would not have the means at hand to act out of their cowardness and find the personal significance that they crave and end the narrative of their troubled and disturbed lives with a tidy story of being “another heroic victim of a rigged system” in the fantasy obsessed minds of our increasingly depraved American culture.
“Thoughts and prayers” are empty words from empty hearts and empty minds.
Pavlov’s dogs would very quickly quit ringing the bell if they got a sucker punch instead of a treat. We who can reason and discern and seek meaning, keep up the pretense of “thoughts and prayers” even though there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever which supports those “thoughts and prayers” as a solution to the senseless slaughter of the innocents over and over and over!
“Thoughts and prayers” absolve us from any real responsibility and lay the blame at the feet of “god” whatever that may mean these days because in the distorted and empty minds and hearts of those “thinkers” and “prayers,” if “god” doesn’t do anything why should we, so we can blame mental illness but allow mental illness and mental health initiatives to be underfunded and unfunded while permitting the very evident symptoms of toxic, immature, and violent masculinity, all such illnesses in our country, to be treated with guns as a kind of emotional/spiritual Viagra for woeful “warriors.”
Even worse than all of this is the fact that our silent acceptance of mass shootings in schools, especially schools, shopping centers, synagogues, churches, street corners, and homes desensitizes us and eventually silences our capacity for anguish at the suffering of others so we accept displays of violence toward the innocent just about anywhere as in the Middle East, Ukraine, Navy Pier, Russia, Grant Park, Wrigley Field, just about anywhere, sooner or later, just about anywhere.
Peace,
Father Niblick