(Note: The regularly scheduled 8:30 am Mass this morning was offered as a Week's Mind Requiem for the shooting victims in Newtown, Connecticut. Saint Thomas the Apostle will be commemorated tomorrow at the 9:30 am Mass.)In a time of national grief, our purpose here this morning is simply to do what the Church does on such occasions: to gather in worship, and to offer our prayers for the souls of those who’ve lost their lives.
The images on TV and the internet these past few days have been heartbreaking: twenty beautiful children between the ages of six and seven senselessly murdered; six educators who died trying heroically to protect those in their care; an entire community left wounded. As Yeats put it, “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”
We cannot forget the shooter’s mother, no less a victim herself whatever mistakes she may have made. And then there is the shooter. To what diabolical evil did he yield himself in his mental disturbance? Unimaginable. He’s not an innocent victim, to be sure, but a victim nonetheless. It’s part of the nature of evil, what the Church calls the mysterium iniquitatis, the mystery of iniquity, to consume and destroy both the innocent and guilty alike, as we saw happen a week ago today.
Some people criticize the traditional prayers of the Requiem Mass as focusing too much on God’s judgment and wrath. And in planning this service I was tempted to omit some of these prayers, because after all the children who died were certainly innocents – like the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem – and they’re safe in the arms of Jesus, who said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” They have nothing to fear from God's judgment now that they've suffered the worst that this world can do to them.
But then I thought better, and decided no, leave the traditional prayers intact. There’s plenty of guilt to go around in a world where this can happen, and we all need to be reminded of our common need for God’s forgiveness. “All alike have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God;” and yet this traditional liturgy of prayer for the dead proclaims that all those who cast themselves on God’s mercy in faith and repentance will be saved. The shooter now has God for his judge; and unlike all human judgment “the judgments of the Lord and true and righteous altogether.”
For me, one of the most disturbing aspects of this episode was its almost immediate politicization. The national reaction has magnified the deep ideological cleavages dividing our society. From the liberal-left side of the political spectrum came immediate calls for stricter gun control laws and attacks on the NRA and the gun culture that it represents, which in turn drew counter-attacks from those who felt that they were being scapegoated and demonized, and some of whom argued that it’s time for teachers to start carrying firearms.
Meanwhile, from the conservative-right came suggestions that this massacre was somehow related to the numbers of abortions performed in this country, or perhaps secularization as manifested in the banning of prayer and religious symbols from the public schools; and from the extreme religious right came allegations that this was somehow God’s judgment on American decadence and sexual immorality. No doubt if the shooter had lived, we would be embroiled in yet another national debate about the death penalty.
These various knee-jerk reactions from both the right and the left suggest that as a society we’ve lost the ability to create a space for mourning in the appropriate season. Instead, we short-circuit our grief by trying to assign blame so that we can prescribe remedies to ensure that this won’t happen again. But how this could have happened is a complex problem for which there are no simple solutions or quick fixes. The mutual recrimination and polarization that we’ve experienced in the past week is unseemly and does not honor the memory of the victims. It simply drives us further apart at a time when we need more than ever to come together in sorrow and grief.
Now, I’m not saying that we aren’t entitled to our political opinions, or that we don’t need to continue addressing such issues as gun control and mental health care policy –and I applaud President Obama’s plan to appoint a task force to investigate the issues and report back with concrete policy recommendations. But I am saying that as a society we need to regain the ability, if we ever had it, of putting aside our differences for a period to observe the rituals and practices of collective mourning. Our body politic will be healthier for it.
My final plea is that we allow the deaths of these twenty innocent schoolchildren to raise our awareness of those places in the world where children remain vulnerable to random violent death almost as a matter of course. When massacres occur in American upper middle-class suburban white communities, at least part of the shock is the feeling that this sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen here. That reaction betrays the unspoken assumption that there are places in the world where this sort of thing can be taken for granted and not given much second thought. But massacres of children anywhere in the world – from Chechnya, to Liberia, to Syria – merit our moral outrage just as much as they do a hundred miles from Providence. And perhaps one positive response to this national calamity would be to investigate how we can work to help protect children from violence worldwide.
Be all that as it may, again, our purpose here today is simply to do what the Church does: to gather in worship and prayer to commend the souls of the departed into the care and safekeeping of Almighty God. May they rest in peace. Amen.
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