As the country struggles to recover from the senseless violence that occurred on Friday in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, Church leaders call for forgiveness, reconciliation, and the courage to look at ourselves in the mirror to see what we have become.
NBC is reporting that Pope Benedict XVI spoke of his deep sadness at the Connecticut school shooting, which left 28 people dead, during his Sunday address to the crowd in St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City.
Newtown shooter Adam Lanza
“I was deeply saddened by Friday’s senseless violence in Newtown, Connecticut,” he told the crowd.Addressing the families of the 20 children who lost their lives, he said: “I assure the families of the victims, especially those who lost a child, of my closeness in prayer. May the God of consolation touch their hearts and ease their pain.”
He later expressed his “heartfelt grief” through Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone who said: “In the aftermath of this senseless tragedy, he asks God our Father to console all those who mourn and to sustain the entire community with the spiritual strength which triumphs over violence by the power of forgiveness, hope and reconciling love.”
Fr. John Hollowell, a priest for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis and the author of the popular On This Rock blog, said it’s time to look at ourselves in the mirror.
“It seems like a line was crossed today that, in our country at least, has never been crossed to date,” he said in this December 14 blog. “Columbine was horrendous and was a paradigm shift for the nation, but given our collective experiences as teenagers growing up . . . I think most people at least could fathom the source of the hatred, the evil, and the revenge that we saw in Columbine.”
Not so for Newtown. “But a classroom of little children, it doesn’t register on any level, nor should it,” Father Hollowell writes.
“So now the carousel of blame starts spinning — people pointing at things external to fix ‘better gun laws,’ ‘better mental health care,’ ‘better health insurance’ … give me a break! I could care less, one way or the other, on gun control, but anyone who thinks that these types of measures would have prevented today is really hoping to avoid the issue that really matters. The dignity of the person.
“In our culture, the dignity of the human person has been spat upon, mocked, and destroyed. There is no ‘dignity of the human person’ to speak of anymore. Anytime someone stands up to speak about ‘the dignity of the human person’ they are shouted down in the public square and mocked for using words from an archaic culture that we have, so we’re told, moved beyond and surpassed.”
In our world today, a human being only has dignity if others will it to be so, such as in the case of abortion where the child’s life depends upon the “thumbs up or down” of the mother.
“Embryos sit in freezers across the country, parents have their reproductive systems mangled in order to have pleasure without the burden of children, wars are now fought, like video games, through the lenses of drones, we tell third world countries that ‘children are the problem’ and so if you want any of our food to eat, you are going to have to stop having children.”
On Friday, when deranged shooter Adam Lanza walked into a first-grade classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary School and opened fire on a room full of innocent children, a new line was crossed in the war on life.
“Today, in Connecticut, a big fat mirror was held up to our nation, and a monster from the depths of Hell illustrated and showed us exactly what we don’t want to see in ourselves,” Father wrote. “We hate children, we hate life, and human dignity is on life support in this country.”
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