Murder of the innocents in Minneapolis

​For the second time in two years, a deranged assassin has committed a mass shooting at a Christian school in America. Like Audrey Hale, Robin Westman identified as transgender and once attended the school he attacked. In Minneapolis on Wednesday, Westman murdered two children and injured seventeen more people in a terrifying attack on the Annunciation Catholic School. Westman chose to target the children’s morning mass before turning a weapon on himself to commit suicide.

​Before his attack on the children of Annunciation Catholic School, Westman posted YouTube videos showcasing firearms, ammunition, and a manifesto. Weapons bore handwritten messages reading “Kill Donald Trump,” “Where is your God?,” “For the children,” and anti-Israel posts. A journal posted on a video references mass school shootings and gunman. The video depicts a person, apparently Westman, saying, “I’m sorry to my family, but not the children. F— the children.” A person believed to be Westman displays a portrait of Jesus Christ placed atop a bullet-ridden target. Westman allegedly recorded another video showing off hand-drawn diagrams of the interior of Annunciation Catholic church in a spiral bound journal, which he then forcefully stabs with a knife.

In the face of this compelling evidence of Westman’s anti-Christian and anti-Semitic hatred, Minneapolis officials claimed they were still seeking the killer’s motive. Mayor Jacob Frey chose the aftermath of the shooting to mock the faith, fuming, “Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now.”

​And yet, despite the disappointing deflections of leadership, everyday heroes emerged from the wreckage Westman left behind. Young people, really just children themselves, used their own bodies to shield their friends from Westman’s incoming gunfire. First responders rushed to the church in courage and treated the traumatized with compassion. Total strangers ran to, not from, the scene to provide aid and support in the immediate aftermath of the crisis.

​The Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 409, speaks to the nature of the evil from which the Twin Cities is still reeling at this moment:

The whole of man’s history has been the story of dour combat with the powers of evil, stretching, so our Lord tells us, from the very dawn of history until the last day. Finding himself in the midst of the battlefield man has to struggle to do what is right, and it is at great cost to himself, and aided by God’s grace, that he succeeds in achieving his own inner integrity.

​In a world that often seems to be descending ever deeper into darkness, Christians would be the first to assert that prayer is the lifeline to the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe. Even when, for reasons we cannot understand, evil has its day, people of faith are deeply convicted that we serve a God who has entered into our suffering, weeps with us, and calls us to demand justice for the fallen. Our response in tragedy is to seek opportunities for kindness, truth, and inner integrity. 

​Time and again, Americans have risen to this challenge. When white supremacist Dylann Roof shot and killed nine African-American members of the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, the oldest black church in the south, he fervently desired to incite a race war. Instead, his 2015 act of domestic terrorism finally brought down the rebel flag in South Carolina and eventually across the old Confederacy. The dignity and faith of the victims’ families stood in stark contrast to Roof’s venomous assault against men, women, and children who had extended to him the right hand of fellowship.

​In this moment, Minneapolis must unearth and expose the truth of Robin Westman’s hate crime against the most vulnerable among us. Christians should and will continue to hope and pray that God grants us the grace to do what is right, even at great personal cost.