Early yesterday morning, a note came into my Substack home page expressing utter scandal that Pope Leo said that before we are believers, we are human. I let it pass. It’s not mine to put out every fire — and what do you do with people who are looking to be offended? (Never mind that grace as the perfection of nature is the perennial teaching of the Church, and that virtually every major heresy has involved a suppression, or outright rejection, of the human.)
Shortly thereafter, I read of the shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis — an event that cannot be rightly called shocking, given how much our society has done to make such atrocities inevitable, although at the same time a new outrage, that schoolchildren be murdered in the very act of liturgical worship. As Mayor Jacob Frey admonished:
Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now. These kids were literally praying. It was the first week of school. They were in a church.
Yes.
These children were innocent — and we know that in a fallen world, darkness and malice fall particularly on the innocent and vulnerable. Yet neither can we reduce this to the wrongness of one disturbed aggressor — or a hundred, or a thousand. It is precisely because of such outliers that weapons access has to be limited more widely, as also access to violent images in games and media. We need to face up to a collective sin of permissiveness.
Today in Minneapolis marks the point where our Eucharistic Lord has explicitly chosen to identify with the victims of violence in America’s schools. I had a regular everyday post as a substitute in a Catholic K through 8, right into June of this year. That something like this could happen was never far from my mind; I carried it with me. To be a schoolteacher implies the commitment to put the lives of little ones above your own.
Consider, with seriousness, Pope Leo’s admonition. Being human implies acting in accord with reason, allowing for things to be reined in, accepting limitation which, however unjust or unmerited for any given individual (by his or her lights), serves as a constraint for those at the statistical margins. The parameters of public health, for example, encompass the weakest as well as the most robust, the former needing safeguarding more than the population at large. The trade-off which such solidarity entails is part of being human. And we are, all of us, liable to sickness, debility and sin. Even St. Thérèse of Lisieux asked her sisters to hide lethal poisons when she was in the acute and overwhelming agony of her final illness.
Thoughts and prayers are not enough. They are, rather, an outrage; if they are taken to absolve of human responsibility, they are at best prevarication and sloth. Faith without works is dead. Are we to leave occasions and means of malice available to those most susceptible to dark impulses, leave helpless innocents vulnerable to lethal violence, and still expect our prayers to be efficacious and pleasing to God? Why does anyone need a rifle, a pistol and a shotgun — all legally purchased — to go up against a congregation of children and the elderly? Seriously, we need to do a lot more to undertake the work of being human.
Photo: Ahmad Juliyanto. Found on Vecteezy.
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The night before last, I had the enormous privilege of chanting the In Paradisum at a Holy Hour dedicated to the memory of an extraordinary young man who died tragically. Somehow, in the Communion of Saints, this singing heralded the passage into glory of these innocents who were lost to us the next morning.
V. J. Tarantino is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport. She has studied ancient and Medieval metaphysics and has devoted her adult life to the service of liturgy (study of liturgical texts and norms, the cultivation of sacred elocution, musical performance and composition, the beautification of sacred space, and the organization and direction of public Eucharistic Adoration) and to immersion in the writings of the Doctors of the Church and of recent Popes. Her writing can be found at https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/
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