Dear Friends,
As I started writing the bulletin letter this week, the news was full of the tragic shooting at a Catholic Parish in Minneapolis. While the grade school students were at their opening school Mass, a shooter stood outside and fired at them through the windows of the church. The evil of such an action is almost beyond imagination. The killing and wounding of innocent children while they gathered to pray should cause all of us to recoil and wonder what has become of us. Every shooting should raise a response of horror within us but this one hits closer to home as we, too, gather weekly with our school students for Mass.
Since then, I have had conversations with parishioners and friends who were searching for some solution to the increase in violence in our society, especially the increase in school shootings. However, the conversations left us with little hope for we could only come up with ideas that would have small impact and would do nothing to truly keep the children safe. The security measures would only limit the children’s play and not yield true safety. Everything seemed so limited.
We live in such unsettled times. The constant state of fear causes people to seek out solutions which often lead to all of us being more unsettled not less. Our fear of the stranger can only be overcome by an encounter with the stranger not by totally avoiding those who are different from us. I remember a conversation I had with a banker amid the economic collapse of 2008. We were talking about how the problem of the subprime mortgage crisis caused widespread chaos and resulted in the worst economic problems since the Great Depression. He said that the whole system of economics and society is based on trust, when trust is gone, the whole thing crumbles. In their study “Trust,” the economists Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser wrote, “Trust is a fundamental element of social capital—a key contributor to sustaining well-being outcomes.”
The Church traditionally played an essential role in building social capital in our local communities. As people have abandoned the Church, we have less social capital, not more; we have less trust of our neighbor, not more. Only as we recreate genuine communities where people know and love each other will we be able to establish the trust necessary to change an anxious culture. Evil has existed from the beginning. With the help of Jesus, we can work in our little corner of the world to make sure evil never wins.
Yes, we only have limited solutions, but even limited solutions can make a difference in one person’s life. And if each one of us works against fear and toward trust we can transform a neighborhood and then a city and then a nation and then the world. It is what Jesus called his disciples to be, salt and light for the world.
Peace,
Fr. Damian fait