School Shootings And The Church

The article posted below is the work of Jim Fritz, a colleague of mine in the Catholic Media Coalition.

It was February 15^th and I was driving down to the abortion clinic in Hagerstown, Maryland, where, at the request of a friend, I had started a sidewalk counseling group some 11 years ago. We have a good group now, working two days a week. Since we started, the number of women going into the clinic has been cut in half, and the clinic  business has dropped from three days to two days a week.

              While driving to Hagerstown I listened to our local Catholic radio station. The host was interviewing a Monsignor, who is the president of a Catholic college. They were talking about the school massacre the day before in Florida.  Seventeen people were killed by a mentally deranged young man. He did not have living parents and he had an interest in automatic weapons. He legally owned the weapon he used in the school shooting.

              The Monsignor did not dwell upon it, but he did discuss gun control. This has been the routine with every school shooting.  I thought this was interesting because, when I was a boy, almost everyone owned and used guns, but there were never any school shootings. We used guns to hunt as we needed the food. This was in the 1930’s. Once in a while one would hear about a single shooting during a quarrel in a business and even at a government organization, but this was very unusual.

              But what has changed? We do not have more guns per citizen -- maybe even less per citizen. The Monsignor and others become too focused upon the weapon used and not the real cause of the problem. All of these assassins appear to have mental problems and would have committed some mass killing even if they used another means such as fire, which would be even more deadly.

              Let’s look at the real problem. What has changed in the past 100 years? In my time I grew up in the depression and then World War ll.  One change has been the percentage of people receiving money from the government and providing nothing in return. During the depression people were at least required to work for the Work Project Administration (WPA), the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) or some such group to receive income. Now we have a record number on welfare, giving nothing in return for money and food stamps, and the clergy is advocating for an increase.

Another change, which the Monsignor should be aware of, has been absence of God in our culture and in our families. There has been a huge decrease in the percentage of people attending church services. He did not mention this. What has caused this decrease and what does he and other clergy suggest we do about it?

Other changes have been the TV, radio, print media, movies and communication devices/methods such as smartphones and Facebook. These have had a tremendous effect on the younger generation. An even greater change since the days of no school shootings has been the legalization of both abortion and assisted suicide. Both of these legalizations of death have had a tremendous impact on the devaluation of human life.

What else to look at? What about the fact we have taken God out of school? We do not teach or give humanity dignity by teaching we are made in the image and likeness of God and that human life is therefore precious. Kids in the public school system have been taught about abortion. They are taught it is perfectly acceptable for a female to deliberately choose to kill her own baby in her own body for any reason whatsoever. Some girls still in school have already aborted their babies and in some cases, the schools have helped them do it. They are taught euthanasia is merciful. And the list goes on and on. Our schools are a problem. NBC asked a student who was in the Florida school during the shooting if guns should be banned. He answered, ”I think it has to do with mental health though. If he’s been expelled three different times, from three different schools, I think he should (have been) helped out.”

The problem needs to be more intelligently analyzed. If we do nothing we will continue to have mass killings. Even if guns are totally banned, a different, and probably worse method will be used.

Getting back to my trip to Hagerstown, I started thinking about the past week when, coincidently, we had the same number of babies, 17, killed in the Hagerstown Abortion Facility as were killed in the school mass shooting. I thought if I were at Mass, instead of driving to the facility, I would surely hear about the mass shooting of 17 students, but I would not hear anything about the estimated 2,800 babies killed by paid abortionists on that very same day and every other day of the year. Why is this? Why do we have Catholic politicians voting to continue supporting abortion in the United States? Why do we have Catholic politicians using taxpayer money to support the abortion business? Is this lack of respect for human life a part of the cause for school massacres? It surely must be.  If our own government actually subsidizes the organizations which kill human beings which should be safe in their mother’s wombs, how can it help but reduce the respect for any human life? Some mentally challenged teenagers are going to think it is ok for them to choose to kill.

The clergy seem to be pre-occupied with justifying the vagaries of the cocaine- addicted homosexuals in the Vatican and Venezuela, fornicating in self-defense, adultery for the sake of the children, fighting a non-existent climate change, etc. rather than doing something about the disintegration of families and respect for God as our Savior. Our Church is becoming more and more irrelevant in guiding us in accordance with what Jesus Christ taught.

I challenge our clergy to do much more to teach our faith and to keep members in the Church. This includes not doing things to drive them out of the Church. We do not need to accept those unfaithful such as homosexuals, who Jesus would reject. We do not need to retain unfaithful clergy, for example, pedophiles, who should be ejected from the Church. We do not need modernist clergy to weaken Jesus’s teaching so it is easier for us to understand. We need clergy to do more and ask more of us.

Jesus did not ask us to spend an hour a week in the temple. He asked much, much more of our clergy and of us. He expects us to take on challenges even though they may be unpopular and he asked us to fight to the death for our faith.