FROM THE PASTOR’S DESK

My Dear Parishioners:
I’m sure you will have had the students and families of Robb Elementary School on your hearts and for the past several weeks, as have I. To hear of the loss of 19 children is heart breaking. You may have heard as well that House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, is being denied Holy Communion in her home Diocese because of her persistent and increasingly aggressive promotion of abortion.

What interests me is the nation’s bipolar reaction to these two things. We express remorse over the loss of children in the classroom, while at the same time passionately defending those who would forsake them in the womb. An alien visiting from another planet would note the psychosis in our culture. Perhaps we are standing too close to see it. In any case, this terrible contradiction is not from God.

19 students lost their lives on May 24, 2022, because of the shooting. But 2,300 children lost their lives that same day because of abortion. In God’s eyes, it’s as if the same shooting happened in 121 other schools at the same time. Conversations about gun law reform abound in the wake of school shootings. But we don’t hear the same kind of outrage expressed against companies that produce the suction catheter.

In any case, school shootings come as a blow upon a bruise. They hit us where it hurts, because the collective wound from which our nation suffers is no longer the unjust denial of rights to blacks or to women, but to their children.

As for the 18-year-old who was seduced by evil into shooting his grandmother and then a classroom full of children, we should pray for his soul. He died under the oppression of a demon. We should pray also for the Speaker of the House, as evil takes on many forms, including the bright pink of Planned Parenthood, deceiving us into championing as health care the very thing that would land a school shooter in jail.

It is a strange psychosis, this inability to see the connection between the classroom and the womb. Both are spaces designed for the growth and development of the human person in his earliest stages of life. Murder has no place in either

And yet, we don’t see the connection between the two evils. We are like the person who can see the splinter in someone’s eye, but not the plank in their own. Still, let us not think ourselves better than Nancy Pelosi, or than the gunman. Let us, rather, see in them our own human frailty, and thank God for His mercy – for instructing us in His ways. And let us pray never to fall into heresy ourselves.

Like you, I was very upset by the school shooting in May – to think of those children so violently separated from their parents. But it also hurt to hear the House Speaker refer to the Church as, “they.” She sounded to me like a child who has, herself, been separated from her mother; she and Mother Church are no longer a “we.” She has allowed an ideology to terminate her communion with the Church.

I hope she returns to God, and that she accepts Christ’s mercy – it is the same embrace that was given to the children of Robb Elementary. It is the embrace of our loving, Heavenly Father who cares for all of his children.

Peace,
Fr. Monteleone

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