It was a mass shooting at a children’s Mass.
Wednesday was the first all-school Mass for the first week of classes at Annunciation Catholic School. Maybe the little ones prayed for the school year and the adventure ahead. Third grade. Fifth grade. The best year yet.
Maybe they prayed for us. The grown-ups who could have built them a world that protects its children from people with too many guns and a manifesto. We could have tried after Rocori, after Red Lake, after Sandy Hook, after Parkland, after Uvalde.
Instead, we let a shooter walk up to the church and fire round after round into the crowded pews. Two children were shot dead and 17 others, ranging in age from a 6-year-old to parishioners in their 80s, were wounded.
Don’t offer us thoughts and prayers, a furious Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told the news crews outside the crime scene tape Wednesday. These kids were literally praying.
As the sun set on a terrible day, a shattered community gathered to grieve. Again. It was the third lethal shooting in Minneapolis in 24 hours. It was a summer that began in the Twin Cities with a political assassination and ended like this — in a city still scarred by the murder of George Floyd and everything that came after.
Thousands of mourners crowded into and overflowed the gymnasium of Holy Angels Academy in Richfield, the largest space the archdiocese could find on short notice. Standing before them, the archbishop searched for “the words to express inexpressible grief.”
Crowded into the auditorium was a governor, a senator, Annunciation’s pastor and principal. There were people wearing yarmulkes and hijabs and clutching rosaries as they bowed their heads and prayed: Our children were suddenly and violently taken from us. Come swiftly to our aid.
“We have a God who embraces us in our pain,” Archbishop Bernard Hebda told the mourners. “He loves us. He loves all of those children who were in that church this morning. He loves their families. He loves the shooter.”
On the third day of the first week of school, bullets tore through a church and its children. Love may be the only thing that can get us through this day and that deed.
We’ll remember the teachers and older students who put their own bodies between the children and the bullets. The mother who tore off her shoes and sprinted barefoot down the street to the school. The first responders who rushed 17 wounded children and adults to hospitals in time.
“You are so brave,” Annunciation Principal Matt DeBoer told children who shouldn’t have had to be this brave. “And I am so sorry that this happened to us today.”
The community’s response to so much cruelty was kindness. Neighbors wrapped the trees around Annunciation in fluttering ribbons. Strangers stood vigil in Lynnhurst Park with candles in their hands and tears on their cheeks.
Restaurants donated mountains of food to feed thousands of mourners. Friends will be organizing meal trains for traumatized families for weeks to come.
You were all so brave. You were all so kind. I am so sorry this happened to us. Again.
