Finding faith from Sandy Hook

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My main work as a priest is as a teacher and an editor. Priests like me who are not assigned to a parish often help out somewhere on weekends. For the past four years the parish where I have been celebrating Mass each Sunday is St. Rose of Lima Church in Newtown, Connecticut.

I’ve been asked to speak about the relevance of the Year of Faith for the current situation of the Church in America. I would propose to do so from the perspective of the horrific events that took place in Newtown last December 14th.

In his Apostolic Letter announcing the Year of Faith entitled Porta Fidei, our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI wrote, “Ever since the start of my ministry as Successor of Peter, I have spoken of the need to rediscover the journey of faith…. The Church as a whole…must set out to lead people out of the desert…towards friendship with the Son of God” (2).

On the evening of the massacre, there was a Mass offered at St. Rose of Lima. The church holds maybe 650 people. No question there were close to a thousand people packed into the church and another thousand standing outside. It was clear that not all who came were Catholic—some were not even Christian. But they were there at St. Rose. Why?

They were people in a desert of desolation, and they wanted to be led out of it. As I gazed at their faces, I could tell that they were looking for something. Thousands had come to St. Rose of Lima—and stayed even when they couldn’t get inside the church—because they needed to be given something so that they would have the strength to face another day. 

Pope Benedict speaks about this phenomenon in Porta Fidei where he says:

Thousands of people came to Mass that night at St. Rose of Lima Church because the One they were seeking had first set out to meet them.

The people came as beggars; they were the poor in spirit of whom Jesus speaks in the Beatitudes.

Before the Mass began that Friday evening, the governor of Connecticut, Governor Dannel P. Molloy, addressed the congregation. And in his remarks he said this: “Many of us today and in the coming days will rely on what we have been taught and what we believe, that there is faith for a reason.” 

Please note: It is not the pope but a governor of one of the United States of America who is telling the world that faith is not optional.

The Sunday after the Sandy Hook School shooting, I was in the sacristy of the church, getting ready for the 7:30 am Mass. A man walked into the sacristy. I had never seen him at St. Rose before, but something told me he was involved with what had happened. And, sure enough, he introduced himself as Michael Murphy, the husband of Anne Marie Murphy, the special ed. teacher who had been killed. He told me: “Anne Marie was so devoted to her students that the shooter would have needed to go through her to get to them.” And, as the press would later report, Anne Marie Murphy was found with her arms wrapped around her pupil, six-year-old Dylan Hockley.

But why was Michael Murphy in the sacristy at that very early hour of the morning? “I have four grown children,” he told me, “and they are taking their mother’s death very hard. So could you please say something at Mass that might help them?” 

Why did Michael Murphy come in search of a priest, instead of a counselor, or a therapist, or a psychiatrist? Because of an endless aspiration … a boundless expectant awaiting for which only Jesus Christ can suffice.

The following Sunday Michael was at Mass again, and this time he was accompanied by his son Thomas.

So the first duty of the Year of Faith is to be ready: ready with a renewed and absolute conviction of the truth that faith is not optional. It is what everybody needs!

It is tragic that so often it takes a crisis or a catastrophe like that of Newtown to make people realize that they need the Infinite. But something always happens to stir up in a person the preamble to faith…the need for ultimate meaning and definitive truth…the aching expectant awaiting. And when it does, your presence will convince that person that appealing to faith is not a foolish thing to do—rather, it is the only reasonable thing.

A second charge of the Year of Faith is “a summons to an authentic and renewed conversion to the Lord” (PF 6).

Not conversion to a lofty idea, or to an ethical choice, or to a theory or code of conduct, but to a Person. 

Repeatedly in his writings Pope Benedict reminds us that the essence of faith is that something meets us which is greater than anything we can think of for ourselves. 

He writes, “Faith is the finding of a ‘You’ that upholds me and, amid all the unfulfilled…hope of human encounters, gives me the promise of an indestructible love…. Christian faith lives on the discovery that not only is there such a thing as objective meaning but that this meaning knows me and loves me, that I can entrust myself to it like [a] child [to his mother].”[1]

For this reason, says the pope, “having faith…is a change that involves our life, our whole life: feelings, heart, intelligence, will, bodiliness, emotion, and human relationships…. [Faith] is not an encounter with an idea or with a project of life, but with a living Person who transforms our innermost selves, revealing our true identity as children of God.”[2]

This is why the Holy Father can make the assertion in Porta Fidei that “faith becomes a new criterion of understanding and action that changes the whole of man’s life” (PF 6). 

An amazing verification of this came in the aftermath of the shooting. A young reporter for the New Haven Register named Michael Bellmore wrote an article entitled “Lapsed Catholic has a confession to make.” The story is about himself. I think his experience if fairly representative of the current situation of the Church in America. The pattern is familiar: raised Catholic, church every Sunday, went to Catholic school. But in high school, Mass attendance became less and less, and was eventually reduced to basically Christmas and Easter. In more recent years he had abandoned even the holidays, leaving him, as he puts it, “agnostic at best.”

But then he was assigned to cover a Saturday evening vigil Mass at St. Rose of Lima the day after the shooting. He writes:

That is conversion. And it all happened because of the presence of a person—Another Christ.

And a third expressed desire of the Holy Father for the Year of Faith is this: “We make it our prayer that believers’ witness of life may grow in credibility…. What the world is in particular need of today is the credible witness of people…capable of opening the hearts and minds of many to the desire for God and for true life” (PF 15).

What makes a witness “credible?” I suppose credibility is something you recognize when you encounter it.

Just days after the shooting, St. Rose parishioners Lynn and Chris McDonnell gave a television interview to Anderson Cooper about their slain, six-year-old daughter Grace. Lynn McDonnell—totally composed, and even radiant—said: “Grace did not have an ounce of hate in her. Hate is not how our family is. We won’t go down that road. We have to live through Grace.”

A great evangelizer of the twentieth century, Madeleine Delbrel, Servant of God, once wrote: “Each time that we are torn apart because we choose to be faithful to God’s faithfulness to us, we become as it were breaches in the world’s resistance.”

A credible witness is someone who is faithful to God’s faithfulness to him or to her…even if it tears the person apart.

Last week, at the one month anniversary of the shooting, St. Rose of Lima sponsored a series of talks for the parents of the children in the parish religious education program. Some of the children were fearful; some were mourning their murdered teachers; some parents were dealing with survivors’ guilt. 

One of the mothers who had lost a child—Jen Hubbard, whose red-headed, six-year-old daughter Catherine had been killed in the rampage—decided that she wanted to come in person and speak to the assembled parents.

I asked her before the session how it was ever possible for her to do something most of the world would consider completely impossible to do. In the closing lines of Porta Fidei, Pope Benedict says, “We believe with firm certitude that the Lord Jesus has conquered evil and death. With this sure confidence we entrust ourselves to him: he, present in our midst, overcomes the power of the evil one.” And in answer to my question, Jennie said: “There is a Presence that is so much better than us, and we have to acknowledge it.”

So she stood in the pulpit of St. Rose of Lima and said to the parents:

And thanks to the awesome witness of Jen, the other mothers in the parish who had lost children in the killing also volunteered to attend the others sessions and give a personal witness to the parents.

At the end of the religious ed. session last Monday, a young mother walked up to me holding the hand of her blond-haired son, a first-grader. His name was John; he was six years old; he was wearing a maroon Fordham University hooded sweatshirt. And he was perfectly adorable.

His mom said John was wondering if I would be willing to bless for him his medal of Saint Michael the Archangel. I told him of course I would. And as John reached into his hoodie to pull out the religious medal he was wearing on a chain around his neck, his mother—in a low voice—confided to me that John had been in Sandy Hook School that day; that he had witnessed everything that happened. And that, only because the shooter stopped to reload, had John been able to run out of the school. 

So now John had a lot of fear. But his faith told him that fear is only a desert, and he had a heavenly friend to lead him out of that desert—a friend Who Is Like God—and all he needed to do was trust, and rely on him and God’s indestructible love. 

I blessed John’s medal and I blessed him. And—thank God!—with a smile, off walked that seraphic little boy into a brand new year, the Year of Faith. 

Let’s go with him. Thank you.

1- Introduction to Christianity, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990, p. 48.
2- General Audience, October 17, 2012.
3- http://www.nhregister.com/articles/2012/12/23/opinion/doc50d7d3d777ff7520330562.prt