Twenty young children, slain for no good reason. Adam Lanza just decided they were inconvenient to him. It was horribly wrong to do this. What Lanza did was wrong not because the parents of those children loved them and wanted them to remain alive. What Lanza did was wrong because each those children was an individual, unique, beautiful human person with his or her own soul and right to continue living.

It is a right that precedes all other rights, and no other rights are possible without it. It is a right that no one can take away, it can only be surrendered through one’s own actions. Adam Lanza ignored the unalienable right those children had to live and killed twenty of them.

Every single day in our country the body count of the Newtown massacre is met two-hundred times over in abortionists’ facilities. Two-hundred Newtowns, daily. The mind reels, the heart breaks.

In response to the Newtown massacre a hue and cry has arisen to restrict gun rights. The awful irony is that the Venn diagram of those who most ardently support such restrictions on guns and those who most ardently support a woman’s right to choose an abortion very likely have significant overlap.

Those same people would be hard-pressed to identify the moment at which the child in utero acquires the right to life, usually preferring to avoid the question entirely. They’d rather discuss the woman’s right to choose what to do with her body and ignore the hard reality that the presence of a new person in her womb changes the dynamic of the question utterly—of course it is her body, but it is also that child’s home.

President Obama and all who have been speaking after him on the topic of gun violence have repeated variations of, “If we can save even one child, it is worth it; we have a responsibility to act; we will be judged on how we move to protect the most vulnerable amongst us.”

Who can disagree with that? And yet, so many who call for measures that would save, at most, a few dozen children’s lives per year in this country defend a practice that directly takes 4,000 children’s lives per year.

Let’s move to value and protect them all.

One could argue that video games are unique because they put the user in control. Games like Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto and Doom allow the player to shoot pistols, throw grenades and set off mines with the goal of destroying their enemy. This is different than simply listening to music or watching a television show, so it’s more likely to have a direct effect on the consumer.

Singer Nicki Minaj routinely mocks Catholicism in her music and performances

On the surface this is a valid point. The gunman in Newtown, like the shooters at Columbine, was a frequent video game player, and his hobby could have had something to do with his decision. But as Robert VerBruggen points out at National Review, studies indicate that even though there may be a link between violent behavior and violent video games the relationship between the two is somewhat ambiguous.

But that doesn’t mean video games shouldn’t be part of the gun control debate. When you blow off a German soldier’s head during a shootout in Berlin by pressing the X button there’s going to be some amount of desensitization toward violence. However, pinning the blame for shootings like the one in Newtown on video games ignores the larger issues: Adults who act like children, crass television shows, profanity-laced music, and movies that glorify alcohol, sex and tobacco all contribute to what society defines as acceptable human behavior.

Mike Huckabee received a lot of flak for suggesting that the Newtown shooting was due to the absence of God in public school classrooms. Seeing how the motives of the shooter are yet to be fully ascertained, and most likely never will, it’s unwise to agree with the former Governor at this time. But his larger point is most valid: What happens to a society when Christianity is removed from the public sphere?

Catholics know the answer to this, and they should see to it that their values are well-represented in public debates. By virtue of their rejection of pop culture and its morbid value system, Catholics should be leading the way not only on how to incorporate faith into everyday life, but on what constitutes appropriate entertainment. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Too many times Catholics fall into the trappings that this world has to offer and they forget what was written in St Paul’s letter to the Romans: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

Our anti-Christian pop culture may certainly bear some culpability in the Newtown shooting. But that means Catholics do too. We haven’t done a good enough job at evangelizing the culture. Just look at college campuses, concert halls and movie theaters. God is absent. And when God is absent Satan has a better chance to get individuals to do his bidding. Human beings without faith, which statistics show are on the rise worldwide, can only withstand his temptation for so long. We must do better.

In full disclosure, I was in seminary for one year with Father Luke Suarez, parochial vicar at St. Rose of Lima parish in Newtown, Connecticut. He is one of the gentlest and most generous souls I’ve known. As I remarked on Facebook when I saw the below picture, I had never seen him without a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye until this picture.

The note I found on Facebook comes from his sister. I think if you only do one more thing before Christmas—more important than getting that last-minute perfect gift—send some love and support toward those who will be supporting so many in Newtown.

The note, all bolding is mine:

My friends,
All of you, I am sure, have heard so much about the tragedy in Newtown, CT. Many of you have received emails from me about my younger brother, Father Luke Suarez, who is a priest at St. Rose of Lima parish, a Catholic church just down the road from Sandy Hook Elementary. He, and his pastor, Monsignor Weiss, arrived at the school within moments of the shooting, and have been caring for the community ever since. The picture I have included was taken at the school.

Father Luke has an impossible task before him. His diocese is without a bishop right now…. Monsignor … is personally devastated by the losses. The parish is very large…. The rectory has received serious threats, and as my brother gave the homily Sunday at the noon mass, the church had to be evacuated by SWAT teams. After experiencing identity theft and online hacking incidents, he had to erase all of his internet accounts. After a weekend of endless media requests, notifications and vigils with heartbroken families, and little sleep, he now has two wakes and two funerals every day, until the fourth Sunday of Advent. Father Luke has not even been ordained two years.

My large family has been trying to send Father Luke our love and support from afar, and one of my brothers was able to visit with him briefly a couple times. All he asks for is prayer.
I have been wracking my brain, trying to think of a way that our beautiful, loving community could tangibly reach out to Father Luke, Monsignor Weiss, and the St. Rose parish, to support them in this most awful of times. I have sent many prayer requests, and I am asking for more prayers again. But I also want to ask everyone to search their hearts, and if the Holy Spirit moves you, please consider sending one of your family’s Christmas cards to the rectory, with a few words of love and encouragement. Here is his address:

Father Luke Suarez
46 Church Hill Road
Newtown, CT 06470

My brother has said over and over again that without the prayer support he is receiving, he could not keep going. And this week is only the beginning. Everyone there is still in shock. Their peaceful home has been desecrated by violence. They will need to live with this sorrow forever.

But in our weakness is His strength. Grace abounds. Can you help me carry him through this time of trial?
On a hopeful note, Father Luke did say that no media coverage has even touched the deep, beautiful awakening of faith that has occurred there. Their tiny church, where my children have received sacraments and where Luke was ordained, has been full of people in prayer without ceasing since this tragedy happened. Love is stronger than death.
Please feel free to share the address with your family, friends, and community. An outpouring of love will sustain these good priests through their impossible ministry–impossible on their own, but possible with God.
I am so grateful to live in this community. We are all so blessed with one another. Every day, I see you all loving one another as Christ loved. Thank you for letting me reach out to you now.
With humble appreciation

The hurt and anger are only just beginning. There will be much anger and pain and division and upheaval from this cataclysmic event for that small town. It is not possible, nor prudent, to send a card to every family who has experienced loss, but by sharing with the priests who will support so many you can support them all. The good priests at St. Rose need all the support they can get so that they can shepherd their flock well.

Show some real love this Advent and Christmas: pray, first and foremost, but if you can, share a tangible sign of your love.

Father Luke Suarez, center, parochial vicar, and Monsignor William Weiss, right, pastor at St. Rose of Lima Church in Newtown, CT, distraught at the crime.

Obviously no mere human words can undo the pain nor answer the questions nor fully and completely show a way forward from the horror of the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.

By “way forward” I’m not talking about government policies, the blame game, video games, guns, abortion, or anything else in particular. I’m talking about the totality of the horror at hand, seeing where there is hope for a better future.

I had been unable to write much about the horror, save a couple of thoughts offered on Facebook and a simple post from yesterday. But the facts remain: 20 children and eight adults murdered, for no discernible reason—even a bad one—at all.

The mind reels. The heart aches. The maniacal, mocking face of Satan stares back.

Where was God in all of this? Why did God let this happen? Why was Satan allowed to mock goodness, despoil innocence, and infect the world in such an unimaginably awful manner?

The fact is, God was there. God was there, and was weeping. God was begging the killer to change and be different.

Perhaps the fact that the killer stopped the murder and turned the gun on himself while yet he had hundreds of rounds indicates that his conscience, that small voice of God in all of us, warped as it was, was not quite extinguished and moved him to stop the massacre.

To be sure, God did not wish for the young man to commit suicide, but certainly wished he would choose to stop the murder. The young man chose self-destruction rather than hope when he chose to stop the murder. God wept for that as well.

We know that God weeps for us. The shortest verse in the Bible is two words: “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). He wept for his dear friend Lazarus, who had died.

He also weeps for our sins. He wept before the triumphal entry into Jerusalem (Luke 19:41), weeping over the blindness of heart of the people and leaders of that royal city.

In both cases He, as God, had the power to command that the condition which grieved him to tears would be different. Indeed, in the one case He exercised that power to undo the grievous situation: he raised Lazarus back to life!

But the raising of Lazarus was a miraculous alteration of a condition of nature, and did not prevent Lazarus eventually dying again. Death, while the most grievous of the wages of sin, is a condition of our nature, it is not itself something that we will. Even in a suicide the choice for death is separate from the death itself: One who casts himself off a cliff can repent of the choice to kill himself and in the mercy of God possibly be forgiven while on the way down. One who commits suicide in a cloud of depression or other psychologically impaired state might also be spared the fires of hell, subject to the mysterious and wonderful perfect mercy of God. By the same token, one who point a gun at another’s heart and pulls the trigger has consented to, and thereby committed, murder, even if the gun jams and the victim lives. Our choice to do something or not to do it matters more than whether or not that thing is fully carried out.

But this series of considerations also points out an important distinction: God can and will, at His discretion, “interfere” with natural processes, like death and sickness. He will not, however, assault or undercut our free will. He respects and loves us too much to do that.

Christ would not force the people and leaders of Jerusalem to believe in Him: what good would their faith be if it were not voluntary? Of what merit is a choice to love if there is not opportunity not to love. Thus the great mystery of free will: the opportunity to choose great good entails the possibility of choosing great evil.

God never wills our evil choices—he always wills goodness—but he takes the risk in letting us decide which we will do, and he weeps when we choose poorly

Jesus also wept a third time in Scripture: in the Garden of Gethsemane. This weeping was not merely for a dead friend or a particular group of people, this weeping was for the entire human race, and his own foreseen passion on our behalf. On all our behalf. Including Friday’s killer.

We are free to love God and thus love our neighbor, and we are free to murder.

A stark choice, but the numbers are in our favor.

The millions upon millions of people who, to varying degrees, choose to love God and neighbor in great good deeds and in everyday small acts of kindness far outnumber the very few who choose heinous acts of evil; but the few, by the sheer unimaginable horror of their deeds, capture our imaginations and chill us to the bone. They scare us because they show the depths to which human beings can fall and the evil we are capable of, and they do it in spectacular fashion. We are driven to dwell on those individual, rare occurrences, to fear and to blame each other, inanimate objects, the media, entertainment, and other factors. Other factors may have been involved, but the evil lay in the choice.

Set opposed to these occasional horrific deeds by a few deeply twisted people we can set the examples of the great saints of our time—Mother Theresa is an obvious and towering example—but also the many, many people who go about selflessness on a regular basis. Even the teacher who hid her students in any nook or cranny that could conceal them and told the killer they were not there before he shot her, shows a remarkable example of virtue. Countless unknown people who place others ahead of themselves as a matter of course show us the smiling, not weeping, face of God.

The pain and horror of this latest explosion of evil is not undone by the presence of so much good in the world, but the presence of that good can at least indicate that hope is possible, that the evil does not dominate and hold sway, that there is a way forward in hope.

And indeed, our faith tells us that this goodness is a hint of the goodness of God: that God has already won, that Satan, though he has his moments and drags some souls down with him, cannot and will not win. Indeed, he has already lost: we’re living in the great drama of his defeat, living in the great drama of the life of God, with the opportunity to bear the goodness of God to all whom we meet, thus sharing the hope in us with them.

This is what Advent is about: a time of hopeful expectation, awaiting the arrival of He who fulfills all hopes and desires, who can heal our hurts and draw us out of crushing pain, who alone suffers the greatest evil of all and returns from the grave, undefeated, to share the victory over death with all who will join Him.

God weeps when we choose evil, but not because He is powerless to bring good. He weeps because he has brought good and we, when we do that which is evil, choose to reject it.

The way forward is choosing good, choosing hope, choosing healing, choosing love, as difficult as it can be at times.

“The wrong shall fail, the right prevail with peace on earth, good will to men”

He had never recovered from the death of his second wife, Frances. She died an agonizing death two years earlier after her dress caught fire in a freak accident while Longfellow napped. He managed to snuff the fire with his own body, but she lingered in that state, succumbing the next day.

In March 1863 his eldest son, Charles, joined the Union army without his blessing and in November was severely wounded.

Distraught, Longfellow penned “Christmas Bells,” which has become the Christmas carol”I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.”

I find comfort in its message during times like these; I hope you might also.

It speaks of the gayety of Christmas Day, at first as something that is rote, matter of fact: The bells are pealing, of course, because it is Christmas day. This happens all across Christendom.

But that ringing is drowned out by the sorrow of the evil so prevalent in the world: a civil war, a senseless slaying of children. There is no peace.

But no: It is not drowned out, it rings unhindered, ever swelling, bespeaking the great Truth it proclaims: “God is not dead nor doth he sleep.” Evil may distract us, and may at times overwhelm us, but it is a lie; it has no strength that we do not give it.

We may not see, with our finite vision and limited time, how the wrong fails and right prevails, but the message of Christmas, of those bells pealing out the birth of the Word made flesh, is that such is indeed the case.

The full poem:

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
and wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said;
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on the earth, good-will to men.”

Yes, hate does mock, mock charity and goodness. But that is all it can do: hate, evil, can only mock and distort goodness, it cannot be and continue on its own. And thus it shall end, it does end, in the triumph of the Son, and in the triumph of each heart that chooses to love and live the life of the Son.

“God is not dead, nor doth he sleep,” even when we cannot understand how a good and loving God could allow such an awful thing to happen.

“In the world you will have troubles, but take courage, for I have overcome the world!” (John 16:33)

Every time I see a headline of human tragedy, particularly involving large numbers of innocent people, I can’t help putting it in the context of abortion. There’s a noon Mass that I sometimes frequent and one of the attendees, when asked to share additional prayers for the faithful, always reminds us to pray for the 3,000 innocent, unprotected, unborn babies who will be aborted that day and to pray for their mothers. It chokes me up. These children have lives full of promise and hope before them and they are killed in their mother’s womb, what should be the safest place they will ever experience.

Ben Stein has a good piece reflecting on Friday’s tragedy. He asks a provocative question which reinforces my focus on the abortion discussion:

[Why] are these killers always men? What is it that we teach our young men in this world that makes them think it’s a mark of manliness to kill the unarmed and innocent? Whatever it is, it’s disgusting. It’s not manly to kill any unarmed human. It’s miserable, crawling cowardice.

What is it that we teach them? Mo. Teresa answered this very question in 1994 when she spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast. She stood before President Clinton and the First Lady, both outspoken supporters of abortion and she said:

But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?…

By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems. And, by abortion, that father is told that he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world. The father is likely to put other women into the same trouble. So abortion just leads to more abortion. Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion. [Full text here.]

Almost as soon as the news of the shootings broke, there were calls for increased gun control.

I suggest, instead, that we look at our broader cultural experience. Not only do we, as a nation, protect the so-called right of women to kill their unborn children; but we glorify random violence. The perpetrator of Friday’s massacre was an avid player of violent video games. Surely, his thinking had to have been shaped by countless hours spent in front of a screen where he mindlessly murdered human looking forms.

And then, there’s also the family. I’ve yet to hear of anyone involved in a killing spree like this who didn’t have some serious family dysfunction at home. Yes, having divorced parents is a form of family dysfunction. Sometimes a divorce may be necessary, but the point is that there are hundreds of thousands of children experiencing family breakdown or “incomplete families” as John Paul II put it. I’m not suggesting that we blame the family of Adam Lanza; I’m assuming they did the best they could. I am suggesting that we examine what we can do to strengthen families.

The family is a child’s first experience of reality. If the family cannot offer that foundation, the child is already at a disadvantage, especially if the child is also suffering from a mental illness. Then put the child in a world where he learns at an early age that the most innocent human beings are not protected. Add to that a steady diet of violence, particularly in video games where he himself commits the violence, and you’ve got a recipe for destruction and dysfunction that has little to do with guns. It’s about evil. And evil will use whatever means necessary to accomplish its goal.

For the record, the internet abounds with all sorts of instructions on how to wage mass destruction without guns. Are we going to call for a ban on the internet?

Abortion has created a society with multiple personality disorder. On the one hand, we proclaim that every person is created equal and has equal rights under the law, unless of course that person has not been birthed and is not wanted. However, if that person’s mother wants him, then many states will protect the right of that person to be free from harm even before birth.

We are a society that places our hope in its youth, as long as we allow them to be born, meeting some arbitrary standard.

If one doesn’t have a strong personal grounding, things can become very confusing and that’s all that evil needs to take root: confusion.

It is my hope and prayer that the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary will at least teach us to better love and protect innocent human life. However, it’s a lesson that comes at a dear, dear price.