They showed up to Annunciation Catholic School on the far south side of Minneapolis on Wednesday wearing backpacks and new shoes their parents may have just purchased during back-to-school shopping. They filed into the adjacent yellow brick Catholic church for the annual start-of-the-school-year Mass with adults shushing their giggles and excitement. After all, Annunciation had just got a new principal and a new priest, and the older children had been assigned their “buddies” from younger grades who would watch them and learn the scripture and rituals of the Catholic Mass.
A barrage of bullets exploded through the stained glass windows and shattered yet another American community.
And then, during a religious service that was supposed to usher in a school year defined by the phrase “a future filled with HOPE,” a barrage of bullets exploded through the stained glass windows and shattered yet another American community.
Two families that dropped their children off at school will never see them again. There is now an empty chair at each table. Two bedrooms frozen in time. Two futures snatched away by a shooter’s cowardly rage. Eighteen more people are physically injured. Some remain in critical condition. But “in critical condition” could just as well describe the whole Annunciation community, the city of Minneapolis and, really, America in its exhausted entirety.
Those babies — one 8 and the other 10 — gunned down in the pews at their Catholic school have forced us all to face a sickening lesson about the current state of our country. The people responsible for writing the laws that govern us have developed a tolerance for children being slaughtered in their schools.
Instead of saying, “No more of this,” our society has introduced more attempts to protect kids in places that should be inviolate. Metal detectors. Security guards. Active shooter drills. Thankfully Annunciation had adopted a protocol of locking the church doors before Mass began. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said locking the doors likely saved many lives.
We should never ever normalize a scene as horrific as this, but somewhere along the way, mass casualty events have become a grim fact of American Life. It’s hard to admit this, but the unbearable has become unacceptably routine. I hate writing that sentence. These facts should cause us sorrow and even shame. The death and despair. The wounds that last a lifetime. The assault on our sense of security. The targeting of CHILDREN. And the ready access to guns that are essentially weapons of war. All of this should be unacceptable. School shootings are still devastatingly shocking, but history shows that these atrocities do not guarantee change.
People committed to truly creating a safer America must figure out how to stand up to a gun lobby that is counting on a woefully predictable pattern. Shock. Grief. Outrage. Anguish.
Calls for thoughts and prayers. Vigils. Funerals. Editorials.
Pledges for action and change.
All of it falling short of achieving a goal we should have reached years ago — restricting easy access to assault weapons.
Another part of this predictable pattern is a debate over what led the shooter to this kind of unthinkable violence. The motives, lifestyle and so-called manifesto will be studied. Was the shooter a lonely outcast or angry and addled? But no matter the answers to those questions, there is a constant through line in these mass shootings at schools and movie theaters and concerts and clinics: access to war-fighting, high-velocity firearms that have no place among civilians.
I grew up on the south side of Minneapolis, and I attended a Catholic school just a few miles from Annunciation.
Since Republicans will be predictably silent, Democrats and those who can find their way to support reasonable gun safety measures need to figure out how to react to the constant ticktock of violence with a constant amplification of their demand for gun reform.
I grew on the south side of Minneapolis, and I attended a Catholic school just a few miles from Annunciation. I know that parish well. It’s part of a cluster of Catholic church/school campuses that dot the Twin Cities. Annunciation has always been a particularly active congregation, in part because of the stability in its surrounding upper middle-class community.
It’s a thriving hub that hosts fish fries, bingo nights, scout troops and basketball leagues. The buildings buzz all week, even in the summer months when kids learn how to ride bikes on the recess lot and seniors do laps to get their steps in. It’s where south siders buy Christmas trees and the church engages in a Mission Monday program where the first day of the week is dedicated to participating in programs like Meals on Wheels, making goodie bags for seniors living in elder care centers or turning old T-shirts into re-usable diapers for the sister parish Annunciation adopted in Haiti.
Catholic churches throughout the city have sometimes struggled in recent years to maintain active congregations and thriving schools. As the Twin Cities went through a series of changes with demographic shifts, rising poverty rates and conversely pockets where working families were priced out of neighborhoods, Catholic parishes were mandated by the diocese to be not just in the community but of the community. Annunciation, built in 1922 on the far stretch of the city near where the suburbs start, has thrived as a model of that creed. But now it is the most recent marker in America’s daisy chain of school shootings. The Tudor building that was such a place of pride with its careful plantings and holiday decorations will forever be a monument to grief. No different than Sandy Hook, Columbine, Jonesboro, Uvalde, Parkland and so many more. Too many more. I hope that Annunciation’s community-strong model will provide both steel and balm. Eventually the students will return to school. Drivers along 54th Street will once again hear the squeals from the playground and the sound of children’s voices united in sing-song hymns floating through an open classroom window. “Annunciation” refers to the moment the angel Gabriel told Mary she would conceive a son. Shoppers visiting the Kowalski’s grocery store across the street or the Holiday gas station just down the road will forever feel a jolt of anguish. How could they not? The Twin Cities is a place that was already reeling from another large casualty shooting earlier that week, the shooting of lawmakers and their families in June, and May marked the fifth anniversary of police murdering George Floyd. And with this latest monstrous assault, it has joined the litany of communities forever marked by the pain of schoolchildren being deliberately murdered. Those communities all figure out how to move forward, but they never really move on. And we should not either. In religious teaching, “annunciation” refers to the moment the angel Gabriel told Mary she would conceive a son. What if we honored those children who lost their lives and all those families affected by this shooting with a full throttled denunciation of high-velocity assault weapons, followed by swift legislative action, punitive laws and stiff penalties. The gun lobby is counting on all of us to go back to that predictable pattern after a school shooting in which outrage fails to usher in true change. Maybe this time we can finally prove them wrong.
Michele Norris is a Senior Contributing Editor for MS NOW. 
