The horrific murder of 19 schoolchildren and two teachers in a mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas has galvanised many Catholic leaders to demand meaningful gun control measures. Archbishop Gustavo Garcia-Siller of San Antonio left a meeting to go to the hospital where some victims of the shooting were recovering, and later said Mass at Sacred Heart parish in the town.
“We the people are on the edge,” the archbishop said the day after the shooting. “We don’t know much about the person who committed these killings, but whatever the case is, arms are available and people are dying and we have made guns as idols, in our faith we would call idolatry, but they are sacred to the point that we don’t take measures to help avoid these situations. It’s horrible.”
Speaking from the White House the night of the shooting, President Joe Biden said, “As a nation, we have to ask, when in God's name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? When in God's name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”
The following Sunday, Garcia-Siller greeted the president and First Lady Jill Biden who attended Mass at the church where seven of the child victims were communicants.
On Twitter, Brownsville, Texan Bishop Daniel Flores, who chairs the bishops’ conference doctrinal committee, echoed Garcia-Siller. “Don’t tell me that guns aren’t the problem, people are,” the bishop tweeted, contradicting a frequent talking point of gun rights advocates. “I’m sick of hearing it. The darkness first takes our children who then kill our children, using the guns that are easier to obtain than aspirin. We sacralize death’s instruments and then are surprised that death uses them.”
In comparison to such bold condemnations of gun violence, the U.S. bishops’ conference issued an anemic statement that did not mention the need for gun control legislation nor was the statement issued in the name of a bishop. “There have been too many school shootings, too much killing of the innocent. Our Catholic faith calls us to pray for those who have died and to bind the wounds of others, and we join our prayers along with the community in Uvalde and Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller,” said Chieko Noguchi, spokesperson for the USCCB. “As we do so, each of us also needs to search our souls for ways that we can do more to understand this epidemic of evil and violence and implore our elected officials to help us take action.”
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