By Gina Christian
(OSV News) – The 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina marks a call to “renew our commitment to racial equity and justice in every sector of public life,” said two U.S. Catholic bishops.

Auxiliary Bishop Roy E. Campbell Jr. of Washington, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Subcommittee on African American Affairs, and retired Auxiliary Bishop Joseph N. Perry of Chicago, chairman of the USCCB’s Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism, issued a joint statement Aug. 26 reflecting on the tragedy.

The hurricane, one of the five deadliest in U.S. history, struck the nation’s Gulf Coast Aug. 29, 2005, as a Category 3 storm, with 120-140 mph winds and stretching 400 miles across the coast. At one point, the storm became a Category 5, but weakened before striking land.

Katrina made multiple landfalls, inflicting what the National Weather Service called “staggering” damage and loss of life, particularly in Louisiana and Mississippi. A total of 1,833 were killed by the storm, which at the time caused some $108 billion dollars in damage, according to NWS.

New Orleans was ravaged by the storm, with at least 80% of the city flooded by Aug. 31, 2005, NWS noted on its website, adding that the impact was “heightened by breaks in the levees that separate New Orleans from Lake Pontchartrain.”

Compounding the damage were key failures in governmental response, and in their statement, Bishop Campbell and Bishop Perry said that “despite the scale of devastation, it took days before the federal government responded with aid.”

More broadly, they observed, Hurricane Katrina “threw into stark focus the deep racial and socio-economic disparities across various sectors, including environmental justice, systemic housing inequality, and disaster response.”

The bishops pointed out that “some of the most catastrophic damage occurred in neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward, a predominantly Black neighborhood, which was under so much water that many of the residents had to take refuge in their attics and on their rooftops to avoid the rising tides.

“Today, we pray with those who still suffer from the loss of family and friends and whose very identities were affected,” said the bishops.

They also noted that the storm resulted in “the loss of irreplaceable items handed down through generations such as photos, videos, diaries, genealogical records, documents, and other mementos that are an essential means of sharing a person’s existence, history, and culture.”

In addition, said the bishops, “many residents were unable to return home because gentrification caused their former neighborhoods to become unaffordable.

“Disparities, rooted in historical and structural racism, intensified the suffering of many Black residents,” they said.

The hurricane and the response missteps “revealed the fragility of our cities to natural disasters and the reality of poverty among the most vulnerable in our country,” the bishops noted.

Bishop Campbell and Bishop Perry extolled the “powerful witness of the Catholic Church” that countered the “inadequate governmental response” to Katrina, citing the work of Catholic Charities USA and its local agencies, the USCCB’s Catholic Campaign for Human Development and Catholic Home Missions Appeal, the Archdiocese of New Orleans and the Knights of Columbus.

The two bishops stressed the “dire need for equitable investments in climate resilience and preparedness,” amid storms intensified by climate change.

“Katrina revealed how quickly entire communities can be overlooked, their cultures erased as neighborhoods vanished – taking with it cherished cultural spaces and historic landmarks,” said Bishop Campbell and Bishop Perry.

They added that two decades later, “many still struggle to rebuild intangible bonds,” with “ongoing mental and physical injuries” still evident today, while the “gap between the wealthy and poor continues to grow.”

Concluding their statement, Bishop Campbell and Bishop Perry said, “Let us join together, as one community, responding to the call to be leaven for the world. As church, let us be a lifeboat in the flood waters of injustice.”

By Joe Ruff and Josh McGovern
MINNEAPOLIS (OSV News) – For the first time since the Aug. 27 attack by a shooter who killed two children and wounded at least 21 more victims at an all-school Mass where he was presiding at Annunciation Catholic Church, Father Dennis Zehren publicly described his attempt to save the children.
“If I could have got between those bullets and the kids,” Father Zehren said, his voice breaking with emotion at an Aug. 30 news conference outside Annunciation elementary school.

“That’s what I was hoping to do. … the doors were barred, shut on the outside by the gunman,” said Father Zehren, Annunciation’s pastor. “We tried to get out. I think some of the fathers would have gone out there and gang-rushed him if they could have, and I would have been right there with them.
“But I think by that time, the damage was done,” and the shooter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Father Zehren said.

“It’s a difficult memory,” Father Zehren said. “It just was loud (the gunshots). It just kept coming, and my first instinct was to just rush toward where the bullets were coming from. There were some fathers who were heading in the same direction, and I was on the phone with 911 just hoping to peek out the window to see which direction (the shooter) might be going in. So I could give them some help. But it was a flurry, and like I said, it seemed to keep coming.”

The news conference took place before the first parish Mass – held at the Annunciation Catholic School’s auditorium instead of the now-desecrated church – since the shooting. The school is steps away from the church.
Identified as Robin Westman, the suspected shooter was a former Annunciation student, then known as Robert Westman, whose mother had been previously employed by the school. Westman fired from three guns through Annunciation’s stained-glass windows around 8:30 a.m. during the first all-school Mass of the PreK-to-eighth-grade school’s academic year. Westman died by suicide in the parking lot.

Archbishop Bernard A. Hebda of St. Paul and Minneapolis joined Father Zehren at the news conference, at one point placing his hand on the priest’s shoulder in support. The archbishop concelebrated the Mass that followed.

The archbishop and Father Zehren opened the news conference describing the importance of the Mass to the Catholic faith. The fact that Annunciation parish would hold a public Mass so soon after the church shooting might surprise some, the archbishop said.

“And yet it’s so important for us in our Catholic tradition for Masses, where we most experience God’s presence and God’s love,” Archbishop Hebda said. “And it’s the place where we come together to be a community.”

Father Zehren said the Mass is what the parish community needs.

“This is why we’re here,” he said. “They just want to be together. They want to pray. They want to help and do anything they can.

“Mass is the heart of what we do,” Father Zehren said. “The Mass is not just a worship service. Because we recognize that as Catholics … we enter into the paschal mystery of Jesus.”

That mystery is presented to the community each time a Mass is celebrated, the priest said.

“Whenever we gather at Mass, we are re-presented with Jesus … at the Last Supper. We are presented with his suffering … with his dying, and … with his rising from the dead,” Father Zehren said.

Asked about the impact of the church attack occurring during a Mass, Father Zehren said he would be “reflecting on that for the rest of my life.”

“I will never be able to unsee,” Father Zehren said. “But in addition to the sorrow and the terror, we know that Jesus was there with us. … Jesus comes to the depths of what we are going through. That’s where he brings the healing and the salvation for whatever we go through.”

Attending the Mass with his family was Sean O’Brien, an Annunciation alumnus and parent who said he was at the Aug. 27 Mass in the back of the church with his 2-year-old daughter, Molly, when shots rang out. His son Emmett, an Annunciation preschooler, was in the basement. His other children, fourth-grader Conor and first-grader Finley, were sitting with their classmates.

“I saw a shaft of light going through the window and that’s when I knew we were being attacked,” O’Brien said.

“I grabbed my daughter, and we went behind a pillar. … When the shooting stopped, we said, ‘OK, who needs help?’ And we did what we could.’”

O’Brien, 37, said he rushed to an injured student and remained there until the police came.

“There were people taking action that were motivated by the love they felt for the people around them, from the very moment things started,” he said. “And that’s only going to continue and get stronger.”

Sean’s wife, Mallory, said she learned that Finley was with her eighth-grade buddy, in a school tradition where older students accompany younger students to school Masses.

“They held hands all the way to the school” as students were evacuated, Mallory O’Brien said.

The O’Briens expressed gratitude that no one in their family was injured. And with service and community in mind, they are helping others where they can.

“We’ve really been getting together all week ever since Wednesday (Aug. 27),” Sean O’Brien said after the Mass. “The best thing for us has been to be together with the people that we love in this parish and in this community. … To be here, to be together again, really means a lot. There’s no place we’d rather be.”

At Mass in the school’s auditorium the following day, Father Zehren talked about the immense help parishioners and neighbors, community responders and others have provided one another. He compared it to the book of Exodus passage in which Moses lifted his arms and hands in prayer, and when he wearied, the Israelites fell back in battle. When Moses held up his arms, they prospered in the fight.

“That’s what we’ve been experiencing in so many ways around here. All of you. All of our neighbors, all of our community, police, first responders, they’ve been a rock underneath us,” he said Aug. 31. “And they will continue to be a rock for us. There (are) so many people who will be continuing to hold up our hands in prayer.”

(Joe Ruff is editor-in-chief and Josh McGovern is a reporter for The Catholic Spirit, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.)

By Maria Wiering
ST. PAUL (OSV News) – Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis will be reconsecrated before it again holds Mass after an Aug. 27 shooting during a Mass for schoolchildren left two children dead and 18 other victims wounded.

“The church does make provision” for reconsecrating a church building after a desecration, Archbishop Bernard A. Hebda told OSV News Aug. 28. “I’ve never had to do that, but I think it will be an important time. Here, where the church is still a crime scene and where there’s been substantial destruction, I think it’s probably going to be a while before we’re able to do that.”

While there are other places on the campus of Annunciation Catholic Church and Annunciation Catholic School that could hold Mass in the interim, “my understanding is that the church’s tradition is that no Mass or sacrament would be celebrated in there until there is that rite of reconsecration,” Archbishop Hebda said.

Canon No. 1211 in the church’s law states, “Sacred places are violated by gravely injurious actions done in them with scandal to the faithful, actions which, in the judgment of the local ordinary, are so grave and contrary to the holiness of the place that it is not permitted to carry on worship in them until the damage is repaired by a penitential rite according to the norm of the liturgical books.”

“I’m grateful that I will have that privilege of doing that at some point,” Archbishop Hebda said, speaking at the archdiocesan headquarters in St. Paul. “The church has such wisdom even about human nature and the human person, and even to have a ritual that would help people in that time of need, I think, is very significant.

“You hope that it will be an opportunity, whenever that occurs, for some healing,” he added, noting that he will work with Annunciation’s pastor, Father Dennis Zehren, on appropriate timing for the ritual. “It would be a priority for me, as I know it is for him.”

A former student at the school whose mother also previously worked there, the shooter, identified as Robin Westman, fired from three guns through Annunciation’s stained-glass windows around 8:30 a.m. during Annunciation Catholic School’s first all-school Mass of the PreK-to-eighth-grade school’s academic year. Westman died by suicide in the parking lot.

Investigators are working through a hate-riddled online manifesto posted by the shooter and other evidence to determine a clear motive for the violence and why Annunciation was targeted.

Fletcher Merkel, 8, and Harper Moyski, 10, were killed in their pews. Other victims, including 15 children and three adults in their 80s, were taken to nearby hospitals, including Hennepin County Medical Center, a Level 1 trauma center.

An extensive, spontaneous memorial of flowers, gifts and messages outside of the church includes tributes to Merkel and Moyski, as well as prayers for those injured and the school’s families.

Archbishop Hebda visited the school Aug. 27 and has since presided at several prayer services for the victims and the mourning community.

Annunciation Catholic Church was founded in 1922. Its parish school was founded by Dominican sisters the following year. The present church building was completed in 1962.

(OSV News) – Eight-year-old Fletcher Merkel “loved his family, friends, fishing, cooking and any sport that he was allowed to play.” Ten-year-old Harper Moyski was a “joyful” big sister, who was “bright” and “deeply loved.”

The parents of both children confirmed as victims of the Aug. 27 shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church issued their first statements in the aftermath, mourning the loss of their children.

Jesse Merkel, Fletcher’s father, said the hole left in his family’s hearts by his son’s death will never be filled, during an Aug. 28 press conference outside Annunciation School in Minneapolis.

In his remarks, Jesse Merkel said they would never be allowed to “watch him grow into the wonderful young man he was on the path to becoming.”

He also noted prayers for the family of Harper Moyski and of the other people affected by the shooting, and expressed gratitude for “the swift and heroic actions of children and adults alike” inside the church.

“We ask not for your sympathy, but your empathy as our family and our Annunciation community grieve and try to make sense of such a senseless act of violence,” Merkel said. “Please remember Fletcher for the person he was, and not the act that ended his life.”

Harper was a “bright, joyful, and deeply loved 10-year-old whose laughter, kindness, and spirit touched everyone,” her parents, Michael Moyski and Jackie Flavin, said in a statement issued Aug. 28.

“Our hearts are broken not only as parents, but also for Harper’s sister, who adored her big sister and is grieving an unimaginable loss. As a family, we are shattered,” they said.

“While our immediate focus is on Harper and our family’s healing, we also believe it is important that her memory fuels action. No family should ever have to endure this kind of pain. We urge our leaders and communities to take meaningful steps to address gun violence and the mental health crisis in this country,” they continued.

“Harper’s light will always shine through us, and we hope her memory inspires others to work toward a safer, more compassionate world.”

Choking back tears, Fletcher’s father pleaded: “Give your kids an extra hug and kiss today.”
He said, “We love you, Fletcher, and you’ll always be with us.”