Angelus News | September 6, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 18
On the cover: Father Richard Sunwoo, pastor of St. Louise de Marillac in Covina, stands on the sidelines of an LA Chargers preseason game at SoFi Stadium in August. This year, Sunwoo is one of several LA priests with a side gig like no other: celebrating Mass for NFL teams before games. On Page 10, associate editor Mike Cisneros tells the story of the little-known ministry helping teams meet their spiritual needs.
On the cover: Father Richard Sunwoo, pastor of St. Louise de Marillac in Covina, stands on the sidelines of an LA Chargers preseason game at SoFi Stadium in August. This year, Sunwoo is one of several LA priests with a side gig like no other: celebrating Mass for NFL teams before games. On Page 10, associate editor Mike Cisneros tells the story of the little-known ministry helping teams meet their spiritual needs.
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Greg Erlandson is the former president and<br />
editor-in-chief of Catholic <strong>News</strong> Service.<br />
that run in our minds hadn’t kicked<br />
in, Owens and Blake would be alive<br />
today. Instead of a gun, Lewis might<br />
have picked up a phone. Instead of a<br />
gun, Lorincz might have called 911.<br />
The truth is that we’ve become the<br />
monsters in our own nightmares. We<br />
buy guns for security, yet feel ever<br />
more insecure. We buy guns because<br />
we feel threatened, yet we become<br />
the threats, not just to others, but<br />
to ourselves. More than half of all<br />
gun deaths in the United States are<br />
suicides. Guns are highly efficient at<br />
one thing: projecting a bullet into a<br />
neighbor, into a kid, into one’s own<br />
head.<br />
<strong>No</strong> one feels secure: not us, not our<br />
neighbors, not our police. So, we buy<br />
still more guns. We play out Hollywood<br />
tropes, cop show scenarios in<br />
our minds. And every now and then,<br />
innocents die.<br />
Lorincz and Lewis never planned<br />
to kill. They never planned to spend<br />
a decade or two in prison for taking<br />
someone else’s life. But the gun<br />
became the crutch, the protection that<br />
they leaned on instead of calling the<br />
police or relying on one’s neighbors.<br />
The gun is one more symbol of our<br />
isolation masquerading as self-reliance.<br />
Stories like the murders of Owens<br />
and Blake rarely get national press.<br />
Mass shootings do, but they are only<br />
1% of more than 42,000 gun deaths a<br />
year. Sixty percent are suicides, while<br />
37% are homicides. All of them are<br />
life-destroying.<br />
While the rest of the world looks<br />
on our slaughter with disbelief, U.S.<br />
bishops regularly call for “reasonable<br />
gun control measures.” They issue<br />
weary press releases whenever the next<br />
massacre happens, making the same<br />
points about background checks and<br />
red-flag laws, but knowing they will be<br />
ignored.<br />
Insanity is doing the same thing<br />
over and over and expecting different<br />
results. Maybe one of the life issues<br />
we can be discussing as a Church is<br />
the morality of gun ownership. When<br />
does it become a near occasion of sin?<br />
When do we end the nightmare we<br />
are living in?
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