The first comment I heard after the attack on Catholic schoolchildren in Minneapolis last week was from the city’s mayor, Jacob Frey, who said: “Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers just now. These kids were literally praying.”

Initially, it didn’t strike me as particularly problematic. But later in the evening I was watching CNN and a group of “experts” were discussing the incident, and to a person they rejected the idea that this was an anti-Catholic attack.

The mayor also made sure to criticize anyone who mentioned that the killer was a trans woman.

That’s when it hit me. What the mayor and these panelists were doing is what people tend to do every time there is an attack against a disfavored minority group: pretend that the group isn’t a target.

You might say Catholics are hardly a minority, given our numerosity in the world.

There are many more Catholics in the U.S. than Jews or Muslims, although we are dwarfed by the collective Protestant denominations.

That said, we have always been a little set apart from the rest of the country, even though we have managed to blend in quite well over the centuries.

The days of the burning of Old St. Augustine Church in Philadelphia are distant history.

What’s that? You don’t remember St. Augustine?

It happened almost two hundred years ago when the country was still young, and a church built by and for Irish Catholic immigrants was set on fire by nativist bigots.

The fire department refused to send a company to put out the flames, and the beautiful church burned tothe ground. It was rebuilt, but the memory of that anti-Catholic hatred is preserved in a historical marker, and in our hearts.

Yes, that happened a long time ago. And of course, those Ku Klux Klan cross burnings in front of other churches in the South were almost a century ago, as was the time my father was almost attacked at a Klan roadblock in 1967.

But we, too, were terrorized by the men in the white sheets.

And true, we managed to elect two Catholic presidents, but the first one had to promise that he wouldn’t be “too Catholic” for the Protestants to stomach, and the second one basically forgot that he was a Catholic and embraced abortion, trans ideology and a whole host of other positions that violate the fundamental principles of the faith.

So in order to get along, you see, we blend. But there are some things on which we cannot simply “blend.”

Our Mass is a very specific, very obvious manifestation of our faith. It is a sacred ritual that takes place in identifiable, beautiful buildings.

Unlike Catholics in other countries who are forced to hide their services underground, we have the great privilege of celebrating in public.

But that is a double-edged sword, because being public makes you a target for the deranged and the unholy.

And that is exactly what the murderer of Catholic children was: deranged and unholy.

The mere fact that the killer, who was trans, was mentally unhinged does not mean that he did not also harbor hatred for Catholics.

You do not take high-powered firearms, aim them at stained glass windows, and target little children in their neatly ironed school uniforms as they are in the middle of praying if you do not hate Catholics.

The attempts of some to try and make this a complicated issue by seeking motives that are not there upsets me, a woman who has very loudly and clearly said that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, and that some of these attacks on immigrants are not rooted in a desire for “order” but are rather the signs of deep-seated bigotry.

I’m able to cut through the hype and get to the truth of the matter, so it angers me when others reject it.

I am also disgusted with the attempts to empathize with the killer, trying to understand his mental illness and his pain, in the moments after an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old were gunned down in their pews.

I am repelled by the thought that we have any sympathy for him or for his mother, in the hours after other children threw themselves over the bodies of their classmates to shield them from the bullets.

This was a hate crime, and even if the rest of the world refuses to see it that way, we have an obligation to shout it to the world: “We are Catholic, and we will not let you erase us.”

That is my thought, and my prayer.

Copyright 2025 Christine Flowers