There is little doubt pro-lifers across North America braced for an onslaught of invective after news broke of “politically motivated” murders in Minnesota wrought by an apparent anti-abortion fanatic.

 Fortunately, at this writing, the anticipated accusations of the killer standing in for pro-lifers at large have been muted. Our hope is the virtual silence signals recognition that every compos mentis pro-lifer finds it repulsive to advocate violence, never mind take another life. 

However vehement the discord over the legality versus lethality of abortion, both sides share common ground that murder as a political weapon is most foul. For us as Catholics, of course, it is a sin that cries out to Heaven.

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We’re not perversely proposing some kind of kumbaya moment. How could anyone do so with the image still so vivid of Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband being fatally shot in their own home at 3:30 a.m. by a killer posing as a policeman. Earlier, the gunman, alleged to be Vance Luther Boelter, had shot two other political figures in the state. A list of 45 other intended victims has been recovered.

At the same time, it’s not hopelessly naïve to hope that the sheer lunatic bloody mindedness of the killings and woundings, the grotesque invasion of security and life, will provide a clearing pause in the usual automatic finger pointing to allow for genuine soul searching about the horrific political climate all of us sustain.

In a column following the Minnesota murders – they occurred against the backdrop of street violence over the Trump administration’s brutalist immigration policies –  the Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker noted all on the political spectrum are culpable.

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“The truth is that political violence is a reality of modern American life, and both sides use (it in) their ever more apocalyptic campaigns to win at all costs,” Baker wrote. “They embrace it directly when it suits them. They also embrace it in an indirect but even more potent way: as a convenient tool for blaming the other side…for demonstrating their opponents’ villainy and their own virtue.”

Let us, as Canadians, not wriggle out of that critique by looking down our snoots at the supposed American yobs. Indeed, we add a particularly pernicious varnish to it with our faux national politeness, which no one who paid scant attention to the recent federal election can seriously pretend exists. 

We might not (yet!) have hyper armed maniacs who kick in doors to execute perceived political enemies. Yet the unapologetic dehumanizing language of the spring election demonstrated how it is now the lingua franca of our public square.

Baker wisely contends the way back from the linguistic violence that perpetrates the psychological violence that begets physical violence is not – repeat not – the “familiar post-atrocity routine” of manufactured outrage, tearful empathy and condemnations of extremism. It is, rather, for all of us as public actors to recognize that if we don’t “rhetorically disarm…the fire that’s coming will consume us all.”

If that sounds like an eight-word description of Hell, well, let us govern ourselves accordingly. And, accordingly, the Register again points our readers to the wisdom of Cardinal Leo’s meditation for June on the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In his message, Cardinal Leo urges Catholics to take to heart the venerable symbols of our faith, to uphold them against those who would lead us astray from that faith. He calls us, above all, to embrace such symbols neither as abstractions of exclusion nor of relativism but as substances of the reality of Christ’s love.

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“Symbols are important as they convey meanings in what they represent, and they point beyond their own reality to something else, someone else. Our very own Catholic symbols help us to deepen our faith and shape our prayer life, not to mention the lives we lead and the choices we make. They are like bridges joining together the material and spiritual worlds and reveal to us the Gospel truths,” Leo writes.

The language of “bridges joining” is especially just and good, as we say, for it gently guides us away from perceiving the symbols of our faith as justification for division, much less as rhetorical cudgels to wield against the neighbours we are commanded to love and with whom we happen to disagree.  We are not called to pursue the victories that can foster the exultation of violence in its varied forms. Christ has already won us Victory. Let us, Leo says, deepen the truth of that reality.