Utah Governor Spencer Cox deserves credit for courage and honesty in calling for “moral clarity” following the spine-chilling cheering of activist Charlie Kirk’s cold-blooded murder.

But from this side of the border, while moral clarity would be a welcome first step, what seems clear is that the United States of America is in spiritual, not just partisan political, crisis.

The appalling outpouring of snark, glee, and outright jubilation at the broad-daylight assassination on a university campus of a 31-year-old devoutly Christian husband and father of two children is far beyond left-right polarization. It is a cry of desperation signalling the need for a full-scale moral reawakening.

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Sadly, or more to the point alarmingly, the crisis has (as so much does) swept into Canada and carried with it good people who know better than to utter the horrid things that have come from their mouths and keyboards in the wake of Kirk’s killing.

As Register reporter Quinton Amundson writes this week, it has cast a pall over even an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Toronto, who unleashed social media vitriol that charity obliges us to assume she must seriously regret.

“Numerous voices were quick to praise the shooter, among them Ruth Marshall… whose vile comments saw her placed on leave by the university. In a post, she said ‘Shooting is honestly too good for so many of you fascist (expletive),’” Amundson reports.

Whatever the outcome of the U of T’s investigation of Marshall’s conduct, it represents a moment (re)awakening to a fundamental moral truth that bridges all our political divides. It is as immoral to praise the public execution of Kirk as it was to celebrate the cowardly killing of abortion doctors a generation ago.

As Amundson writes, it’s a parallel truth that Canada’s pro-lifers grasped in the immediate aftermath of the gunning down of the conservative activist last week. 

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Campaign Life’s Jeff Gunnarson put it well: “Charlie Kirk was a bright light who courageously challenged many of the darknesses of today by means of his strong faith in God, rational discourse and his belief that the values of life and liberty were worth fighting for — and even dying for. He lived what he believed to the very end.”

In other words, Charlie Kirk was, first, last and foremost, a human being, endowed with inherent human dignity the transcends intellectual, political, social and cultural identity. He lived what he believed but died in a pool of blood leaving family, loved ones, friends, admirers, followers and, yes, even his ideological opponents wondering how we have fallen into such immoral slumber.

It’s fitting that the pro-life movement would express that truth. It, after all, suffered through the dark period of the 1990s when everyone who professed the pro-life cause was obliged to denounce and disavow violence every time some lone lunatic with a rifle fired a bullet through the living room window of an abortion doctor or committed some similar heinous crime.

Of course, such violence is utterly antithetical to pro-life belief, but it was an agonizing process to get that message across when certain unstable individuals asserted that their profession of life entitled them to take it through criminal acts. 

 We have reached such a moment of agony again, and the answer to it is only partially – it might be said, superficially – political. The fundamental and active answer will prove to be a spiritual one. It’s essence is beautifully captured in the words of Cardinal Leo in our Verbatim feature where he addresses the pending Solemnization of St. Michael Archangel.

To turn our eyes and hearts toward St. Michael, the Cardinal writes, “can serve to shape civic imaginations, and caution leaders, citizens, and disciples alike that no ideology can save, and no economic plan can heal, the deepest wound of the human heart.” 

A turn to the Archangel “humbles power and purifies misplaced zeal,” he says. 

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More, Holy Mother Church herself, through sacraments such as confession, offers us “the same clarity of vision and recommitment, the very light of Christ given at baptism that St. Michael bears against the ‘Father of Lies.’”

It is not only overheated associate professors of religious studies at the University of Toronto who need to take these words to heart, in the wake of last week’s public murder, as a means of healing individual and collective hearts. As Charlie Kirk sleeps the sleep of the just, all of us, alone and together, must join the cause of spiritual awakening.