Few words could be more radically necessary for the fallout from the inexplicable tragedy of Tumbler Ridge than Pope Leo’s message for Lent.

The Holy Father’s Lenten letter was issued five days before the mass killing of school children, the murder of a mother, the shooting of a step-brother, and the suicide of a transgendered person lost in the cruelties of overwhelming psychological distress. 

Yet the Pontiff’s emphasis on committing ourselves during Lent to deep listening and “disarming our language” by abstaining from “harsh words and rash judgement…from slander and speaking ill of those who are not present and cannot defend themselves” have a prophetic quality in light of the devastation that has afflicted the village in northeastern B.C.

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“Let us strive to measure our words and cultivate kindness and respect in our families, among our friends, at work, on social media, in political debates, in the media and in Christian communities. In this way, words of hatred will give way to words of hope and peace,” Leo urged.

He counselled us to see such comportment as “a very practical and frequently unappreciated form of abstinence.” To witness the abusive excesses of spleen-venting that flowed from Tumbler Ridge was to appreciate the infinite wisdom of his words.

Funerals for the dead – for children who went off to school in the morning and never came home, for Heaven’s sake – had not yet taken place before mainstream and social media alike were saturated with anger, animosity, detraction, slanders from all parts of the ideological spectrum.

Divisive, and in this case pointlessly distracting, debate erupted instantaneously about pronouns used to describe the suicidal killer. The never-ending argument over gun control horned in. Ludicrous assertions were recklessly tossed off that the tragedy proved a general tendency to violence in transgendered people. Media, always now chasing click bait, escalated those fringe claims into proof of the “hatred” suffered by the transgender community.

In other words, the killing of children, the murder of a mother by her own agonizingly troubled child, was cast aside as the central reality. It was replaced by the “harsh words and rash judgement” stemming from our social and political addiction to quelling the other side. 

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Is there a rational person who does not wholeheartedly appreciate how vitally we need to practice abstinence from that defect? More, what can we do as Catholics to show those outside the Faith the merits of cultivating such a Lenten habit?

Here, too, Pope Leo’s letter is an essential guide to answering those questions. He notes that the personal promises of Lent are always rooted in community with God. That in itself gives an “evangelical character” to fasting and abstinence that must “be lived in faith and humility…grounded in communion with the Lord.”

We don’t, as the hypocrites did in the Gospel, stand in the street and skip lunch just to show what superior beings we are. Rather, we put on the habit of guarding our tongues, hesitating with our keyboard fingers, restraining our podcast predilections, to cultivate listening and discernment.

“To foster this inner openness to listening, we must allow God to teach us how to listen as He does,” Pope Leo writes. “Our God is one who seeks to involve us. Even today He shares with us what is in His heart. Because of this, listening to the word in the liturgy teaches us to listen to the truth of reality.” 

The first and last reality of Tumbler Ridge is that innocent human beings, created in God’s image to live as part of a family, of a community, lost their lives by the action of another desperately troubled human being. That is what must be mourned because it is, above all things, what matters. 

By no means does that render irrelevant the fact of how the individual was dressed at the moment of the horrendous crime. It does not make unmentionable the truths of transgender medicating and surgery. Facts and truths are of course fit, indeed essential, for discussion, debate, even civil disagreement. Nothing in Pope Leo’s Lenten message suggests abstaining from them.

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But here is his vital caveat: “Let us ask for the grace of a Lent that leads us to greater attentiveness to God and to the least among us…for the strength that comes from the type of fasting that also extends to our use of language, so hurtful words may diminish and… our communities (become) places where the cry of those who suffer finds welcome.”