The Tablet: Minneapolis school leaders pledge to 'rebuild together' after shooting

Annunciation Catholic School Principal Matthew DeBoer and parish priest Fr Dennis Zehren described an ‘impossible situation’ after the deaths of two schoolchildren.

The Minneapolis Catholic school where two children were killed in a mass shooting on Wednesday will remain closed as the community responds to the incident.

The shooting took place during the all-school Mass at Annunciation Church in Minneapolis on 27 August. The gunman, identified as 23-year-old Robin Westman, born Robert Westman, shot through the church’s stained-glass windows with a rifle, killing the two children and injuring nearly 20 children and adults before taking his own life.

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In a social media post on Wednesday evening, Annunciation Catholic School Principal Matthew DeBoer and parish priest Fr Dennis Zehren described the crisis as an “impossible situation”.

“No words can capture what we have gone through, what we are going through, and what we will go through in the coming days and weeks,” they wrote. “But we will navigate this – together.”

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In 2023 Minnesota’s bishops appealed to state lawmakers to provide security funding for local non-public schools, after deadly school shootings at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.

The bishops had argued that pupils at Catholic and other non-public schools should receive the same level of protection as their public-school peers, though bills to that effect stalled in the state legislature.

Read the full article from The Tablet.