Riots and Assassinations: A Valley of Tears

I remember my Catholic-school class praying for President John Kennedy the day he was shot in 1963. The next year, there were riots in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, just 35-minutes (17 miles) from my home bordering that borough. More riots in Harlem followed. Major uprisings trailed in cities like Watts (Los Angeles) in 1965. Then, in the long, hot summer of 1967, Detroit, Newark, and more than 150 cities burst into flames, racial riots as they were called. The tumultuous decade continued with the back-to-back assassinations of 39-year-old Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, and 42-year-old Robert Kennedy, June 5, 1968. 

I recall this strange thought that this must be what is meant by high crimes. One assassination after another. No one is safe. Yet in my working-class, suburban home just blocks from a New York City bus stop in Queens, it did seem moderately safe. I had a mom and dad at home and a younger brother and older sister. We went to church every Sunday.

This is also the decade Robert Prevost was growing up. 

Why does Charlie Kirk bring all these memories to the fore?

Riots and assassinations. Still a Valley of Tears. 

President Donald Trump narrowly escaped an assassin’s bullet just last year. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s house was firebombed. Supreme Court Justices’ homes and lives were threatened. Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were assassinated last year. Brian Thompson, a CEO, was killed for leading a health care company; his assassin is considered a “folk hero” by some. 

Let us also not forget the violence against Catholic and pro-life Protestant churches, as well as other pro-life organizations, which increased with no Department of Justice justice—peaceful, pro-life sidewalk counselors physically bloodied like 73-year-old Mark Crosby.

Racial riots have escalated in this past decade. Violent anti-Semitic protests washed over college campuses, including the most elite in our nation.

Charlie didn’t wield the power of politics but the power of persuasion. His convictions came from faith not from politics or polls. His witness was mostly with the young on their turf.

His death is a martyrdom because he was killed for the very beliefs he and all Christians hold dearly about human life being precious, about marriage and family, about protecting one’s nation. 

One meme going around shows Charlie’s face, hands clasped as in prayer, and underneath: “If you have been crying today, felt a strange feeling or weird burden for Charlie where your heart aches for a man you have never met, it’s because you are part of the body of Christ.” 

The Body of Christ brings us together more than the conniving of the devil could ever break us apart. There is no contest. But we have to remember this. We need prayer. We need the Church.

Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more (Romans 5:20-21).

Riots and assassinations didn’t start during the 1960s.

This has been a Valley of Tears since Adam and Eve stepped out of the Garden. 

The young husband, father of two, died as a witness for the One whom he followed in this life. The One whose widowed mother crushed the head of the serpent through her peaceful acceptance of the Truth. The One whose death brings life out of all things. 

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, in God and the World: A Conversation with Peter Seewald (2002), puts this so well that it is worth reading slowly and repeatedly: 

Truth is worth pain and even conflict. I may not just accept a lie in order to have quiet. For it is not the first duty of a citizen, or of a Christian, to seek quiet; but rather it is that standing fast by what is noble and great, which is what Christ has given us and which can reach as far as suffering, as far as a struggle that ends in martyrdom—and exactly in that way of peace. 

Christ embodies the great and undiluted loving-kindness of God. He comes to help us bear the load. He does not do this simply by taking away from us the pain of being human; that remains heavy enough. But we are no longer carrying it on our own; he is carrying it with us. Christ has nothing to do with comfort, with banality, yet we find in him that inner calm that comes from knowing that we are being supported by an ultimate kindness and an ultimate security. We see that the entire structure of the message of Jesus is full of tension; it is an enormous challenge. Its nature is such that it always has to do with the Cross. Anyone who is not ready to get burned, who is not at least willing for it to happen, will not come near. But we can always be sure that it is there that we will meet true loving-kindness, which helps us, which accepts us—and which does not merely mean well toward us, but which will in fact ensure that all things go well with us.  

All things will go well with us as long as we never accept the lies of this age.

All things will go well as long as we stand fast to the Truth, who is Jesus Christ.

All things will go well as long as we embrace the Cross.

Embrace the Cross and forgive.

Forgive those who persecute us.

While the flames of riots and the bullets of assassinations continue, let us take a thought from St. Augustine’s City of God about “fire causing gold to glow brightly, and chaff to smoke. . . so the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked.”

Let us pray and speak, like Charlie, not to condemn those who act wickedly but to win them over so that they no longer detest God and blaspheme—that they may, instead, come to pray and praise Him.