Nick Cardilino thought he understood solidarity and the human
family. Then he woke up to the news Aug. 4 of the mass shooting at a bar
in Dayton’s Oregon District and remembered that his son had been a few
blocks away, at a baseball game, the night before.
“As you can
imagine, I panicked,” said Cardilino, who serves as associate director
of campus ministry and director of the Center for Social Concern at the
Marianist-run University of Dayton. He texted his son right away and
thought, “If he doesn’t reply to me in five minutes, I’m going to call
him and wake him up.”
His son texted right back, to Cardilino’s
great relief, but an hour later, he found himself sobbing. He was now in
solidarity with his brothers and sisters in a litany of U.S.
communities impacted by mass shootings, including El Paso, Texas, not 24
hours earlier.
“I wish I had gone there first,” he said of how he
didn’t immediately think of other communities, but thought first of his
own kids, then his students and his community. “I found myself kind of
moving out from my own personal situation,” he told National Catholic
Reporter.
Cardilino said the experience put him in touch with how desensitized he’s become to the endless news of mass shootings.
“The
longer it goes on, the more I’ve become desensitized, and so I was kind
of shocked in some ways at how personal this became, because it
happened in my backyard,” he said. The physical distance of other
affected communities, he noted, “enables us to be not only physically
distant but also somehow psychologically distant. And when it keeps
happening over and over again, it makes us even more distant.”
Sara
Seligmann, regional director for the Dayton-based Catholic Social
Action Office of the Cincinnati Archdiocese, said people have told her
they’re surprised by how numb they feel, again largely due to the
frequent nature of mass shootings. She observed that other bad news in
Dayton in recent months, such as a Ku Klux Klan rally and devastating
tornadoes, have left the city “feeling beaten down.”
“You need to
comfort the community,” Seligmann said, “but recognize this is no longer
a freak thing. This keeps happening, and we need to figure out how to
make it stop happening and treat it like the life issue that it is,
because people keep getting killed.”
Cardilino agreed about the
need for action and said that while watching former Ohio Gov. John
Kasich on television, he found his own anger reflected in Kasich’s
words, particularly when he said nobody talks about policy fixes in the
aftermath of a shooting, letting the issue fade. He is convinced things
are “not going to change unless people are marching in the streets.”
Cardilino
said he hopes his students take up the push for commonsense gun laws —
including greater care and funding for people with mental illnesses —
when they return for the semester, provided that the issue hasn’t faded
when school starts again.
“Our students are constantly surprising me with their compassion and with their ingenuity and creating new things,” he said.
Seligmann of the Cincinnati Archdiocese sees political action as a natural and necessary part of a Catholic response to tragedy.
“We
have got to stop this. We have got to vote for people to stop this, and
we have got to lobby people,” she said. “You can’t be authentically
pastoral if you’re not trying to stop the problem.”