After Pope Leo’s Plea, Parents of Shot Annunciation Student Confront JD Vance on Guns

Parents of a wounded child urge fellow Catholic Vance to back life-saving gun measures.

In Minneapolis, the parents of a wounded Annunciation student looked the nation’s Catholic conscience in the eye and asked us to do more than pray.

After meeting Vice President J.D. Vance, Leah and Harry Kaiser publicly urged him — and all of us — to “move your feet,” invoking the Prayer of St. Francis and asking for concrete steps to prevent the next massacre.

Their daughter, Lydia, is still recovering.

Their appeal was not partisan theater; it was Catholic witness.

Here’s an excerpt of their letter:

On just this one issue of gun violence, will you please promise me as a father and a Catholic that you will earnestly support the study of what is wrong with our culture that we are the country that has the worst mass shooter problem?

We were at Mass, singing about being called to act with justice, love, service and humility. Will you please promise to pursue, despite powerful lobbies, some common sense, bipartisan legislation as a starting point, so we can come out of our corners and find the values that we share so that this time some progress is made?

Thoughts and prayers haven't been enough. Many policies have been dismissed without even being studied or tried. It's so complicated. I don't claim to have the answers, but we have to commit to looking. Then we can feel good about defending life.

Their call lands squarely within what Pope Leo XIV and the U.S. bishops have said in the days since the attack.

From St. Peter’s Square, Leo condemned the “pandemic” of gun violence and prayed for the Minneapolis victims — then widened the lens to insist that protecting children requires more than slogans.

American bishops, for their part, have long backed practical steps — universal background checks, limits on high-capacity magazines, and a renewed ban on assault weapons.

Those positions aren’t new; they’re consistent Catholic social teaching applied to a uniquely American scourge. When moms and dads beg leaders to act, they’re echoing the conference’s own policy priorities.

The Kaisers’ words to Vance were strikingly un-hostile and unmistakably direct: one law, one executive order, one policy — “call it the Annunciation Bill” — so we can tell our children we tried.

That’s the moral grammar of Catholicism in public life: apply mercy and justice to the real, not the hypothetical.

It also comes as Vance has managed, in just eight months as vice president, to draw the ire of two popes.

In February, Pope Francis rebuked the administration’s deportation program and pushed back — without naming him — on Vance’s theological justifications for harsh immigration policy.

And before his election, Pope Leo publicly amplified criticism of Vance’s “order of love” claims.

Different men, same bottom line: Catholic faith can’t be conscripted to excuse indifference to the vulnerable.

“Thoughts and prayers” are right and necessary. They’re just not enough.

If the Church’s teaching means anything in America right now, it means standing with the Kaisers — and pressing our leaders, whatever their party, to enact life-preserving limits on weapons that too often turn sanctuaries into morgues. The next act of mercy is policy.

Let’s move our feet.

Letters from Leo exists for moments like this—when Catholic parents stand in a ruined sanctuary and ask the Church and the country to move our feet.

Our work is to carry that witness after the sirens fade: to report clearly, press for concrete steps on gun safety, track what leaders actually do, and follow how Pope Leo XIV and the U.S. bishops lead a Church that defends children before anyone’s talking points.

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I’ll see you on the road.