“Prayer Doesn’t Absolve Us”: Minneapolis Archbishop Calls for Action to Stop Gun Violence

fter the Annunciation school shooting, Minneapolis’s archbishop says “thoughts and prayers” must become laws and mental-health care.

Minneapolis-St. Paul Archbishop Bernard Hebda didn’t mince words: prayer is critical, but it’s not a hall pass for political inaction.

In the aftermath of Wednesday’s massacre at his archdiocese’s Annunciation Catholic School, Hebda insisted that prayer “doesn’t absolve us” from taking steps to prevent the next one, urging his community to confront both the prevalence of gun violence and the mental-health crisis head-on.

That moral clarity is increasingly the Catholic mainstream in the United States.

Chicago’s Cardinal Blase Cupich, Pope Leo’s top ally in his hometown, said: “We must cry out for action to prevent even one more such tragedy.”

That’s not a partisan line; it’s a statement of Christian realism about the world as it is — and the duty to change it.

Zoom out, and the American bishops have been laying down the policy markers for years.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has called for universal background checks, a federal gun-trafficking statute, extreme-risk protection orders, limits on high-capacity magazines, raising the purchase age, and banning assault weapons. T

They’ve paired this with calls to strengthen mental-health care, family supports, and community safety — because a culture of life requires both prevention and accompaniment.

The bishops’ biggest ally in this effort is their American compatriot in Rome, Pope Leo XIV.

After the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, the future Pope Leo retweeted this from Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT): “Your cowardice to act cannot be whitewashed by thoughts and prayers. None of this ends unless we do something to stop it.”

So let’s be clear. “Normal” is not an option. Two kids were murdered at a school Mass.

If that doesn’t reorder our priorities — at the Capitol, in statehouses, and at city councils — nothing will.

People of faith should continue to do what we do best: honoring the dead, consoling the hurting, and providing for the future of the survivors.

But we must also show up with votes, testimony, and bills that pass.

That means enacting common-sense gun safety measures already endorsed by the bishops and investing in accessible, stigma-free mental-health services. Anything less is performative grief.

Pray without ceasing. Then change the laws. That’s the Catholic answer to a uniquely American sin.

Hebda is right: prayer is our first line of attack — now let’s make sure it’s not our last.

Letters from Leo exists to follow the Church’s public witness when it collides with the most urgent questions of our civic life.

Today, that means listening to Archbishop Hebda and other U.S. bishops who grieve with families after yet another school shooting — and who also insist that prayer must lead to laws, mental-health care, and real change.

Our work here is to keep that witness in view after the cameras leave: to tell the story clearly, to press attention on the people and policies that matter, and to track the debate until it yields results that protect children’s lives.

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