COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (CNS) — A priest who celebrates Mass every Friday morning on a sidewalk near the Planned Parenthood facility targeted by a lone gunman Nov. 27 said the shooter’s actions were the antithesis of the pro-life cause.

“We want the conversion of Planned Parenthood, not their destruction,” said Fr. Bill Carmody, the longtime Respect Life director for the Diocese of Colorado Springs. “The pro-life movement has no place for violence.”

The attack on the facility in northwest Colorado Springs left three people dead, including a police officer, and nine others wounded. Planned Parenthood reported that none of its employees or patients was among those killed or seriously wounded in the Black Friday attack.

The facility sits near a busy shopping center that includes a grocery store, a bank and several other businesses. After the attack broke out around 11:30 a.m., local time, patrons and employees of the businesses “sheltered in place” for nearly six hours while police tried to contain the alleged shooter, Robert Lewis Dear, 57. The standoff ended with Dear’s arrest at 4:52 p.m., local time.

Among those killed was Garrett Swasey, a police officer at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and father of two. Swasey was also an elder at Hope Chapel, a pro-life evangelical community in Colorado Springs.

The facility is the frequent site of prayer vigils and other activities, in addition to the pro-life Masses, leading several national media outlets to speculate that Dear was a member of the pro-life movement.

However, Fr. Carmody said he did not recall ever having seen or spoken to Dear. On the day of the shootings, he had celebrated his usual weekly Mass, but he said that he and others in attendance departed shortly afterward because of the snowstorm hitting the region.

“We were long gone” before the attack started, Fr. Carmody told The Colorado Catholic Herald, the diocesan newspaper of Colorado Springs.

Others who regularly pray outside the facility also said they did not recall seeing Dear at any pro-life events.

Law enforcement officials would not discuss a motive for the shootings because their investigation was still underway. Dear was scheduled to appear in court Nov. 30.

According to The Gazette daily newspaper, Dear previously lived in South Carolina and North Carolina and had arrest records in both states. Voting records show that Dear maintains a residence in Hartsel, a small town about 120 miles west of Colorado Springs, The Gazette reported.

“Yesterday, our community experienced an act of pure evil at the local Planned Parenthood clinic,” Bishop Michael J. Sheridan of Colorado Springs said in a statement. “As Pope Francis recently reminded us, ‘The path of violence and hate can never solve the problems of humanity.’”

The National Right to Life Committee’s president, Carol Tobias, said her organization “unequivocally condemns unlawful activities and acts of violence regardless of motivation. The pro-life movement works to protect the right to life and increase respect for human life. The unlawful use of violence is directly contrary to that goal.”

Bryan Kemper, youth outreach director for Priests for Life and founder of Stand True, said in a Nov. 27 statement that “although we do not know the details behind the gun violence at Planned Parenthood in Colorado, it is important to say that we are against all violence against our fellow human persons.”

“From the abortionist, the workers, the patients, the children scheduled to die or anyone at that Planned Parenthood, all of their lives are precious and worth saving,” he said. “All of them are loved by God and deserve our prayers. I am sickened by the violence there today just as I am sickened by the violence there every day.”

Judie Brown, president of American Life League, said that “despite aggressive attempts of some news media to tie this brutal and egregious act to pro-life causes, there is no evidence supporting their case — and these attempts are simply irresponsible.”

“We abhor and condemn all acts of terrorism, all acts of savagery against the innocent — born and preborn — and we call upon our fellow Americans to do likewise,” she said in a Nov. 30 statement.

Brown urged people to “to look beneath the surface of escalating violence in this nation” to see that “the violent act” of surgical abortion is at the root of it, which “the media ignores.”

— By Veronica Ambuul, Catholic News Service. Ambuul is editor of The Colorado Catholic Herald, newspaper of the Diocese of Colorado Springs.

[quote_box_center]

RELATED

Blessed are the peacemakers via 40 Days for Life

[/quote_box_center]

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (CNS) — Representatives of U.S. religious and human rights organizations called for the Salvadoran government to reopen the investigation of the 1980 killing of three U.S. nuns and a lay missionary.

It is important to “ask the Salvadoran government and prosecutors to open this case, so that the masterminds of this crime do not walk free, with impunity,” said Claire White, who came on behalf of her father, former Ambassador Robert White, who died in January.

White told Catholic News Service the U.S. government should pressure the Salvadoran authorities to do a proper investigation and not let the intellectual authors go unpunished.

On Dec. 2, 1980, Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clark and Ita Ford, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel and lay missionary Jean Donovan were abducted, raped and murdered by members of the National Guard, when the North Americans traveled by car from the airport.

Civil war in El Salvador had erupted earlier that year. The churchwomen were in El Salvador to work with refugees of that conflict, but were regarded as leftist by the government.

[quote_box_center]

RELATED: In El Salvador, families say U.S. churchwomen’s work lives on

A reflection from the 30th anniversary

[/quote_box_center]

The U.N. Truth Commission, established in 1992 to investigate cases of political violence during the civil war, concluded that then-Col. Eugenio Vides Casanova, director of the National Guard, knew that a unit from his command had carried out the assassinations and facilitated the concealment of the facts, which hampered the investigation. In 1984, four guardsmen were found guilty of the killings and convicted to 30 years in prison, but those who planned the murders and gave the orders have never been brought to justice, said some of the more than 100 North Americans who traveled to El Salvador to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the murders.

“There may be justice if we North American women go back and do what we need to do in terms of strategizing to make that happen,” Ursuline Sister Janet Marie Peterworth of Louisville, Kentucky, told CNS during a Nov. 30 memorial service held in San Salvador’s Parque Cuscatlan.

She recalled the last letters she received from Donovan from El Salvador and added, “It’s cold and rainy in December in the States, and I can’t stop thinking of Jean Donovan and what she said in one of her last correspondence: ‘I would come home, but where else can you find roses in December?'”

“She did not come home, she decided to stay,” she added, with tears rolling down her cheek.

Sr. Peterworth said Donovan used to say that the Salvadoran military would not kill “an American blond.”

“But they did,” Sr. Peterworth added.

Isabel Hernandez, El Salvador office director of the SHARE Foundation, said: “We don’t want revenge, because we are Christians, but we do want justice, the truth, we want to know who gave the order.” She said the 1992 Salvadoran amnesty law must be repealed because it protects those responsible for the murders of the churchwomen and many other victims.

In 2002, Vides Casanova and former Defense Minister Jose Guillermo Garcia, who were both granted residence in the United States, were found responsible by a Florida jury in a federal civil case for the torture of three Salvadorans. In April 2015, Vides Casanova was deported to El Salvador for participating and assisting the torture and assassination of thousands of victims, including the four churchwomen.

The four guardsmen were convicted because they were not eligible for amnesty, as their case was regarded as nonpolitical.

During the current visit, U.S. delegates visited the tomb of Archbishop Oscar Romero, assassinated in March 1980. They also went to Central American University, where six Jesuit priests and two women were killed in November 1989 by a military unit.

On Dec. 2, they were to travel to Santiago Nonualco, a small town in La Paz department, to attend a memorial service at the very spot where the three nuns and the lay missionary were shot dead.

— By Edgardo Ayala, Catholic News Service.

BANGUI, Central African Republic (CNS) — Put down the weapons of war and work for justice, Pope Francis urged the people of the Central African Republic.

“Even when the powers of hell are unleashed, Christians must rise to the summons, their heads held high, and be ready to brave blows in this battle over which God will have the last word. And that word will be love and peace,” the pope said in an evening homily Nov. 29 at Bangui’s cathedral.

A civil war that began in 2013 and ongoing outbursts of violence, including between mainly Muslim and mainly Christian militias, have sown terror in the Central African Republic, which already was on most lists of the five poorest countries in Africa. A fifth of the country’s population has fled abroad or is living in camps for displaced people.

Explaining to people outside the Bangui cathedral that their city was, for the day, “the spiritual capital of the world,” Pope Francis prayed for the mercy and grace of peace as he used both hands and his body weight to push open the Holy Door of the cathedral. The main opening of the Year of Mercy will be Dec. 8 at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

[quote_box_right]

RELATED

What is a holy door?

God never shuts the door, Church always must be open too, pope says

[/quote_box_right]

Marking the first Sunday of Advent at the Mass with priests, religious, catechists and youths, Pope Francis urged the Catholic community to be committed to helping the country make a new start.

Christians, and especially those with a vocation to priesthood or religious life, are called to love their enemies, “which protects us from the temptation to seek revenge and from the spiral of endless retaliation,” the pope said in his homily.

Anyone who has a role of evangelizer, teacher or preacher in the Christian community, he said, must be “first and foremost practitioners of forgiveness, specialists in reconciliation, experts in mercy.”

As Catholics observe the Advent time of waiting to celebrate Christ’s coming, he said, they should keep reminding themselves that God is a God of justice and of love — two things the people of Central African Republic need desperately.

“God is stronger than all else,” the pope said. “This conviction gives the believer serenity, courage and the strength to persevere in good amid the greatest hardships.”

“To all those who make unjust use of the weapons of this world, I make this appeal: Lay down these instruments of death! Arm yourselves instead with righteousness, with love and mercy, the authentic guarantors of peace,” the pope said.

Pope Francis arrived at the cathedral after a meeting with representatives of the Central African Republic’s evangelical and Protestant communities.

Catholic Archbishop Dieudonne Nzapalainga of Bangui, president of the Central African Republic bishops’ conference, Rev. Nicolas Guerekoyame-Gbangou, president of the Evangelical Alliance of the Central African Republic, and Imam Oumar Kobine Layama, president of the Islamic Community of Central African Republic, have been working together to persuade their people to end the vendettas and embrace peace and reconciliation.

Rev. Guerekoyame-Gbangou was among those welcoming Pope Francis Nov. 29 to a special meeting with representatives of the country’s evangelical and Protestant communities.

The pope publicly expressed “closeness and solidarity to Pastor Nicolas, whose home was recently ransacked and set on fire, as was the meeting-place of his community. In these difficult circumstances, the Lord keeps asking us to demonstrate to everyone his tenderness, compassion and mercy.”

For too long, too many Central Africans have been suffering, the pope said.

“There are also those who have been scarred in soul or body by hatred and violence, those whom war has deprived of everything: work, home and loved ones,” the pope said. When God looks upon the suffering, he does not see members of one denomination or another.

“I have often called this the ecumenism of blood,” he said. “All our communities suffer indiscriminately as a result of injustice and the blind hatred unleashed by the devil.”

Pope Francis urged the country’s Christians to continue on the path of ecumenism, cooperation and common prayer.

“The lack of unity among Christians is a scandal,” he said, “above all because it is contrary to God’s will.”

But it is also a scandal in a world torn apart by hatred and violence, a world yearning for a word of peace and unity, he said.

— By Cindy Wooden, Catholic News Service.