In the wake of the fires and recent mass shooting in California, some people are critical of offering prayers in response to tragedy. Trent examines their arguments and shows why it’s not just good but necessary to pray in response to this suffering.
Transcript:
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Hey there, thanks for stopping by the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic apologist and Speaker Trent Horn and today I want to express gratitude for those who first have been supporting the podcast. Thank you so much. If you’re not supporting it, check it out on TrentHornPodcast.com. We got some bonus features coming up this week and your support is very helpful to keep the podcast going for as little as $5 a month.
I’m also grateful for those who have been praying for our ministry and even on the radio show yesterday, a caller who is an atheist, but he expressed concern about the wildfires that were happening here in California. I know other people have expressed concern to me as well. Thankfully down where we are in San Diego, things are really just fine. The only thing that I have noticed is that the sunset–I mean the wildfires are a tragedy. I’m going to get to that here in a moment, telling you what’s been happening–but I still admit that the sunsets are now actually really beautiful because the smoke has kind of drifted over the ocean and there’s like this radiant Crayola-red sunset that we had. The sun literally just turns into a red ball and goes over down into the ocean.
So that’s one little beautiful thing to see amidst a lot of tragedy and destruction that has been happening here in California, both from natural disasters and those that are caused by man. And that is what I wanted to talk about today on the podcast, is our response to that and something that’s been going on in recent years, which is a criticism of a common response that both believers and even non-believers make in the face of these tragedies, which is the offering of prayers, or now more of the secular version, offering thoughts and prayers.
So is that okay? Is it not okay? Is it prayer shaming? How should we respond to this? That’s what I’m going to talk about today. So first, let me just give you some insight on what’s happening here. First with the wildfires. This is published at NBC News yesterday. It says, “13 bodies had been found in northern California in the wake of the deadly Camp Fire, bringing the death toll in the blaze to 42, authorities said. The grim discovery makes a wildfire the deadliest in the state’s history, Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea told reporters, replacing the record held by a Los Angeles bushfire in 1933 that killed 29. The campfires burned through 117,000 acres and is 30% contained, said California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection or CAL FIRE on a 7:00 PM Monday update.”
So when we see these kinds of tragedies, at first some people will just express just sympathy and empathy. Others, and I really appreciate the atheist who called the show yesterday, said, “Hey, there is something on Airbnb.com where you can offer a place to stay for people who have been displaced by these wildfires.” So I think that when we can do practical things, we should do them. But in some cases when we see disasters like this, all we can do, well really the most important things we can do is pray for God to intervene and control weather, humidity, drought conditions, wind speeds to help bring this to an end. So some people though are very reticent to want to endorse that type of an option when these things come up, especially when it comes not so much to natural disasters but to man-made ones.
So, you know, we’ve got the wildfires going on here in the state right now, but we also came off the heels of a deadly mass shooting at a bar in Thousand Oaks, California. It’s in southern California, not that far from down where we are here in San Diego. So what’s interesting about this story is the response of one of the mothers of the victims, and this is just tragic to hear that one of the victims, his name is Telemachus Orfanos, he was actually at the Las Vegas Country Festival music shooting. You remember that guy went up into Mandalay Bay, had just a ton of weapons, broke out the windows and you know he killed a lot of people. One of the deadliest mass shootings in US history and he was there at that music festival and survived.
And now tragically he was at this bar in Thousand Oaks and the bystanders and witnesses claim that Telemachus–at first his friend thought he was okay cause there were reports that he was outside safe with other people after the shooter had gone in. But other eyewitnesses have come forward to say that he went back inside to help people, tried to pull people up and do a crawl space, or he got on top of someone’s body to shield them, and he perished in that shooting. And if he did go back inside to help others in the face of that, then he died a hero. But of course his friends and family are, as you would expect and rightfully so, in a tremendous amount of grief to see this young man struck down in the prime of his life with many other people. And him especially to have survived another mass shooting.
And then here to be struck down at another shooting. A lot of people just cry out in frustration, “Enough is enough,” and I think that’s where his mother Susan Orfanos is at right now. This is an article, published at abc13.com, says: “The mother of one of the victims killed in the shooting that erupted at a Thousand Oaks bar, said she was done receiving thoughts and prayers and pushed for better gun control. Susan Orfanos also said her son Telemachus Orfanos survived the Las Vegas mass shooting last year.” She says in the interview, “My son was in Las Vegas with a lot of his and he came home. He didn’t come home last night. And I don’t want prayers. I don’t want thoughts. I want gun control and I hope to God nobody sends me any more prayers. I want gun control, no more guns.” And then the article goes on to say: “Orfanos is one of 12 people killed while attending a college night event at Borderline Bar and Grill Wednesday night.”
I understand that feeling of frustration. Of just wishing that these weapons that can kill so many people just didn’t exist and you could just snap your fingers and make guns go away. There was actually an attack in I think it was in Melbourne, Australia man with a knife was attacking people in a park and I think he only managed to injure one person because while knives can be dangerous, there was somebody, he had a shopping cart–I think in Australia they call it a “shopping trolley–” and he went and blocked the guy because the knife is a dangerous weapon but only at close range. Now knives, don’t kid yourself, a knife is dangerous if someone gets up to you, they don’t jam and they don’t run out of ammunition and you can kill someone very quickly with a knife. But guns, because they’re projectile weapons, they are able to inflict just much more damage at a longer range.
And so I sympathize where she’s coming from. And so when we talk about these issues, I do think we have to put ourselves in the shoes of people who are really suffering right now. And that suffering and grief can be overwhelming and we have to take that into account and we shouldn’t let it blind us into trying to think of, “Well, what is the most rational way to approach these problems?” But I don’t want to blame people who are the victim … There are many people who are victims of gun violence in this country or their loved ones are victims of gun violence and then they come out later as very vocal proponents of gun control and can be involved in political debates, other things like that. And then that gets us into the political fray that we’re at today where there can be harsh words thrown back and forth in the debate.
And I think we’ve got to understand where people’s hearts are at, where they’re coming from, when this happens. However, in order to move the discussion forward, especially not just on gun control but on the larger issue of what Susan Orfanos and others talk about, this whole idea about thoughts and prayers, like, “I’m done with thoughts and prayers. I don’t want to hear this anymore. I want action.” We don’t want to reinforce the idea that God doesn’t exist or that God doesn’t care about us. That’s why it’s hard for me. I don’t like … I understand why people do it in newspapers and media conjoining thoughts and prayers because there’s many people who don’t believe in God but they want to communicate a sense of empathy and sympathy for other people. “I feel badly for what is happening for you right now.”
And so when we say a lot of times if a friend is suffering, you say, “I was thinking of you lately.” To show that we care. We may not be able to solve their problem, but we just want them to know that someone cares and they have not been forgotten.
Now the thoughts and prayers meme, you’ll find this online, it really originated in the early 2010s after some mass shooting events. I think it gained a lot of popularity after the shootings in Paris in 2015 because people would put on their social media profiles images saying, “Pray for Paris.” And that had lot of people come forward and say, “Well,” like the atheist trope, “nothing fails like prayer.”
In fact, I think there was a online programmer, Mike Lackner, in 2016 he created a satirical video game called “Thoughts & Prayers: The Game,” where you try to prevent a mass shooting by clicking a “Pray” button or a “Think” button, and if you click “Ban assault weapons,” the game yells at you and says you did the wrong thing. Now our faith has a principle behind it. You look in the letter of James, St James tells us that “What good is it if you say to someone who is cold or who is hungry, go be warm, be well fed, but you do nothing to provide for his needs?” Merely saying you want to help someone but not doing anything, that doesn’t help anybody. That’s why the church believes and practices the corporal works of mercy; to feed the hungry, help the poor, visit the imprisoned, help and heal the sick.
But on the other hand, we as human beings, we’re limited in what we can do. And sometimes we just have to face the fact that in the world we live in, bad things happen and we can’t prevent them from happening. All we can do is ask the all-powerful, all-loving God we believe in to help mitigate the suffering that we experience in this life and know, through his divine providence, through his all powerful majesty, he is ordering these things to the good for those who believe in him, so that ultimately the scales of injustice and suffering will be balanced in the next life.
So we say “I’m sending thoughts and prayers of victims of this shooting. I’m thinking of you,” to express sympathy, but as Christians, when people are critical of thoughts and prayers like, “Well, why are you praying for this? That doesn’t do anything.” You can always say to them, “Look, what prayers do you think I am specifically saying? What do you think that I am praying about?” I think a lot of people, especially those in the secular world, think that we as believers are simply praying that this never happens again. But that is not, I think, our first intention. When you hear about a disaster and you turn to prayer, it’s not, “Lord, please do not let something like this happen again.” I think that’s one of the prayers we will say, but it’s not the immediate thing.
The very first thing in a disaster like this, we pray for the souls of the deceased. And that is something Christians can do that has an impact. That in the secular world there’s a thought that these people who have died, they’re simply gone. They’re now out of existence, and that is a tragedy. Death itself is a tragedy. We were not made for death. Death entered the world for human beings. Human death entered the world because of sin. It was not God’s original plan for us. So it is something bad, but it’s not the end. It’s not the end. It’s something that can be turned to good when we understand that it is the next step to eternal life and our afterlife.
So that is why we can do good for those who have died, they still exist. We pray for the repose of their souls and that is a way that if we are burdened, if we are overwhelmingly burdened by the death of a loved one, there is such comfort in knowing that we did not run out of time when it came to caring for them and helping them. We did not run out of time. And I’ve experienced this and maybe you’ve experienced this, the sudden death of a loved one. You felt there are many things that were left unsaid, left undone, so much more you wish you could have done. You can still do those things by praying for that person, by going and offering a mass for that person, the mass, the most powerful prayer in the Church, to offer on behalf of their soul.
We can do that, and that is something that when it comes to people saying, “Well, you should do something practical;” who can help the deceased? We can’t on our own. We can only do that by combining our efforts with God and his mercy to pray for his mercy on those who have died. So that’s the first thing that, obviously, praying in the face of a disaster is a normal thing to do if it is the case that those who have died still exist and they have a fate in the next life that we can pray for. We can pray for their purification. We can pray for their salvation. We pray hoping for God to have mercy on their souls, to welcome him into his kingdom.
And then we have … people might say it’s useless, but that takes us back to the other debate: “Well, does God exist? You did Jesus rise from the dead? Can we trust Jesus’ promises that he’ll give us eternal life?” So if those are true, I’m sorry, my atheist friend, I’m still going to offer prayers in the face of these disasters because your worldly solutions are not going to be helpful for those who are deceased. So that’s the first group. I think that when we pray in a disaster we say, “Look, I’m praying for those who have died. Nothing we do in this life can help them right now unless we can join it to God’s grace.”
But the second group that we pray for in the face of these disasters, I believe, are the survivors. People like Susan Orfanos, people who have lost loved ones whether it’s a wildfire or whether it’s a shooting. Whether it’s something like that, we pray for those who are suffering and are now burdened with grief and sadness and anger. And once again, we through our own abilities, I mean, we can be empathetic, we can offer a listening ear, but human beings we’re not … We just can’t get inside of someone’s heart and change their heart towards God and to give them peace. God is the one who gives peace to other people.
There’s a great passage in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. 2 Corinthians 1:3-7. This is what he says: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.” He goes on to say: “For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken; for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.”
To know that God allows us to suffer in this life, we don’t always know why that’s part of the mystery of sin in our world, living in a fallen world, but God is also able to comfort us, that we who are comforted, knowing what God’s plan is for us through Jesus Christ, through that we’re able to comfort others. And one way we can comfort them is by praying for them so that they can experience the same comfort of God. They can experience the love of God that gives peace to their souls, which can give people peace in almost any situation.
Let me give you an example of that. There was a murder in 1994. July 21st, 1994, Eric Wrinkles. He was convicted and executed actually on December 12, 2009. This is from Wikipedia: “On July 21st, 1994 Eric Wrinkles murdered his estranged wife, Debra Jean Wrinkles, his brother-in-law Tony Fulkerson, and Fulkerson’s wife, Natalie Fulkerson at their residence in Evansville. Debra Wrinkles and her two children had been living with the Fulkersons since her separation from Wrinkles.”
So Eric Wrinkles went and killed his estranged wife and the people that she had been living with at that time I think. So she was living with her brother and his wife Natalie Fulkerson. There is an article in the National Catholic Reporter, which is a source that I don’t cite too often, but this is actually a pretty decent article I want to share with you by sister Camille Darencio. It says: “After Daughter’s Murder, Mother Finds Comfort in God, Family.” And so this is an interview with Mary Winnecke and she’s the mother of Natalie Fulkerson who Wrinkles murdered, he shot to death. And so she says in here, she was interviewed, she was asked, “What got you through this?” She says–well first, “No matter how you feel about forgiveness, the impact of such a loss must be unimaginably devastating.” And this is what Mary Fulkerson’s mother said, dealing with the death of her daughter at the hands of Eric Wrinkles:
“When Natalie died and I was told, I fell into the deepest, darkest pit that existed. I believed I was a step away from dying, which would have been a blessing. Even today, I have to tip toe around the outside of this pit because I fear even getting near it. It is only because of God’s love that I am here. I remember sitting in my car in the parking lot screaming and wailing, I hurt so bad. I understood the Wailing Wall,” the wall where faithful Jews wail about the destruction of the Jerusalem temple and the loss of Jewish lives in Jerusalem, the destruction of their their temple. The grief over death and suffering, crying out to God just for the pain to go away.
She then asks her, “From where did you draw your strength?” She answers, “From God. The night it happened, as I was dressing to the hospital, I looked up at my Cursillo crucifix. I saw Jesus hanging above our bed and said, ‘Thy will be done.’ Had God not held me and given me the love of my family, I would not be here. We had four generations in our home for 15 years. God knew I would need all this love to keep me going.”
So you say, “Well, thoughts and prayers, how’s that supposed to help anybody?” Well, I think first we pray, as I said before, for the souls of the deceased, but also we pray for the souls of the afflicted, the survivors, that the only person who can enter into their hearts to give them that comfort, to give them that strength, to pull them out of that pit, the person who is best equipped to do that is the person of the Holy Spirit. The person of the Holy Spirit who can enter into their hearts and give them that peace from God, that surpassing peace and joy. That doesn’t mean the sadness is gone. Doesn’t mean you’re not sad anymore, but it means you’re not in the pit. You’re not hopeless. You have something that guides you to walk you through the pain every day, to know that pain is something that you can manage, you can find meaning in, and you can move forward in and not dwell in the darkness.
So I think a lot of people when they hear “thoughts and prayers,” especially after a man-made disaster or a man-made tragedy like a shooting, they get upset because they think, “Look, just do a simple solution. Instead of thoughts and prayers, let’s just push this button ‘Gun control.’ And we could end this,” that there’s a frustration, “If you just did this, we wouldn’t need all these thoughts and prayers anymore. Just take action and end this.” And I would understand that. I understand the frustration and I would be there if it were that simple.
Like imagine if every few months there were these horrible fires and people died because organizations did not install sprinkler systems, just didn’t install sprinkler systems. And it could be shown that sprinkler systems are cheap, effective and they’ll stop 98% of fires if you put them in, and companies don’t bother to do that. You’d be frustrated. And they say, “Well, let’s just pray for those who died in the fire.” You’d say, “No, why don’t you–yeah, we should pray for them, but just install the darn sprinkler systems!” It reminds me of the horrible fires, working conditions in early 20th century America, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Look that one up if you want to hear some horror stories about lax safety regulations that lead to calamity and disaster.
But the problem with gun control in the US, it’s just way more complicated than that. There’s no magic solution and button to stop it. And I don’t want to get…as I said, I’m not going to get into politics to often on this podcast, but I’m willing to offer my thoughts on this. I agree the problem is that there’s too many guns. If you could get rid of guns, you would get rid of gun violence. In countries that don’t have guns, like Australia and Japan and England, you have very low rates of gun violence, but the problem is the genie’s out of the bottle.
You’ve opened Pandora’s box in the US. There are almost as many guns in the United States as there are people. I think on the low end of the surveys, something like 250 million. Some people say there’s more guns than people, like 310 million, we’re not sure, but at the very least there’s over 200 million guns in the United States.
Australia did a buy-back of guns about 20 years ago, but I think they only got hundreds of thousands, maybe a million guns were given back to the government, were legally bought back. It’s a million. You got 250 million guns here. Even if you do ban weapons, I mean, I live in California. I had a 15 round pistol, a Bursa pistol before I moved here. I had to sell it because it’s banned. It’s on the California banned gun list, can’t own it here. So California has some of the strictest gun laws in the country and yet these things still happen. The guy who went into the Thousand Oaks bar, he had a 45 caliber pistol. And people will say, “Well, just ban all the guns.” That’s just not going to happen. You’re not going to…it’s just an improbable thing to do.
Now I think we could take reasonable steps, background checks, keeping guns out of the hands of those who are likely to commit violence, who have a diagnosable mental illness that makes it likely that they’re a harm to themselves or others. Background checks. Something else I think that we need to do, honestly, you know, people will say, “Oh, what about gun violence, we need to …” They focus on these shootings, whenever these shootings happen, it’s all about getting rid of the guns. But honestly, I think a big thing, what we need to do, we need to reduce the coverage, the media coverage of these tragedies. Because it does contribute.
It contributes to this idea that people have, that they can, if they are angry, they’re angry and they want to do something about it and they want to stick it to other people and they want to make a name for themselves because they feel miserable in their little lives, they feel like nothing’s going right and this is the one thing that they can do.
Here’s why I think that media should … I’m not saying it’s totally the media’s fault. There’s no single person or thing we can blame when it comes to these shootings, but there is a paper I was reading published at the American Psychological Association called “Mass Shootings and the Media Contagion Effect.” This is an excerpt from it. This is what they say: “Many people fantasize about revenge or murder, and this type of fantasy is not unusual or extreme.” One one researcher indicates that up to 90% of men fantasize about murder. Have you ever at least thought about really angrily telling off your boss at some point? Or your relative that has just completely driven you up the wall? Maybe you didn’t think about killing them, but Jesus did say that malicious anger is as bad as killing. Remember in Matthew 5.
So the paper goes on to say, “What tips the scales from fantasy to reality? We would argue identification with prior mass shooters made famous by extensive media coverage including names, faces, writings, and detailed accounts of their lives and backgrounds is a more powerful push toward violence than mental health status or even access to guns.” That is why I have a policy, at least on this podcast, and I think all major media outlets should have this policy, we should not share the name, the names of people involved in mass shootings or mass crimes or terrorist events. We should not, we should not say who did it. We should not talk about them because that is what they want. They want that notoriety.
Although I think also what would help is not covering these stories as much. If it’s true that there is a media contagion effect, then we have a responsibly. It’s similar with suicide. That’s why that Netflix show 13 Reasons Why is such a dangerous thing, that suicide contagion is real. When people talk more about suicide, especially in positive terms, they’re more likely to consider suicide as an option.
When people see all the … a lot of these people who resort to violence, they feel like no one’s hearing them, no one’s listening to them, no one’s taking them seriously, no one’s showing them respect. I mean all these mass shooters are men and the one thing men want–there’s a great book my wife and I are reading, His Needs, Her Needs–women want love, men want respect. All these mass shooters, I think that their core, they don’t feel respected in this world. And they want some respect, and a gun, you think of Dirty Harry, you think of crime movies, a gun, they think, in their little minds, a gun gives them respect and they’re going to get respect. Everyone’s going to listen to them now and know who they are.
No, I’m not going to tell people who you are. Nobody needs to know about you. The only person needs to know about you is Our Lord who will see you at the judgment seat and I pray for him to have mercy upon your soul. And I pray for whoever you are, the only time I might mention your name is in private to pray for the conversion of your soul or for the repose of your soul, that God would have mercy on you, because we want God to have mercy on all sinners, because we are sinners and we need that. And that is why prayer is so important. Thoughts and prayers is not a useless meme.
It can be a platitude. Christians do that all the time, right? “Hey, I could use some help moving my couch.” “Eh, I can’t do that, but I’ll pray for you.” It does become a platitude sometimes, but just because prayer can be misused, a platitude, a vain repetition, you just recite the rosary without thinking about anything, that doesn’t mean prayer is a bad thing. Just because something can be abused doesn’t mean there isn’t a case where you can use it correctly and that is why we ought to use prayer correctly when these tragedies happen to pray for the souls of the deceased, to pray for comfort, for survivors, to pray for decrease and violence and tragedy in our world, and pray for God to give us His grace, knowledge, wisdom and prudence to enact policies and to make choices in this world that maximize the good that we can do for other people.
Those are at least my prayers. I hope they’d be your prayers as well, so do keep the victims of these recent tragedies in your prayers and pray that we can all work together to build up God’s kingdom on Earth and show that God is real, He loves us and He’s someone we can put our faith in to receive comfort from Him.
I’m so glad you guys stopped by with me this week. I hope you’ll join me tomorrow for Workshop Wednesday. I’ll say a little prayer for you all who are listening to me. I hope you’ll pray for me as well, and also I hope that you’ll visit TrentHornPodcast.com. Consider making a monthly donation. We’re growing. We’re going to reach a few other places. I was on the phone yesterday with another radio station that wants to bring us on daily. Very excited about that. Maybe I’ll have more news for you in a few weeks to see what we’ll come to that. Thank you guys so much and I hope that you have a blessed day.
If you liked today’s episode, become a premium subscriber at our Patreon page and get access to member only content. For more information, visit TrentHornPodcast.com.