Father Mike Murphy loves Southwest Baltimore. It’s where he grew up and roamed the streets as a child.
Now, as a diocesan priest in his 60s, he is devoting his third act to trying to help heal one of the most troubled neighborhoods in the United States.
In a rare move for a Catholic cleric, he is taking an active role in fighting gun violence. Since 2023, Father Murphy, who is pastor of Our Lady of Victory Parish and St. Joseph’s Monastery, has led a gun buyback program with the help of the Baltimore Police Department. Baltimore is the only diocese in the United States participating in such a scheme.
“Guns are a life issue,” Father Murphy says.
In the United States, 42,358 people died from guns last year, according to an analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The number of gun murders declined, but the number of gun suicides hit a record high of 28,000. Since 2020, guns have been the leading cause of death for American children.
When Father Murphy was born in 1964, his Baltimore neighborhood, called Irvington, was tight-knit, prosperous and very Catholic. People worked in factories that made everything from steel and auto parts to bread and brooms.
“It was a great place to grow up,” he says on a drive through streets of shuttered shops and boarded-up houses. “It was a walking community. Up there was a hardware store, over there a corner pharmacy, and over there a movie theater. You didn’t have to go outside your neighborhood for basic necessities.”
That world is gone. Factories started closing in the 1970s. By the time Father Murphy left home in 1982 to go to college, the drug trade had taken over the local economy. Increasingly, more prosperous residents, mostly white, moved to the suburbs.
Like many older cities in the United States, Southwest Baltimore decayed. Gun violence followed. In the year Father Murphy was born, there were 144 murders in a city of almost a million people. By the turn of the century, the number of annual murders was regularly over 300 in a city with less than two-thirds the population.
The tragedy of Father Murphy’s hometown acquired global fame through the celebrated HBO show “The Wire,” which debuted in 2002, although he watched it the first time only recently. He found many characters relatable but was shaken by the violence.
Thankfully, the murder rate in Baltimore has plummeted. There were 72 homicides in the first eight months of 2026, down 18.2 percent from the same period in 2025. Nobody is quite sure why, but Father Murphy is one of thousands of activists who have brought new initiatives to the table. Something is working. Mayor Brandon Scott credits “everyone involved in our community violence intervention ecosystem.”
A neighborhood ambassador
Father Murphy went to college at Mount St. Mary’s in Emmitsburg, Md., and then seminary at St. Mary’s in Baltimore. He returned to his old neighborhood in 1995 to teach at Mount St. Joseph’s, a Catholic all-boys school in Baltimore.
Working at Mount St. Joseph’s, Father Murphy walked around the neighborhood and asked residents how he might help. With his soft-spoken manner, he is easy to talk to and a good ambassador for his church. He helped run a storefront that offered free meals to people. He started an organization called My Brother’s Keeper to feed and clothe people and provide other necessities. Eventually, he built a new building and turned the ministry over to Catholic Charities. “There’s been a need for help in West Baltimore for a long time,” he says.
Living in the neighborhood, Father Murphy regularly heard the sounds of weapons and violence. In the 2000s, a friend named Maurice, a man who sometimes cooked at My Brother’s Keeper, was shot and killed. “If you live around here, you’ll know somebody who was killed by guns,” he says.
In 2014, the archdiocese asked him to move into St. Joseph’s Monastery and work part-time at the school and as pastor of the parish. Now he is retired from the school and working full-time at the parish. In 2023, after prayer and discernment, Father Murphy started the gun buyback program.
With the help of Baltimore police, his team has collected over 1,500 firearms. Organizers pay $300 for automatic weapons, $200 for semiautomatics and $100 for other types of guns.
In the most recent roundup in August, a team of around 30 volunteers collected 490 guns, including over 100 semiautomatic weapons. Participants drove in a line and gave waiting police their weapons. People stayed in their cars and police approached and retrieved the weapons. There was no paperwork.
This year, Father Murphy has raised $91,000 for the gun buyback from religious orders, parishes and donors. Around $27,000 was left over, and that is being used for a grief ministry, paying for funerals, counseling, relocation and food for the families of victims of gun violence.
People in Baltimore have supported Father Murphy’s activism.
“The fewer guns on the streets, the better for everyone here,” says Chris Schulze, a local activist who has worked with Father Murphy.
Beau Higginbotham, the chief executive of Ascension St. Agnes Hospital, says the hospital treats a couple gunshot wounds a month. He supports the gun buyback program, although he cautions that the hospital is not trying to take a strong position on gun control. “It’s about reducing risk,” he says.
The archdiocese has also been cheering on Father Murphy’s gun-buyback work. “These are unnatural weapons that are voluntarily surrendered,” says Yvonna Wagner, a spokeswoman for the archdiocese.
A house divided
Like the rest of the United States, Catholics are divided about the appropriate amount of gun control. Father Murphy knows priests in Baltimore who own guns, and this is not uncommon elsewhere in America.
Father Jeff Coore, pastor of Holy Family in Clarkston, Wash., likes to carry a gun under his robes when he says Mass. He has secured approval from his bishop, he says. Father Coore grew up with guns and he believes carrying a weapon makes him better able to defend his congregation against an attack. He is an enthusiastic defender of relaxed U.S. gun laws. “But God bless Father Murphy for doing what he thinks is necessary for his parish,” he says.
Others argue there is no point in trying to reduce the number of guns in a country with 400 million of them.
“It’s absurd to think that buying a few hundred old and worn-out guns in one neighborhood will matter,” the George Mason University economist Alex Tabarrok wrote me in an email. “It’s like trying to lower the Atlantic with a bucket.”
Father Murphy’s response is that every drop in the bucket matters. “If we can save one life because a gun is taken off the street or out of somebody’s house, it’s worth it,” he says.
Ginny McCarthy, a Jesuit-educated researcher at the Colorado School of Public Health in Denver, says gun violence has often been ignored by Catholic leaders and thinkers.
“Church leaders are hesitant because there are a lot of gun owners who are good Catholics, but talking about guns is the first step,” Ms. McCarthy says.
She named Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago as a rare Catholic leader who has taken a stance on gun violence. Cardinal Cupich has highlighted the right of people to live safely as equally important as the right to bear arms. The right of children to “return home safely each day to their families includes the reasonable expectation that those who would harm society are not armed with weapons designed for the battlefield, and bullets designed to kill police officers,” he said in 2018.
Father Coore says he sees no conflict between gun ownership and Catholic social teaching. In his view, the common good is “enhanced by responsible gun owners” who can protect their communities. If Father Coore ever preaches about guns, it is to admonish gun owners who aren’t being safe. “Guns are just a tool, and like any tool, they can be abused and misused,” he says.
Recently, however, Catholic bishops have staked out a position supporting local gun control.
In September, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court supporting the right of local communities in the United States to regulate firearms. The case, Viramontes v. Cook County, was brought after the county banned over 100 semiautomatic weapons, including AR-15s.
The bishops invoked the Catholic principle of subsidiarity and the threat of “dangerous and unusual” modern weaponry. The Constitution, the bishops argued, does not demand that every local government “regulate weapons identically.”
Contrary views
Father Murphy admits that he has his critics. “In the age of social media, there’s a lot of snarkiness and criticism,” he says. He accepts that some might hold contrary views.
“I know there are people in the congregation who totally disagree with [the buyback program],” he says. “Some people think the police just take them and sell them. There’s all kinds of strange conspiracy theories.”
Critics in the community say the buybacks are not solving violent crime. Thieves and murderers are not surrendering the tools of their trade, they argue.
“We know we’re not going to have the bad guys lining up [to turn in] their guns,” Father Murphy says. “But a few days before we started fund-raising, I did a funeral for somebody’s granddaughter who was killed by domestic abuse.
“People get in a moment of great darkness, and they’re not rational,” Father Murphy says. “What I’ve learned about suicide over the years is that it’s much easier to do if you have a weapon.”
In 2019, Father Murphy cofounded an organization called Health by Southwest, which gathers Catholic institutions to talk about gun violence, poverty and other problems as health issues.
On Dec. 29 this year, he will again lead a prayer vigil from St. Joseph’s to My Brother’s Keeper. “It’s a chance to highlight the call for peace.”
In April, Father Murphy opened the Holy Family Catholic Worker in the storefront of an old eye doctor’s office. It stands near the St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, where a young Babe Ruth was educated.
It was a mess when they bought it. St. Agnes Hospital paid for the $40,000 renovation. “I put a business plan together and sent it to the archdiocese,” Father Murphy says. “They said, ‘What are you going to do there?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ You don’t go into a community, especially as a white guy, and tell people what you’re going to do. You ask them what they need.”
In May, Father Murphy organized a clinic to help people get crimes off their record so they can apply for jobs. He started a food pantry to help the families of crime victims. He is also supporting an organization that helps children learn chess. Money left over from the buyback program helps support these ministries.
In 2014, when Father Murphy took over as pastor at St. Joseph’s, a friend who was a retired policeman suggested he buy a gun to protect himself on the streets of Baltimore.
“I don’t want you to be alone without a weapon,” he told him.
Father Murphy said no.
“How do we respond to fear?” he explained. “Having a gun isn’t going to make me feel better. If I use that weapon, I’m going to feel terrible. And if somebody else has that weapon, I’m going to be afraid. The only answer is building a more peaceful community where people don’t have to live in fear.”
Jesus, he added, “knew he was going to be killed. Did he pick up a weapon?”
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