Senegal bishops urge ‘reason and restraint’ amid spiral of political violence

 

Catholic bishops in the overwhelmingly Muslim west African nation of Senegal have called for “reason, restraint and responsibility” amid a mounting spiral of political violence.

At least 15 people have died in that violence over the last few days, according to national authorities. It broke out when opposition leader Ousmane Sonko was sentenced June 2 to two years in prison for allegedly “corrupting” a young woman, after initially being charged with rape.

Theoretically the conviction could take Sonko, 48, out of contention for presidential elections in Senegal set for 2024. He and his supporters have charged that the sentence was politically motivated.

In its wake, the opposition leader’s supporters went on a rampage, burning tires on highways and confronting police in the national capital of Dakar and several other places. It’s a disturbing atmosphere for a country considered one of the most stable democracies in West Africa.

In a collective statement June 2, members of the Episcopal Conference of Senegal, Mauritania, Cape Verde and Guinea Bissau said they were “very concerned about the social and political climate currently prevailing in our country, particularly with the events we have been experiencing.”

They said they were concerned about the “many human victims, as well as all the acts of destruction of public and private property” and the general “climate of fear and insecurity” that now prevails in a country that has often enjoyed long spells of peace.

“We call for reason, restraint and responsibility from all those involved in the violence,” the clerics said.

The bishops underscored the need “to build and develop our country together, in peace, loyalty and mutual respect.” And in emphatic fashion, they said “No to violence! Yes to Peace!”

“For the present and future of our nation, we invite all political, social and economic actors, as well as religious leaders, to put the general interest first, and to promote justice, truth, peace and social equity, in their words and deeds,” the clerics said.

They called on the people to not abuse their constitutional right to free expression by speaking “truthfully, respectfully, responsibly and constructively.”

The violence in the country has also captured the imagination of the international community, with the United Nations and the African Union both urging calm.

UN deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq told reporters Friday that the UN Secretary General, Antonio Gutierrez, “strongly condemns the use of violence, calls for calm and urges all stakeholders to exercise restraint.”

According to the African Union, Moussa Faki Mahamat, president of the AU Commission, sharply denounced the violence and pleaded with authorities to refrain from doing anything that would “tarnish the face of Senegalese democracy, of which Africa has always been proud.”

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) called on all parties to “defend the country’s laudable reputation as a bastion of peace and stability”.

“The Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, is concerned about the eruption of violence in Senegal following the verdict concerning Ousmane Sonko,” its statement said.

“ECOWAS firmly condemns violence directed at the forces of Law and Order, public goods, private property and public disorder. It deplores the loss of human life and urges restraint and the peaceful resolution of conflicts.”

While Sonko’s supporters see the protests as a pushback against attempts to silence the opposition, especially in the buildup to a crucial 2024 presidential poll, the government has described the protests as the handiwork of miscreants.

According to government spokesman Abdou Karim Fofana, the violence was not fueled by “political demands” but “acts of vandalism and banditry”.

“These are difficult times for the Senegal nation that we will overcome,” he said Friday in an interview.

Sonko has been a constant fixture on Senegal’s political chessboard, speaking out sharply against debt, poverty, food insecurity, underfunded healthcare and education systems, as well as corruption, and he enjoys broad support among Senegalese youth.

Catholic bishops have called on the Senegalese people “to respect the laws and regulations, and the institutions of the republic, which guarantee our life together.”

They warned the youths against giving in “to despair or manipulation, to the point of burning, ransacking and destroying the property of others and of the community.”

They said it was critical that the values, particularly the respect for human life, the promotion of the common good and peace are nurtured and cherished.

The Senegalese President, Macky Sall, used similar language when he spoke at the start of a national dialogue on Thursday designed to reduce the tensions.

“There can be no democracy without freedom, just as there can be no freedom without responsibility,” he said.

“Every piece of physical violence, every piece of verbal violence, every word of hatred, every piece of private or public property ransacked and, above all, every Senegalese killed is a deep wound to our country, and no one should imagine that they are greater or stronger than this Nation that shelters us all,” Sall said.

“Together with all the socio-political components that are keen on peace, stability and national cohesion, we must jointly defend our model of society. This is one of the fundamental raisons d’être of this national dialogue,” he said.

Virgin Mary apparitions ‘not always real’, says Pope after statue row

Apparitions of the Virgin Mary are “not always real”, Pope Francis has said, in what appears to be an indirect reference to a woman who drew thousands of pilgrims to a town near Rome to pray before a statue that she claimed shed tears of blood.

“Don’t look there,” the pontiff said during an interview with Rai 1 on Sunday when asked about apparitions of the Virgin Mary. “There are images of the Madonna that are real, but the Madonna has never drawn [attention] to herself,” he said. “I like to see her with her finger pointing up to Jesus. When Marian devotion is too self-centred, it’s not good. Both in the devotion and in the people who carry it forward.”

The interview was aired a few days after residents in Trevignano called on Francis to intervene against Maria Giuseppe Scarpulla, who has been nicknamed “the Saint” and “clairvoyant”. 

For five years she has organised monthly ceremonies in a park overlooking Lake Bracciano where a statue of the Virgin Mary sits in a glass case.

The statue was bought by Scarpulla, known to her followers as Gisella Cardia, at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Medjugorje, Bosnia. Upon returning to Italy, she claimed the Madonna made apparitions, wept tears of blood and was communicating messages to her.

Marco Salvi, a local bishop, last week urged pilgrims to stop flocking to the site on the third of each month while his diocese investigates the phenomena surrounding the statue. Many people prayed before the statue in search of cures for serious illnesses.

Scarpulla is facing a judicial investigation after a private investigator alleged that the blood stains on the statue came from a pig, and after some of her followers claimed they had been scammed.

Scarpulla, who in the past had been convicted of bankruptcy fraud, created a foundation through which she collected donations, which she reportedly said would go towards setting up a centre for sick children. One man told La Repubblica that he and his wife had donated €123,000 (£106,000) to her foundation.

“We were both ill, we trusted her, it was a clamorous error,” he said.

Scarpulla fled Trevignano in early April amid the furore only to return a few weeks later. She still hosts the ceremonies, although Saturday’s event was reported to be a flop, with only a handful of people in attendance. She said last month that she was undeterred by the investigation as well as an order for the glass case to be demolished.

“I won’t budge an inch because I’m in the house of God and have the Madonna on my side,” she said.

Indian bishops protest harassment of church-run child care centers

Both the bishops’ conference in India and a child care facility have protested what they describe as a pattern of government harassment of church-run centers for children, under the pretext of enforcing India’s anti-conversion laws.

In a May 31 statement released by Archbishop Felix Machado of Vasai, secretary of the conference, the bishops describe themselves as “deeply saddened” by three such recent incidents in the Diocese of Jabalpur in the northcentral Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, which is currently governed by the Hindu nationalist party BJP:

• On March 2, members of the State Commission of Child Rights along with local police visited the St. Joseph Boys and Girls Boarding facility in Ghoreghat.
  
• On March 3, the same delegation of commission officials and police visited the JDES Boys and Girls Boarding center in Junwani.
• On May 29, members of the Child Welfare Committee visited the Asha Kiran Child Care Institute in the Katni district.

“What is common in all three incidents is that the officials entered the premises without prior permission, searched the premises, took away some files and questioned the children if they were forced to go to church and if they were forced to read the Bible,” the bishops said.

The prelates insisted the facilities are not engaged in illicit proselytism.

“While these boardings and hostels cooperate wholeheartedly in complying with all legal and government requirements, the members who visited these three places sought to unnecessarily harass the management and the children. They tried to make false allegations against the management and show how the children are getting converted to Christianity,” the statement said.

In addition to the unannounced visits to facilities, Bishop Gerald Almeida of Jabalpur and Sister Ligy Joseph of the Congregation of Mother Carmel, a Syro-Malabar congregation, were charged on May 30 in a complaint of alleged conversion.

“The Catholic Church in India strongly calls upon the state authorities of Madhya Pradesh and the central government authorities to stop this age-old ‘bogey of conversion’ which has no basis and has been brought up repeatedly to tarnish the selfless and dedicated service of thousands of priests, religious and lay people,” the bishops said.

In a separate statement, the Asha Kiran center, which serves children with autism, cerebral palsy and other developmental and intellectual challenges, also denied engaging in conversion of the children under its care.

“No one is converted to any religion in our institute,” the statement said, claiming that “the only aim” of the inspections and harassment “is to defame Christian institutions.”

“We do not promote any religion. We do not motivate any resident to learn Christian prayers. So we deny this accusation, as it is [politically] motivated and fallacious.”

The statement described an atmosphere of intimidation during the March 29 inspection.

“At first, two persons came to our center and removed all the staff and started inspecting the rooms and cupboards,” it said. “Later, Mr. Priyank Kanoogo came in shouting and frightening the children and the staff.”

Kanoogo is chair of India’s National Commission for Protection of Child Rights.

“He wanted to get into our worship place, which is part of our convent,” the statement said. “When we did not allow him to enter the chapel, fearing desecration as he had done in another center, he was insulting the nuns and telling that they are eating the money of the children and building up the churches. Insults were hurled at us in front of the children.”

Kanoongo, who has headed the national commission since October 2018, has accused Almeida and Sister Joseph of forcing three Hindu children in the Asha Kiran center to convert to Christianity.

The statement said the center will fight any charges in court, and accused Kanoongo of “putting children at risk and endangerment.”

On the threat of ‘lawfare,’ does Pope Francis practice what he preaches? (Opinion)

 

Despite being the oldest reigning pontiff in the last 145 years, Pope Francis at 86 nevertheless remains remarkably au courant. 

Among other things, he sometimes borrows the latest cultural buzzword to drive home a point.

One good example is the term “lawfare,” a neologism combining the words “law” and “warfare” to suggest weaponization of the judicial system for political ends.

Francis first dropped the term in a 2019 speech to a Pan-American summit of judges held in the Vatican, warning against the rise of “lawfare,” and he used it again this past April in an interview with the Argentine TV outlet Canal 5 de Noticias.

“Lawfare begins through the mass media, which denigrate [the target] and insinuate the suspicion of a crime. Then massive investigations are created, and to condemn someone the volume of these investigations is enough, even if the crime is never found,” the pope said.

Francis was referring in particular to the cases of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and former President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. Lula spent 19 months behind bars while Roussef was impeached, both on charges that critics, including the pontiff, regarded as politically motivated.

The pope said “we have to raise our voice” against such abuses of the justice system.

While the vocabulary may be new, Francis’s insistence on keeping politics out of criminal justice reflects established Catholic social teaching. Chapter eight of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church says, “In defining the proper relationships between the legislative, executive and judicial powers, the constitutions of modern states guarantee the judicial power the necessary independence in the realm of law.”

That’s actually a quote from a March 31, 2000, speech by the late Pope John Paul II to the Italian Association of Judges, in which the pontiff said that in a “modern democratic state … the judicial power stands side by side with the legislative and executive powers, with its own autonomous and constitutionally protected function.”

“The balanced relationship between these three powers, each one operating according to its own specific competence and responsibility so that one never prevails over the others, guarantees the proper functioning of democratic life,” he said.

And, yet.

Yet Pope Francis is vulnerable to the charge of not practicing what he preaches when it comes to lawfare, because he has his own criminal justice system. It’s thus a perfectly reasonable question to ask whether he’s done everything he can to ensure that politics don’t taint its own judgments.

In that light, it’s striking that when Pope Francis recently issued a new fundamental law for the Vatican City State, it pointedly reaffirmed that “the Supreme Pontiff, Sovereign of the Vatican City State, has the fullness of power of government, which includes legislative, executive and judicial power.”

In other words, there’s no separation of powers whatsoever.

While journalists and pundits sometimes lazily say that the papacy lost its temporal powers with the collapse of the Papal States in 1870, that’s not true at all. The pope remains the absolute monarch of the physical territory he governs, even if his authority now is limited to the 108 acres of the Vatican and its extraterritorial properties.

Indeed, the fundamental law is quite specific: “In any civil or penal case, and at any stage, the Supreme Pontiff can defer the investigation and the decision regarding a particular subject, to the exclusion of any further appeal.”

One might have expected Francis the Reformer to introduce at least some degree of autonomy to the judiciary when he updated the fundamental law, the first such revision since 2000, but instead he delivered a ringing reassertion of direct papal authority over the judicial system and everything else.

The consequences of this apparent contradiction between what preaching and practice seem clear in the Vatican’s ongoing “Trial of the Century,” currently lumbering towards a conclusion later this year.

Recently, defense attorneys for Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu, one of ten defendants accused of various financial crimes, appealed to a three-judge panel led by veteran Italian jurist Giuseppe Pignatone to admit into evidence a series of 126 WhatsApp messages sent to Prosecutor Alessandro Diddi by one of the witnesses in the case, laywoman Genevieve Ciferri, as well as portions of the interrogation of the prosecution’s star witness, Monsignor Alberto Perlasca, both of which had been withheld.

Pignatone rejected the request, siding with Diddi’s argument that the omitted material has to remain secret because it’s relevant to other ongoing investigations.

In a declaration to the court, Becciu – who, by the way, turned 75 on Friday – protested the decision, arguing that Ciferri and Perlasca, along with another Italian laywoman, Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui, are involved in a campaign to defame him.

“They’ve used the pope to carry out a vengeful plan against me, and I don’t understand why [the court] won’t clarify this,” Becciu said. “These three are tranquil and free, while I’ve been suffering the nightmare for three years of these accusations which are showing themselves to be false.”

Obviously, it’s impossible for anyone who hasn’t seen the material in question to assess the merits of the court’s decision.

What can be said is this: If you were to ask ten ordinary people if it’s fair that the judges who made this ruling are paid, hired and fired by the same guy who controls the police and prosecutors, nine probably would say “of course not” and the tenth would just laugh.

In fact, supporters of Becciu, such as the Italian news site Faro di Roma, would argue that what’s happened to him is itself a classic instance of “lawfare.”

In effect, Becciu was judged in the media well before his trial even began, after Pope Francis unceremoniously fired him as Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints and stripped him of his privileges as a cardinal in September 2020. A criminal charge wasn’t delivered until the summer of 2021.

Since then, Becciu’s been the central defendant in a highly publicized trial, in which his fate is being determined by judges who are directly subordinate to the same executive authority which indicted him. No matter how carefully reasoned the court’s eventual verdict may be, many observers likely will treat it with an asterisk because of doubts about the structural fairness of the process behind it.

Of course, popes aren’t obligated to be completely consistent. Often enough, like leaders everywhere, they can almost seem tributes to Walt Whitman – they are large, and contain multitudes.

Still, if Pope Francis aspires to resist the threat of lawfare around the world, it might help to make sure no one can accuse him of waging it in-house.

Pope accepts resignation of bishop accused, and acquitted, of rape

Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of a Catholic bishop in India who was accused of rape by a nun in 2018, and who was acquitted by a local court in 2022. 

An appeal of that acquittal is still underway.

While the criminal case against Bishop Franco Mulakkal remains on appeal, a statement from the Vatican embassy in India indicated that his removal was not a disciplinary measure but rather intended to promote healing in the diocese.

Mulakkal, according to the statement, remains a bishop in good standing and faces no canonical restrictions on his ministry.

Now just 59, and thus 16 years below the mandatory retirement age of 75, Mulakkal served as the bishop of the Jalandhar diocese in the far north of India near the border with Pakistan from 2013 to 2018.

A video message circulated by Mulakkal among friends and associates said Pope Francis had accepted his letter of resignation written after consultations with his superiors and prayers. In the video, Mulakkal appeared without his trademark black beard.

“Let me inform you this with joy and gratitude,” Mulakkal said in the video, offering thanks to those who have loved him, prayed for him, shared in his pains, and stood with him during his difficult times.

“On this occasion, I offer all the sufferings that I have experienced directly and indirectly and the troubles that it has caused at the feet of the Crucified Lord. God bless you,” he said.

Mulakkal is a native of Kerala state in southern India, and in 2018 he became the first Catholic bishop in India to be arrested on rape charges after a nun claimed she had been raped by the prelate thirteen times between 2014 and 2016 during his visits to a mission home in Kerala. Five other nuns eventually backed the accuser’s charges.

Mulakkal claimed the nun, who has not been publicly identified, invented the rape charge in retaliation for him taking action against her after a woman complained the nun was having an illicit relationship with her husband. After a trial that ran from November 2019 to January 2022 and featured 39 witnesses, a local court in Kerala cleared Mulakkal of the charges, finding that the accuser’s testimony contained “exaggerations and embellishments.”

The verdict produced protests on social media, including from feminists and women’s rights campaigners who felt the judge in the case had effectively placed the accuser on trial. Prosecutors, along with the accuser and the nuns who support her, have filed an appeal of the acquittal.

The statement from the Vatican embassy, based in the national capital of New Delhi, indicated that the Holy See will defer to the Indian justice system.

The Vatican, it said, “respects the verdict of the Additional District and Sessions Court [in] Kottayam, Kerala, acquitting Bishop Mulakkal from the allegations concerning him, as well as the appeal against the acquittal which has been admitted by the Kerala High Court.”

The statement also stressed that Mulakkal’s resignation should not be read as a judgment about his guilt or innocence, but rather as a pastoral measure.

The Vatican requested Mulakkal’s resignation, it said, not as a disciplinary measure but for the health of the Jalandhar diocese, which needs a new bishop since the highly public controversy surrounding Mulakkal has created a “divisive situation.”

Italian bishops roll out ad campaign to reverse declines in taxpayer contributions

 

Facing a drop in contributions amid fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic and a slew of other social factors, the Italian bishops have rolled out a new TV and radio ad campaign aimed at convincing taxpayers to allocate their charitable funds to the Catholic Church.

As part of the campaign, a series of 15-30 second videos have been released showing individuals performing routine acts of kindness and volunteers assisting the needy in various charitable projects.

The tagline for each video is, “If you do an act of love, it makes you feel good. Imagine doing thousands. By signing the 8 x 1000 for the Catholic Church, your signature will become thousands of acts of love.”

The “8×1000,” or the “eight per thousand,” refers to a feature of Italy’s tax system in which a small percentage of income tax payments – under the old currency, it was eight lire for every 1,000 – can be devoted to support a charitable entity, whether private or public.

Given that roughly 75 percent of Italians are Catholic, of those who do choose to allocate their tax funds to charity, around 70 percent select the Catholic Church. Funds the Church receives from the 8x1000 are managed by the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI).

For the taxpayers who make no selection, their 8×1000 funds are divided among the various approved recipients in proportion to the selections that were made, meaning the bulk of those funds benefit the Italian Catholic Church, providing it slightly in excess of $1 billion annually, which CEI allocates toward a variety of charitable initiatives as well as administration and overhead costs.

Despite the considerable sums CEI draws, the share of taxpayers choosing to allocate funds to the Catholic Church has steadily declined in recent years, dipping to an all-time low in 2020. The share dropped from 31.8 percent to 29.03 percent, according to a report from the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance.

While part of that decline was related to the economic strain of the coronavirus pandemic, it also reflects another trend in which Italians are increasingly choosing to allocate their funds to state causes, including disaster and hunger relief, refugee assistance, and maintenance of public-school buildings.

Last year CEI published an ad in Corriere della Sera, Italy’s newspaper of record, explaining what the 8×1000 was, how they use the funds, and encouraging taxpayers to select the Catholic Church as the recipient of their money, signaling an effort to draw in more contributions and to make up for recent losses.

This year’s new ad campaign appears to be yet another step in that direction and signals a bump in the effort the bishops are investing in advertising.

In an interview with the Archdiocese of Milan’s online news platform, Massimo Monzio Compagnoni, head of CEI’s Service for the Promotion of the Economic Support of the Catholic Church, said the new ad campaign aims to be both “immediate and intuitive.”

The idea, he said, is to show viewers how they can perform small acts of love for others on a daily basis, by helping someone up who has fallen down, by sharing an umbrella in the rain, or giving up one’s seat on the bus for the elderly.

Compagnoni said the commercials show “everyday gestures within everyone’s reach. Gestures that many people can repeat, amplified thousands and thousands of times thanks to the signatures of taxpayers who choose to allocate the 8x1000 to the Catholic Church.”

In terms of the new advertising strategy, Compagnoni said, “We felt the need...to communicate the beauty that exists in taking care of others and how much each individual signature can exponentially multiply this beauty.”

“The Gospel has not changed for two thousand years, and the works of mercy, corporal and spiritual, are always the same. With this campaign we would like to try to make them more tailored to our current daily lives,” as well as the fact that “the Church’s commitment to the needs of the least does not stop,” he said.

He noted that CEI, in addition to using the 8x1000 funds to support charitable projects at home, has also provided financial support to charitable projects abroad, such as hospitals, schools, and migrant centers.

Last October CEI penned an agreement with the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors to provide support for safeguarding initiatives, with a special emphasis on the global south, where funds for these efforts are often lacking.

Both parties pledged to exchange information and updates on safeguarding initiatives at the national and global level, and to share skills and professional resources.

As part of that deal, CEI – despite criticism that they have not done enough to intervene in the abuse crisis on the home front – agreed to allocate resources from its 8×1000 fund over a 3-year period to support the commission’s work in building safeguarding mechanisms in the global south.

Compagnoni in his interview said CEI has always sought to use the 8x1000 funds to support projects that “aim to reach the most disadvantaged and abandoned populations of the planet.”

He praised the role of volunteers who assist in various charitable initiatives around the world and thanked them for their generosity, saying, “the 8x1000 is a true multiplier of resources and services in the area, a concrete support for the most vulnerable, and a driving force for the promotion of career paths,” such as those who run soup kitchens, after-school programs for at-risk youth, and church restorations.

“Without the church and the extraordinary work done by the voluntary machine, I think there would be an enormous void,” he said, saying, “The 8x1000 supplies fuel to an immense charity machine.”

“Every community and every single Christian must feel responsible for it and must offer their own contribution so that people sign and have others sign, making use of the potential of a truly extraordinary instrument of fiscal democracy,” he said.

Newark cardinal asks Americans to voluntarily forgo right to guns

 

Amid a mounting debate in America over the constitutionality of gun control, Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark has entered the fray with a different argument: That people should voluntarily forgo their Second Amendment rights for the betterment of society.

“I honestly believe it is the best thing we can do to change the culture of violence that threatens us today,” Tobin said.

“Let’s voluntarily set aside our rights in order to witness the truth that only peace and never violence, is the way to build a free society that is lived concretely in our homes, our neighborhoods, our communities, our nation and our world,” he said.

Tobin made the plea in a recent letter, “Pray for an end to all instances of violence,” where he calls on community leaders and Catholic bishops, himself included, to call for a “synodal effort” to actively resist gun violence. He proposed a threefold process that includes prayer and work, advocacy, and voluntary self-restraint from the Second Amendment.

The letter, published May 26, is the latest call to action amid a spate of mass shootings in recent months. May 30 marked the 150th day of 2023, over which time there have been 263 mass shootings – incidents with four or more people shot – that have led to 327 deaths.

Both figures are records for this early in the year.

Memorial Day weekend was especially violent. Nationwide there were at least 20 mass shootings that left 16 people dead, and at least 80 more injured.

The data comes from the Gun Violence Archive, which has tracked all gun related injuries and deaths in the U.S. since 2013. The organization reports that as of May 31 there have been a total 17,629 gun violence deaths in the U.S. – 7,663 homicides, and 9,966 suicides.

There were 20,200 gun violence deaths in all of 2022, and 21,009 in 2021, the organization reported.

A 2018 report by the Small Arms Survey, an organization that tracks violence globally, found that U.S. gun owners possess 393.3 million firearms, which is well above the nation’s 331.9 million population.

With that in mind, Tobin made the case that while legislation and regulations are necessary, in the case of gun violence, as with all life issues, it’s equally as important to “regulate our behavior in order to protect the vulnerable and ensure the common good.”

“It’s true that we have a Second Amendment right to bear arms, but rights always involve responsibilities – in this case, the responsibility to protect the innocent and to secure public safety and good order,” Tobin said. “The mass shootings we are witnessing almost weekly now are a serious threat to the lives and well-being of all people.”

In the cardinal’s threefold synodal process, he echoes what other U.S. prelates have said, stating that prayers alone aren’t enough to adequately address the issue. Instead, Tobin said that Catholics must combine prayer with action to prevent the root causes of gun violence.

Under the second part of the process, advocacy, Tobin calls on Catholics to make their voices heard.

“As an integral part of our efforts to prevent gun violence, all Americans should make local, state and federal officials know how we feel about this critical issue,” he said. “We should make our voices heard, demanding that actions be taken to protect the vulnerable and keep our communities safe.”

The third and final part of Tobin’s process is self-restraint, which he acknowledges is a challenging and controversial proposal that won’t alone solve the problem of gun violence, but could help change the culture.

“The voluntary self-restraint that I am calling for will not solve the problem of gun violence all by itself, but it can help us change our culture from one that is obsessively focused on individuals’ rights to a society dedicated to ensuring the common good,” Tobin said.

Tobin cited Pope Francis’s statement that “violence is not the cure for our broken world.”

“Please join me in praying for an end to all instances of violence, especially gun violence in our schools, churches, places of business and in the public square,” Tobin said.