How things can turn on a dime

And how faith and forgiveness come into it

UPDATE: My dear friend Kim Bolan at the Vancouver Sun has the story. Kai-ji Adam Lo had no criminal record, but he was the subject of dozens of interactions with police related to his deteriorating mental health. His own brother was murdered last year. His ma later attempted suicide. Only hours before the incident a family member was in touch with a hospital psych ward about Lo’s delusions and paranoia. “It’s not known what action, if any, was taken.”

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There’s a lot of ground in the newsletter that was supposed to go out this morning, which will now be out first thing tomorrow. It’s mostly about Election 2025, the Lost Generation and other “issues” quite a few of us preferred not to discuss out loud during the election campaign. I’ll also have some inside baseball on the news media for you.

This evening I’m sending you this instead. I didn’t get much sleep last night.

Eleven dead, dozens injured.

In the Roman Catholic calendar, today is the Sunday of Divine Mercy. Mass was observed with a particular sorrow and solemnity today at St. Jude’s parish, a working-class Filipino church where Masses are sometimes celebrated in Tagalog, only a few blocks from the site of last night’s massacre.

Esperanza Bermudez, comforted by her friend Manjit Claire, Sunday morning (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson).

Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope.
To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.

Not just at St. Jude’s, of course. Filipino Masses are regulary celebrated at St. Mary’s, and at Holy Trinity on the North Shore. In the Vancouver Archdiocese there are 16 Filipino parish priests, assistant pastors and deacons, and perhaps 30,000 parishioners.

The eleven dead and the dozens of injured are not remembered today only at Catholic services, of course, and the shock and grief is by no means confined to Catholics or to people of faith. What happened on East 43rd Street shortly after 8 p.m. last night was not just a local event, or a national event. Condolences are coming in from around the world.

From His Royal Majesty King Charles III: “Both my wife and I were profoundly saddened to learn of the dreadful attack and utterly tragic loss of life in Vancouver, which took place as the Filipino community came together to mark the celebration of one of their most special festivals. Our hearts and prayers go out to all those whose lives have been shattered by such a desperate tragedy and we send our deepest possible sympathy at a most agonizing time for so many in Canada.”

From Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy: “Heartbreaking tragedy at Vancouver's Filipino festival, where a man drove a car into the crowd, killing and injuring innocent people. On this sad day, Ukrainians deeply share the pain of Canadians, Vancouver residents, and the Canadian Filipino community. Our condolences to the victims' families, and we wish the injured a speedy recovery. Stay strong, our friends in Canada and the Philippines.”

Forgiveness is rarely an easy thing

The Vancouver police have not released much information about the driver of the black SUV that roared through the crowd except to say that he is 30 years old, he was “known to police” and to health authorities, and that he has a history of mental health problems. Before he was taken into custody he was apprehended at the scene by citizens, and there are videos circulating of the man standing against a chain-link fence, and he appears to be saying “I’m sorry.”

We should be prepared to understand that police may never have a clear understanding of the man’s motive and that it may remain “senseless,” as these tragedies are so often called. Such was the case in 2018, with the Danforth Mass Shooting in Toronto.

In that tragedy, a young man, Faisal Hussain, shot 15 people, killing two of them. His weapon was a Smith & Wesson 40-calibre handgun. His shooting spree in Greektown ended during a firefight with Toronto police, when Hussain took his own life. In his case, “mental health issues” were cited as well.

My piece in the National Post about it provoked about as much rage as anything I’d ever written. The point of it was captured well enough by the headline: #TorontoStrong can be strong enough to support the shooter's parents, too.

I assure you, there is no soppy ‘yes, but’ in the standpoint I adopt here.

There were extenuating circumstances in the case of the Hussain family that made compassion a difficult thing for a lot of people to find within themselves. And fair enough, but to my mind the difficulty made the effort that much more necessary and worthwhile. It may prove much easier in the case of the Vancouver man and his family.

In any case, from what we understand so far, the man is deserving of our compassion. Even the late Holy Father himself was not without sin, as he was honest enough to concede. I’ll come to that below.

Astute Real Story subscribers will be aware that I’m some sort of atheist afflicted with a kind of phantom-limb Catholicism. I’ve spent more time in synagogues than in churches over the past few years, although that began to change dramatically a couple of years ago, for reasons I described last year in Easter Monday: Death has no dominion. The personal and political aspects come below the subhead An raibh tú ag an gCarraig? Have you been to the rock?

The thing of it is that I’ve been struck with an unshakeable melancholy these past few days.

This always happens around Easter in my family, as it will with the Irish, what with 1916 and everything, and especially dad’s side (see Faith of Our Fathers). It hasn’t helped that in the days before Easter this year there was the 80th anniversary of the death of my Uncle Patrick, a 19-year-old Irish kid who’d signed up with the 1st. Battalion of the Hereford Regiment to fight the Nazis. For his trouble he was killed in Germany just a few days before it was all over.

In the way histories can turn on a dime, Uncle Patrick’s death was a pivotal event in my ma’s family story, well remembered in this tribute in the Globe and Mail by Marsha Lederman. Put my parents’ story together and it’s the story of how and why we ended up in Canada.

Adding to this came word the other day of the passing of my devout Catholic mother’s beloved rebbe, Mordechai Feuerstein, whose children ma strictly admonished us to comprehend as our “Jewish cousins,” Leah, Dovid, Shifra, Penina, Aviva, Yosef, Elisheva and Nechama.

And then the pope goes and dies

We were never Catholics of the ultramontanist type and certainly not of the dour Jansenist variety that ended up disfiguring Irish Catholicism. We tended to be of the view that simple things like saying the Rosary and attending Mass and keeping the Holy Days of Obligation could get you through a lot of misery and vexing bother about theological questions, and that the role of the priest was to administer the sacraments, visit the sick, bury the dead and otherwise leave the lectures out of it.

Even so, the death of the Holy Father would necessarily cause a kind of shuddering in the community, and would cause our minds to turn to matters ordinarily at the periphery of our field of vision.

In my case, my thoughts turned to Jimmy Lai, the 78-year-old Hong Kong newspaper publisher, who is coming up to his fifth year in prison, mostly in solitary confinement. Jimmy’s a Catholic, and he’s been denied Holy Communion along with any modicum of fair play and due process. He’s among 1,800 political prisoners in Hong Kong, about whom the Vatican has barely uttered a peep (although it shouldn’t matter, many of them are devout Catholics). I can’t find any evidence that Pope Francis so much as uttered Jimmy’s name.

I’m also reminded of the 2018 Vatican-Beijing accord, renewed last fall, which allows the Chinese Communist Party to veto the appointment of bishops. The accord “regularized’ bishops appointed by Beijing’s “patriotic church,”’ and its renewal last year was rightly condemned by the retired Hong Kong bishop, 90-year-old Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-Kiun, as a betrayal of China’s Catholic faithful.

Appeasement with the Chinese authorities has yielded little in the way of liberty for China’s Catholics, some of whom have been forced to replace crucifixes in their churches with portraits of Xi Jinping.

A good overview of Vatican-Beijing relations is here.

Pope Francis had a habit of appeasement. A bad habit. His residential-schools “penitential voyage” to Canada in 2022 was all well and good for Indigenous Catholics, but even all that was partly in service to the Trudeau Liberals’ incitement of mass hysteria set off by the discovery of a mass grave that wasn’t discovered and wasn’t a mass grave.

It didn’t help, either, that the Vatican played into a conspiracy theory straight out of the Da Vinci Code by giving the appearance of repudiating a 1493 “doctrine of discovery” two years ago that was fully and finally repudiated by Pope Benedict XIV in 1741 after it was abrogated anyway by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 and struck down by Sublimis Deus in 1537.

The last word on Pope Francis, and on forgiveness

That word goes to the Ukrainian writer Viktor Kravchuk, in Kyiv.

Yes, he disappointed us. Yes, he hurt many of us in Ukraine. What do you do when the man who preached peace doesn’t raise his voice when your country is bleeding?

There were moments, terrible moments, when it seemed like he was defending the aggressor instead of the victims. Moments of silence and softening. Moments of words that avoided naming the aggressor. Moments when we needed clarity and got ambiguity instead.

When you’re done here, do read the whole thing.

You were not everything we needed, Pope Francis. But you were good. You were kind. You tried.

I’m not sure I can summon that strength. It’s not up to me to forgive and neither will I be casting the first stone anyway, let me tell you.

But Viktor knows something of suffering and death, and of forgiveness, in the same way that the Filipino community of Vancouver and everyone who was there last night on East 43rd Street now knows something of what it’s like to be Ukrainian.