At about noon on Saturday, April 27, the last day of Passover, an adult male killed one person and injured three other people at the Chabad of Poway Synagogue in Poway, CA. The shooter has been arrested and charged with murder. This is the second deadly shooting at a synagogue in the United States in six months. The shooter, John Earnest, wrote and published an anti-Semitic manifesto prior to the attack.
Bishop Jaime Soto has released the following statement:
”The senseless attack on a synagogue in San Diego this past weekend has wounded our hearts. Violence threatened to overshadow the hallowed days of Passover and Easter, cherished by both Jews and Christians. The suffering anguish echoes with the sorrowful lamentations from the attack on Christian churches in Sri Lanka and the mosque in New Zealand. Prayerful people have been the target. Choosing to root our lives in prayer is our response. Both through public communal prayer as well as personal prayer, we unite ourselves to the merciful God who created us and to our brothers and sisters with whom we were meant to live in peace. May God grant us the courageous hope to remain steadfast in prayer for one another.”
Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, Archbishop of Galveston-Houston and President of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, issued the following statement:
“I, along with my brother bishops, am greatly saddened and deeply concerned over the news that another house of worship has been subjected to violence. This assault, which occurred on the last day of Passover, is the second shooting in a U.S. synagogue within six months. Our country should be better than this; our world should be beyond such acts of hatred and anti-Semitism. This attack joins an all too long list of attacks against innocent people, people of all faiths, who only want to gather and to pray. It is a contradiction, a perverting of their teachings to believe that Christianity, Judaism, or Islam would condone such violence. Unfortunately, both in the past and today, too many preach such hatred in the name of God. This cannot be abided; it must end.
“Our prayers today are for the victims of this shooting, and for the Jewish community of Poway, California, placing our trust and our hope in ‘the Lord [who] is close to the brokenhearted, and saves those whose spirit is crushed’” (Ps 34:19).”
To read the latest news story from Catholic News Agency, visit https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/our-country-should-be-better-than-this-says-dinardo-after-synagogue-attack-31133.