Charlotte, Minneapolis, Charlie Kirk Killing: Cross of Christ Conquers Icons of Evil
National Catholic Register, 11 September 2025
As proper icons elevate, perverse icons degrade — and horrific recent crimes have imprinted images that make present the reality of evil. But evil will not have the last word.
Three killings in quick succession have dominated national attention.
On Aug. 22, Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska was fatally stabbed on a Charlotte, North Carolina, commuter train, with video of her horrific murder released earlier this week.
On Aug. 27, the mass shooting at Annunciation parish in Minneapolis killed two schoolchildren.
On Sept. 10, Christian conservative movement leader Charlie Kirk was assassinated on the campus of Utah Valley University.
That attention is paid is not to be presumed. There is not enough attention available. The day before the Annunciation shooting, another mass shooting took place in the same city, close to Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, killing one and injuring several others. The same morning of Kirk’s assassination, there was a school shooting in Colorado. There is always another one.
The three atrocities were particularly sudden and brutal, and two were captured on video. Circumstances were unusually cruel — a woman killed for no reason on her way home from work, a man killed with his wife and young children present, and children killed at Holy Mass.
The events demanded attention because they were icons — images that convey something more, somehow making present the reality represented. The killings were perverse icons, a sort of iconography of evil.
The refugee who makes a new life in a new land is a foundational image of America; it is the meaning of the country’s most famous image — the Statue of Liberty — in the very engraved words welcoming new arrivals.
Zarutska was making a new life after fleeing the Russian invasion of her homeland. It was not a grand life — she worked at a pizzeria — but she had work in a prosperous and peaceful land.
Her killing thus mocks the message of the statue in New York Harbor. It inverts, perverts that embrace. Lethal danger is what refugees flee from, not encounter, in their new home.
School shootings are too frequent to command wide attention anymore. That the Annunciation killings took place at Mass, while the children were praying, was the difference in Minneapolis. There, bullets crashed through the stained-glass windows, showering shards into the church.
Pope Benedict XVI’s preaching in St. Patrick’s Cathedral immediately came to mind, about how stained-glass windows are “from the outside … dark, heavy, even dreary.”
“Once one enters the church, they suddenly come alive; reflecting the light passing through them, they reveal all their splendor,” Benedict continued. “It is only from the inside, from the experience of faith and ecclesial life, that we see the Church as she truly is: flooded with grace, resplendent in beauty, adorned by the manifold gifts of the Spirit.”
The children were inside, and from outside came not resplendent light, but lethal bullets. The proper iconography of the windows was shattered, usurped by the perverse iconography of a sanctuary not flooded with grace but overwhelmed by lethal hatred.
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