WASHINGTON – From a Franciscan parish in a city where one of the victims once lived to a border city that experienced a similar mass shooting, Catholics around the nation remembered those gunned down May 14 in Buffalo, New York, and prayed for an end to violence and racism.   

In Syracuse, New York, family and friends gathered in Assumption Church May 21 to mourn Roberta Drury, who at 32, was the youngest victim of what authorities believe was a racially motivated attack targeting Black people at a Buffalo grocery store.

“Last Saturday, May the 14th, our corner of the world was changed forever. Lives ended. Dreams shattered and our state was plunged into mourning,” Franciscan Father Nicholas Spano said during Drury’s funeral Mass attended by her parents.

Authorities said that a gunman wearing tactical gear and armed with an assault weapon entered a supermarket in a predominantly Black area of Buffalo at around 2:30 p.m. that day and began firing at customers and employees, injuring three and killing 10.

One of them was Drury, who was raised in the Syracuse area but moved away a decade ago to care for a sick brother in Buffalo, news reports said.

[[In-content Ad]]
Police arrested 18-year-old suspect Payton S. Gendron, of Conklin, New York, at the scene. He pleaded “not guilty” after being charged with first-degree murder and is in custody without bail.

News reports said authorities have pointed to a 180-page online document the shooting suspect is alleged to have left behind, filled with racist views and details of his plan of attack. The Associated Press reported that the writer “intended to terrorize all nonwhite, non-Christian people and get them to leave the country.”

Bishop Michael W. Fisher of Buffalo joined mourners outside the Tops grocery store where the shootings occurred in what law enforcement authorities said was a racially motivated crime.

Placing flowers and a handwritten note remembering “the souls of our brothers and sisters lost to the acts of violence and racism” at a growing memorial outside the store, Bishop Fisher paid his respects to the victims May 17, the Western New York Catholic reported.

Shortly after the shooting, Bishop Fisher condemned on Twitter “the scourge of senseless gun violence that has taken the lives of so many across our nation and changed the lives of countless innocent men, women and children must come to an end.”

On May 17, he later updated his remarks saying that innocent people were victimized in the killing spree. “No love was shown in this rampage, only the deepest of hate,” he said.

“This country has struggled for years with the practice of racism and white supremacy that has victimized communities of color and has

weakened us all. My heart is so heavy, and I pray for the victims, their families, friends and this community traumatized by this tragedy,” he said in a statement.

“Faith,” he continued, “compels us to reject the abject evil of racism and white supremacy, and to say ‘no’ to terror, and ‘no’ to the intent to silence Black and Brown voices.”

The bishop also hosted an interfaith prayer service May 23 in St. Martin de Porres Church, located near the grocery store.

In El Paso, Texas, where a similar tragedy took place after a gunman opened fire on a mostly Latino clientele at a Walmart in 2019, community members, including Bishop Mark J. Seitz, gathered at a park in a show of solidarity with Buffalo May 22. Flyers announcing the event said that the similarities of the violent attack in both cities “will always unite our two communities.”

Bishop Seitz, offering prayers with those gathered, said:

“We entrust the souls of the just to you, O Lord. We entrust to you souls singled out by the color of their skin, slain by weapons of war and instruments of hatred. We entrust to you our Latino and African American brothers and sisters, and all other people of every race and nation, victims of the diabolical lunacy of racial discrimination.”

Bishop Seitz, along with priests from the El Paso Diocese, tended to the dying as well as the injured following the 2019 attack, which left 23 dead and 23 injured.

“As you care for those who have died and were injured in El Paso and in Buffalo, and all those sacrificed at the altar of the gods of White Supremacy, we ask your forgiveness, O Lord, for all the ways we fail to recognize this evil and its long shadow,” Bishop Seitz prayed.

“The souls of the just are in your hands, O Lord, but there is one final grace that we beg of you,” he said. “Out of the ashes of these unspeakable crimes, grant that we might rededicate ourselves, people of every race, to making of ourselves one family, diverse in our origins, varied in our cultures and languages and gifts, yet beloved daughters and sons of the same loving God, who is Lord forever and ever.”