Cross of Christ Conquers Icons of Evil| National Catholic Register
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.
Violence in the house of the Lord is particularly perverse and maintains its capacity to shock.
The mass killing at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, after the shooter had been welcomed to the evening Bible study, still sears the memory 10 years later. The historic Black congregation had provided an icon of hospitality; the killer converted it to an icon of hatred and hostility. In eulogizing those killed, President Barack Obama broke into song, Amazing Grace, attempting to heal with a hymn — an icon for the ear.
At Utah Valley University, the iconography was not sacred but civic. Charlie Kirk, unlike the other victims, was a precise target. He was in the courtyard of the campus, a place of encounter in an institution dedicated to rational inquiry, free exchange and search for truth.
Kirk had a rare gift for that encounter, drawing on Wednesday several thousand students, as he had done in many other places. He was murdered in the very midst of engaging in civil debate, the campus courtyard converted in an instant by an act of civic defilement, not unlike the sacrilege at Annunciation in Minneapolis. Another perverse icon, an image making present the reality of evil.
Christians are accustomed to icons, including those depicting the deaths of martyrs, sometimes even disturbingly so. Videos of Kirk’s killing were posted online. I chose not to watch. There are images one cannot bear to see.
As proper icons elevate, perverse icons degrade. The Sandy Hook mass killer had been obsessed with the mass killings at Columbine a decade or so earlier. Something similar may have had a role in Minneapolis. Somewhere, the images of these past weeks are leading another soul terribly, lethally, astray.
This Sunday falls on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, and Jesus speaks about icons. One of the most curious such is in the Book of Numbers, with Moses fashioning a bronze image of a deadly serpent. The image of affliction becomes the source of miraculous healing. Jesus applies that image to his own salvific work on the cross:
Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.
The cross, in and of itself, is an icon of sin, cruelty and death. The cross of Christ converts that cursed icon to a blessed one, the image that makes present the mystery of salvation. The world provides its own iconography — an iconography of evil — as it has in recent weeks. God then provides his own.
