Virginia colleges, high schools hold memorials for shooting victims

Published: 2007-04-24

ARLINGTON, Va. (CNS) -- Perhaps nowhere has the sting of the shootings at Virginia Tech been felt more palpably than on college campuses throughout the commonwealth of Virginia. "It could have been here," people were saying. "It could have been us." On April 16 at the university in Blacksburg, student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people before turning his gun on himself as police closed in. No one can make sense of such a senseless act, and trying to make sense of it is beyond our understanding, said Father Peter Nasetta, Catholic campus minister at George Mason University in Fairfax. "How can you make sense of what you can't make sense of?" Father Nasetta said in his homily at a memorial Mass on campus at St. Robert Bellarmine Chapel April 19. "Questions persist." But, he added, another senseless act was for God to take human form as his Son, to take on the world's sufferings and ultimately to die to save humanity. "Out of love for us, God chooses to become one of us and then die for us," he said. "God's love is mysterious. The way our God works is hard to understand."

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