WASHINGTON (OSV News) — As the nation grappled with the aftermath of a deadly mass shooting Aug. 27 while students and staff from Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis attended an all-school Mass at the adjacent Annunciation Catholic Church, the Trump administration said it would investigate the tragedy as both domestic terrorism and as an anti-Catholic hate crime. Some lawmakers called for new legislative action to prevent gun violence.
In Washington, President Donald Trump signed an executive order Aug. 25 targeting those who burn an American flag as an act of protest, and senior staff left the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after reported disagreement with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over his preferred vaccine policy.
FBI to investigate Catholic school shooting as ‘domestic terrorism’ and ‘hate crime targeting Catholics’
In the wake of the shooting, which killed two children and injured 17 others during the Mass, Trump ordered flags across the U.S. and its military bases and embassies abroad flown at half-staff to remember the victims.
FBI Director Kash Patel wrote in a post on X that the bureau “is investigating this shooting as an act of domestic terrorism and hate crime targeting Catholics.” Patel said the shooter “has been identified as Robin Westman, a male born as Robert Westman.”
Some lawmakers called for a legislative response as an effort to prevent such tragedies in the future.
“We have a choice: do we do something or not? We can take meaningful action to save lives without infringing on the 2nd Amendment,” Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc., wrote on X, arguing universal background checks could be among such efforts.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has long called for a total ban on assault weapons, a term that commonly refers to military-style semi-automatic rifles, shotguns, and pistols fed by ammunition magazines of various capacities.
In response to a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers, Congress passed a modest gun safety bill — the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — that expanded the background check system for prospective gun buyers under 21 years old, closed a provision known as the “boyfriend loophole,” banning domestic abusers from purchasing firearms regardless of their marital status, and funded new investments in mental health resources.
The USCCB supported that legislation.
Trump signs executive order on flag burning
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Aug. 25 targeting those who burn an American flag as an act of protest.
Supreme Court precedent broadly holds such acts of protest as protected by the First Amendment, but Trump’s executive order stated his administration would seek to “prosecute those who desecrate this symbol of our freedom, identity, and strength to the fullest extent permissible.”
But when Trump signed the executive order, he told reporters, “if you burn a flag, you get one year in jail, no early exits, no nothing.”
In what will likely become a test case, a U.S. Army veteran was taken into custody in front of the White House on the same day after burning a flag in protest of the executive order.
In a controversial and narrowly-decided 1989 case, Texas v. Johnson, the U.S. Supreme Court found that flag-burning is a type of free speech protected by the First Amendment.
The late Justice Antonin Scalia, a Catholic and a jurist seen as one of the court’s notable conservatives, was among the majority in that case.
In a 2012 interview on CNN, Scalia elaborated on his position, saying that while he personally found flag burning objectionable, the plain interpretation of the First Amendment permits it.
“If I were king, I would not allow people to go about burning the American flag,” he said. “However, we have a First Amendment, which says that the right of free speech ‘shall not be abridged.’ And it is addressed, in particular, to speech critical of the government. I mean, that was the main kind of speech that tyrants would seek to suppress.”
“Burning the flag is a form of expression. Speech doesn’t just mean written words or oral words,” he added. “It could be semaphore. And burning a flag is a symbol that expresses an idea, ‘I hate the government, the government is unjust,’ whatever.”
Vice President JD Vance, in apparent response to commentary about Scalia’s position, simultaneously argued in a post on X, that the executive order “is consistent with Texas v. Johnson,” but that the case was wrongly decided.
Tumultuous week at CDC after COVID-19 vaccine recommendations narrowed
The Food and Drug Administration approved an updated version of COVID-19 vaccines Aug. 27, but imposed new restrictions on who is eligible to receive them.
The FDA moved to limit the updated shots to people it says are most at risk for serious complications, such as those 65 or older or other health conditions such as lung conditions or diabetes. Previously, COVID vaccines were available to anyone 6 months and older, regardless of their overall health status.
“The American people demanded science, safety, and common sense. This framework delivers all three,” Kennedy argued on X.
The announcement came in tandem with resignations at the CDC over what senior leaders called an unscientific vaccine recommendation process there.
The White House fired CDC director Susan Monarez–who was sworn in less than one month prior–after she clashed with Kennedy, a longtime vaccine critic, over policy governing them. Several other officials there resigned in similar protest.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Aug. 28 a statement from Monarez’s lawyers that she had chosen “protecting the public over serving a political agenda,” shows that she “was not aligned with the president’s mission to make America healthy again.”
The White House named Kennedy ally Jim O’Neill as its choice to replace Monarez.
The Catholic Church has been clear that Catholics may receive COVID-19 vaccines, but such decisions should be voluntary.
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, shortly before vaccines became available to the American public, the Holy See’s Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith, Catholic bishops, and theologians all released statements that the COVID-19 vaccines were morally permissible for Catholics to receive.
Those statements varied only slightly, as the U.S. bishops encouraged Catholics, where they had such a choice, to seek some brands of vaccines over others due to the varying degrees of remote connection to cell lines derived originally from several unborn children aborted in the mid-20th century.
Currently used cell lines are not the same as fetal tissue, as they were developed in a laboratory over the course of decades. Almost all cells die after they have divided a certain number of times, a phenomenon scientists call the Hayflick limit.
The 2020 statement from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, now a dicastery, said while any connection to abortion was remote, “the licit use of such vaccines does not and should not in any way imply that there is a moral endorsement of the use of cell lines proceeding from aborted fetuses. Both pharmaceutical companies and governmental health agencies are therefore encouraged to produce, approve, distribute, and offer ethically acceptable vaccines that do not create problems of conscience for either health care providers or the people to be vaccinated.”
But that statement also stressed, “from the ethical point of view, the morality of vaccination depends not only on the duty to protect one’s own health, but also on the duty to pursue the common good. In the absence of other means to stop or even prevent the epidemic, the common good may recommend vaccination, especially to protect the weakest and most exposed.”
Kate Scanlon is a national reporter for OSV News covering Washington. Follow her on X @kgscanlon.
