A friendship forged in face of evil... how Dunblane priest helped Sandy Hook cope after massacre in US classroom
IN a cosy guesthouse sheltering from a Connecticut winter, two white-haired Roman Catholic priests greet each other warmly under the quiet gaze of a documentary film crew.
Monsignor Basil O’Sullivan and Monsignor Bob Weiss may embrace like old friends, yet this is the first time they have ever met faceto-face. While their homes are separated by thousands of miles, they nevertheless share an unshakable bond of friendship forged in the face of terrible trauma.
Both have confronted purest evil; their stories eerily similar and equally troubling. Father O’Sullivan, then parish priest of Dunblane’s Holy Family Church, rushed to the town’s primary school on March 13, 1996, after hearing there had been a shooting. He soon learned that a crazed intruder had killed 16 P1 children and their teacher Gwen Mayor in the gym hall before turning his gun on himself.
In the days that followed he consoled griefstricken parents, helped to identify bodies and conducted funeral services. For years afterwards, he struggled to deal with his own psychological fallout from the attack and would often burst into tears at the mere sight of a young child.
Sixteen years later, when he learned that a gunman had visited unspeakable wickedness upon Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, killing 20 young children and six teachers, Father O’Sullivan knew immediately that his US counterpart would need help coping with the emotional toll of ministering to a devastated congregation.
And so, he reached out across the ocean with a simple act of kindness – a written message filled with compassion and practical advice that he hoped would help steady the ship and support Father Weiss through those first dark days. That precious email from Dunblane offered Father Weiss the first ray of light in his darkest days. The gesture moved him to write back and so began a remarkable correspondence born out of two senseless massacres.
When they finally met up in Connecticut, to hold a joint Mass marking the first anniversary of the Sandy Hook killings, it was captured by filmmaker Kim Snyder, who was inspired by how the two communities were helping each other come to terms with their tragedies.
This year, her powerful meditation on the lasting effects of mass killings – Notes From Dunblane: Lessons From a School Shooting – picked up the award for best short documentary at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Without being overtly political, it serves as a quietly compelling argument in favour of tighter gun control laws in the United States.
This week, as the film is released on Netflix, Father O’Sullivan spoke about his reasons for contacting his fellow pastor and how their emails have had an unexpectedly healing effect on him. ‘I saw the connection between the two towns. They are similar in size but also in light of the age of the children and similarity in the shootings,’ he says.
‘We are five or six hours ahead of Connecticut and we prayed for the victims of Newtown at our first Sunday Mass since the shootings there. One woman who lost a child in our own shooting in Dunblane, Pam Ross, came to me in tears and said I should contact the priest in Newtown.
‘I knew exactly what he was feeling and that his congregation would be devastated. It was uncanny; I felt I could identify totally with him.
‘So, there and then I emailed the letter to Father Weiss before he was due to say Mass in Newtown, telling him we were thinking of them. That’s how it started.’
The Irish-born priest, who still ministers in Dunblane at the age of 86, added: ‘I found the words flowed easily. When you have been in a tragedy like ours, everything remains fresh in our minds. It was as though I was talking to my own congregation on that first Sunday when they were traumatised by the evil that had been visited on their community.
‘He would be traumatised but have to talk to other people who were also traumatised. I had been there so knew exactly how he was feeling. I think writing to Bob did help me, too. Even the very letter I wrote that first Sunday was a help; it helped me to express myself. Everything still feels so fresh in my mind, it could have happened yesterday.
‘Kim Snyder got to hear about the emails we were writing to each other and she came over to Dunblane to interview me and one or two other people. It was due to her auspices that I went out to Newtown. It was very poignant meeting Bob around the first anniversary.’
FOR Father Weiss, even six years on from the massacre, the pain remains palpable. ‘This hurt is so real, just unimaginable that something like this could happen here,’ he says. ‘How do you live with that?’
Breaking down in tears, he adds: ‘I don’t think that people know how hard this is, I really don’t. I don’t know if it’s really had the impact, just to see so many people so affected.’
The film’s opening sequence revisits the immediate aftermath of both attacks 16 years apart, gently underlining the fact that Thomas Hamilton’s murderous spree in Dunblane lasted only three minutes, Adam Lanza’s barely five.
A TV interview given by Father O’Sullivan at the time reveals a man visibly stunned by such unimaginable horror. ‘Well, it’s been horrendous,’ he tells the reporter. ‘We are a sleepy little town, a very united little community and just in a total state of shock and total disbelief.’
For his part, Father Weiss, pastor of St Rose of Lima parish in Newtown, is also shown in the film confronting a barrage of media for the first time, almost stricken by the magnitude of the events which threaten to engulf him. Asked how many children were lost in his parish, his voice trembles as he replies: ‘We know for sure six, we think seven. We have quite a few from here...’
THROUGHOUT the film he is shown in a constant battle to keep a lid on his emotions, breaking down uncontrollably on several occasions. It emerges he once voluntarily committed himself for a month to a psychiatric clinic to be treated for posttraumatic stress disorder. ‘I will admit it continues to overwhelm me. I find myself just exhausted physically, I’m exhausted spiritually, I’m exhausted emotionally,’ he says.
‘I contacted our families and said I don’t think I can be much help counselling you now, it’s just still too raw. I’m realising that some of the really deep questions that people keep asking I don’t have answers for.
‘Kids in particular are questioning how could a good God let this happen? Why didn’t he stop him from pulling the trigger? Why didn’t he open his eyes and realise these were six and seven-year-old children? I certainly grapple with that.’
Despite everything, Father Weiss remains devoted to his calling. Part of that is due, he feels, to his newfound friend’s messages of support, prayers and encouragement which have given him the strength to figure out his own way forward and help guide the grieving parents.
‘You can’t fix things, you just can’t, you’ve just got to try to be there and try to help people fix it for themselves,’ he says.
Even now, two decades on, Father O’Sullivan confesses he and the rest of Dunblane are far from ‘fixed’.
‘It’s 22 years now since the event happened, but I’m quite sure that the people most closely affected, the mums and dads, would live it every day,’ he says. ‘There cannot be a day passing without them thinking about it. We have to live with it as best we can. Somebody asked me how we cope, but you just have to cope, you have no other choice.’
Father O’Sullivan, who was the school’s Roman Catholic priest at the time of the tragedy, admits with admirable candour just how close he, too, came to falling apart.
‘I was surprised by how badly affected I was,’ he says. ‘For a year or two, the very sight of a five-year-old made me cry. I knew that I wasn’t any use because you cannot have a priest going around town crying, you just couldn’t. That’s not what a priest is for. But life goes on, time is a great healer.’
In the film, he says: ‘You become more aware of the fragility of life. The poor parents, they left their children off at five to nine at the school and half an hour later they were dead. And so you learn how frail and how precious life is. It’s a very precious gift indeed.’
In one revealing email, he counsels Father Weiss not to neglect the state
of his own mental well-being. ‘Your experience is very similar to mine. As the weeks went by after the shooting and going through Lent, to my surprise I got worse and worse.
‘Looking back, I suppose it was some kind of a breakdown but I did not realise that at the time,’ he says. ‘During Holy Week I was crying all over the place, which is not much use in a parish priest and pastor. I hung in there until Easter and then went off to a sunny place for two weeks. I wasn’t completely better but I was much improved and more human on my return.
‘I do encourage you to take a holiday if you have not done so already, and even if you have, take advantage of the Easter break to get away again.’ A wry smile plays across Father O’Sullivan’s lips as he recalls ways in which his life has changed irrevocably, and often unexpectedly.
He had a weakness for cowboy movies, especially those starring his favourite John Wayne. ‘I can’t stand them now, I can’t stand the shooting so I’ve changed my television viewing drastically. John Wayne has gone out the window.’ The priest adds: ‘Guns, as far as I’m concerned, should be held only by the police and soldiers. That’s not the common view in the United States but, of course, it’s not for me to make a comment upon a great country like the United States. But I don’t understand it.’
He won’t be drawn further into the politics of gun control, except to praise the dignified but determined campaign by the bereaved parents of Dunblane, which led to the passing of two Firearms Acts outlawing private ownership of most handguns in Britain by 1999.
The Snowdrop Campaign, whose private petition garnered more than 750,000 signatures, became an unstoppable force that pushed through meaningful legislative change which, even today, seems unthinkable in Donald Trump’s America.
The film closes with some stark figures on gun crime which ought to make any right-thinking American citizen pause and consider their unfettered support for the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms.
Since the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, while some states including Connecticut passed tougher gun laws, nothing has been done at a federal level, where the pro-gun lobby remains powerful. Since Sandy Hook, there have been 1,600 mass shootings in the US, including more than 300 at schools.
Father O’Sullivan says the figures speak for themselves. ‘Dunblane is a small town far from the centre of power but they got their way and thank God there hasn’t been a school shooting since in Britain, so that’s a big positive,’ he says.
In one of the documentary’s most compelling scenes, archive footage of Father O’Sullivan giving his first sermon after the Dunblane atrocity merges into film of the priest offering the same words of comfort at a special Mass in Newtown to commemorate the first anniversary of Sandy Hook.
‘Love,’ he says, standing shoulder to shoulder with Father Weiss, ‘although it looks weak, always overcomes hatred and evil. We pray that the tragedy of Newtown and Dunblane will never happen again anywhere, and that our children and our little ones will feel safe and snug in their nurseries and schools.’
We can only hope America will one day hear their prayers.