Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice Dasilva Aguiar and Bebe King died after the attack.
“How will this help the families?” a dismayed Fr John Heneghan asks himself, as he and Andy Drozdziak discussed the riot that broke out during a vigil for the children who were killed on 29 July in the horrific knife attack in Southport.
A week later Fr Heneghan was leading a memorial service at St Patrick’s Catholic church in Southport for Alice da Silva Aguiar, 9, one of the three girls who were killed. “Children are a gift and Alice had this radiant smile. I call it a rainbow smile because it was so full of life. You couldn’t look at it and not smile, you couldn’t keep a straight face because it was just raw happiness,” he told the congregation.
Afterwards, Fr Heneghan told Andy Drozdziak that he was “grateful” for the support offered to the families and the town since the attacks. “From someone who lives in Southport and who loves the area, the message is a massive ‘Thank you’ for all the love,” he said. “We’re all shocked and we know that people all around the country are shocked. We’re so grateful for the love, because we feel it.” Alice’s funeral will take place on Sunday.
In The Tablet print edition this week, we look at the complex relationship between social media such as X/formerly Twitter (Telegram is another example of the genre) and the rioters. Messages from agitators – uncensored because of Elon Musk’s free speech obsession – have directed them where and when to go in order to cause trouble. But the role of social media is more insidious than that. Far-right groups recognise that disillusioned and directionless young men will respond to a strong voice, and have set out to make themselves the strongest voice in the room. Recruitment to the Nazi party in 1930s Germany had a similar dynamic. Events have clearly put the British multiracial experiment under strain, but are very far from breaking it. Left to themselves, the British have time and again proved themselves allergic to extremism. They do not need the evil genius of Elon Musk meddling in their affairs. Perhaps telling him to mind his own business might be necessary.
“I follow the Olympics like it’s my second job – canoe slalom on one screen, rugby sevens on another – because the Games are a tapestry of human solidarity and courage, and because I like yelling at the TV,” confesses Liz Dodd in her column this week. “How on earth did the Church turn them into a culture war?” she wonders. Some of the most stinging criticisms of the opening ceremony came from US Catholics very shortly after the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis, “a choreographed caretaking of the presence of God … No wonder, after such a manicured experience of holiness, that difference and challenge – like trans people making art – might be, as the Right so often likes to say, ‘triggering’.” How horrendous, Liz writes, that the death threats the director and the performers in the parody of da Vinci’s Last Supper received likely came – or certainly were stoked by – a corner of the Catholic Church. “It is easy to watch, aghast, as fascists attack mosques in the West Midlands: it is harder to acknowledge that that same violence lies not-so-dormant in our Church. When it comes, revival in the Catholic Church will look like a tidal wave of love, not the shoring up of a subculture that alienates and derides.”
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