Fr. Morris: Where was God when the Las Vegas massacre happened?
On Sunday night, Stephen Paddock opened fire during an outdoor country music festival in Las Vegas killing at least 59 people and injuring more than 500 others. The massacre is the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
Father Jonathan Morris, a Catholic priest and Fox News contributor, discussed the massacre on FOX Business on Wednesday.
“Varney & Co.” host Stuart Varney asked Father Morris how a “loving God” could allow something like this to happen and Father Morris replied: “Maybe even, where was God when this happened? Before and during.”
In Father Morris’s opinion, free will played a role.
“I think [God] weeps alongside us and weeps alongside those victims of this terrible abuse of the gift that he has given to us of free will,” Father Morris said. “If he intervened every time you and I made a bad decision we would be robots. We would not be humans. And we would not be able to do something that is the most important of all—and that is to make a free decision to love.”
Varney asked how free will impacted the victims: “Through no fault of their own they’re dead, wounded, injured, trampled—where does free will come in there? Because they didn’t exercise any free will at all when they were trapped,” he asked.
“If you do not believe in the afterlife, if you do not believe in the possibility of heaven—you’re exactly right, that makes no sense and God cannot allow that to happen in order to give us free will,” Father Jonathan replied. “But if you believe that God does have a solution to every one of the problems of suffering that we experience in this life and ultimately heaven—the possibility of a place where every tear will be wiped away, well then we can see that God would be able to step in and say here’s plan B. My plan was not for you to… abuse your free will to hurt people but what you do to those innocent victims, to those who accept my love, I have another plan and it’s called heaven and it’s forever.”