Who greets you on a Sunday morning when you walk into your church? Gentlemanly ushers? Nervous pre-teens co-opted to offer a shy word of welcome? Or an off-duty police officer packing a pistol?

I recently accompanied my son to Dallas for his first adult-world, job. Newly graduated and recently engaged, he is nothing if not task oriented. He had already researched the Catholic churches with a view to finding a home and location for his impending nuptials.  

Among my favorite things about travelling is attending Mass in a new locale. Away from my home parish routine, I can sit, pray and observe. I look at people in the pews for differences in habit and dress, and for nuances of the Catholic world – a special devotion, added prayers, the choice of hymnbooks.

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My son directed us to Christ the King Catholic Church, which, like everything in Texas, is big. Combined with the school, it takes up a city block. Founded in 1941, it is one of the oldest Catholic churches in Dallas, and is surrounded by homes with nicely tended gardens and late-model cars. 

The ushers wore sport coats and ties. Their formality mirrored the congregation’s: Many women wore dresses and some men rocked bowties.

So far, so Texas, but I did a rapid double take when I spied a uniformed and armed man at the front doors.

I first thought it was a security guard, and was primed, journalist-mode-activated, to find someone to question. Why did this parish, in such a leafy, prosperous area, need extra protection? 

My son, knowing my habit of getting into protracted conversations, corralled me. The pews were filling. He wanted to grab a seat. Only after Mass did I start thinking again about the guy at the back. 

Catholic churches in the US are not being burned down as Canadian churches are but they have witnessed a recent rash of attacks.

On May 11, a teenager entered a Louisiana church with a rifle during a First Communion Mass and was quickly subdued by parishioners. 

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Two weeks later, a man brandishing a bamboo cane assaulted two men at the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City during a Sunday morning Mass.

Turns out the hired gun, though strange to my Canadian-acclimated eyes, is so normal that even the church staff can’t remember when the practice first began.

I contacted Andrew Petiprin, the ‘Kevin Cardinal Farrell Director of Community Life’ at Christ the King, for answers.

Petiprin said, “Christ the King employs one uniformed off-duty officer from the Dallas Police Department at each weekend Mass. This is standard practice at most churches in our area – Catholic and Protestant.”

Turns out the practice is so routine there are long Reddit threads about guns at Mass policies and protocols in case of an attack. One thread from three years ago opened with a question from a  self-identified Knight of Columbus who ushered at his parish and carried a concealed handgun while doing so.

A mystified reader replied, “For a European, this is such an abstraction. I would never ever think about carrying a gun to a church. I would never think that it could prevent something bad to happen because I can't imagine such a bad thing to happen.”

More common were U.S. Catholics responding with years-in-the-making practices, split between those in dioceses where it was common to have an off-duty police officer at Mass and those where parishioners routinely carried.

“I’ve been to parishes (where) all the men of the parish who carry discuss their strategy if something does happen (to prevent it from turning into the OK Corral). The priest was part of the meetings as were law enforcement officers. I personally feel much safer knowing we have men in the parish willing and able to protect us if the worst happens,” wrote one Redditor.

Perhaps I assume wrongly most Canadian Catholics would roll their eyes and “tsk”about American gun culture, but it was interesting that typing “2024 Catholic church shooting” into a search engine pops up two events that have nothing to do with the U.S.

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The first was the January shooting in Istanbul in which one churchgoer was killed. The attack was carried out by the Islamic State and was part of a larger foiled plot. The second was a horrific attack in Burkina Faso in February when gunmen killed 15 Catholics gathered for Mass.

Making one question whether the response should be, “Pray for peace and pass the ammunition.”