Dayton Catholics see need to spur action from mass shooting

Nick Cardilino thought he understood solidarity and the human family. Then he woke up to the news Sunday morning of the mass shooting at a bar in Dayton's Oregon District and remembered that his son had been a few blocks away, at a baseball game, the night before.

"As you can imagine, I panicked," said Cardilino, who serves as associate director of campus ministry and director of the Center for Social Concern at the University of Dayton. He texted his son right away and thought, "If he doesn't reply to me in five minutes, I'm going to call him and wake him up."

His son texted right back, to Cardilino's great relief, but an hour later, he found himself sobbing. He was now in solidarity with his brothers and sisters in a litany of U.S. communities impacted by mass shootings, including El Paso, Texas, not 24 hours earlier. "I wish I had gone there first," he said of his immediately thinking not of other communities, but first of his own kids, then his students and his community. "I found myself kind of moving out from my own personal situation," he said.