PART 14: Antichrists revealed by Christ – Feasts of the antichrists

“When John Paul II said, ‘The gunman fired the gun, but Mary guided the bullet,’” DePerro started, “there was more than one bullet that she guided that day.”

“We were very, very blessed. We were spared the worst.”

Shock and Healing

Following the attack, DePerro and the other witnesses of the assassination attempt were in shock. However, as a child, DePerro did not know what shock was, much less how to respond to it. “I didn’t know what that was called. When you’re a kid, you feel a lot of things or you feel nothing.”

DePerro said that while what he experienced was troubling, it did not make him sad — even though he felt it should. “There was just an emptiness and a confusion,” he recalled. This emptiness contrasted, however, with others’ responses of sadness and tears, making David feel “guilty because I thought I should be crying.

“I started crying crocodile tears. I started crying because I was supposed to be crying.”

He added that, in the days following the assassination attempt, the group continued its tour of Italy, traveling to Assisi and holding Masses to pray for the Pope and their own group member injured in the attack. “I have no recollection of that service,” DePerro said, adding that he has little recollection of any details of the trip after the assassination attempt. Instead, he said, DePerro turns to memories from his parents and others on the trip to fill in the gaps of what happened.

DePerro remained silent on his experiences, until the aftermath of the shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007. Since then, DePerro has taken to speaking to children and young adults, as well as to news outlets, about his experiences during and after the shooting and to offer advice and the “example of St. John Paul II as a saint to whom they can turn.”

One of the most important points for children and youth who are witnesses of shootings to understand, DePerro said, is that they should be free to talk about and to process their feelings on what happened, no matter what they are. Children who are witnesses of violence should find a trusted adult to talk about what they feel (sadness, anger, nothingness and even gratefulness) without fear of how others will judge those feelings. “It might take a long time to process those feelings, to feel those feelings,” DePerro advised, stressing that as children try to work through what they witnessed, “there should be no guilt that it takes a long time to feel those feelings.”