Four leaders had barely arrived at Annunciation in Minneapolis when they found themselves helping a wounded community to heal and find a way toward hope. A shooting during an all-school Mass that took the lives of two students and wounded others sent the Annunciation community reeling Aug. 27, 2025.
The experiences these four leaders brought to Annunciation helped shape how they led the community in the aftermath.
Father Dennis Zehren, ordained in 2004, was first assigned to Annunciation July 1, 2025, almost two months before the shooting.
Deacon Kevin Conneely began his ministry — as a deacon and at Annunciation — in January 2024. Deana Clapp, the dean of school culture, came to Annunciation in August 2025. The school’s principal, Matt DeBoer, was the assistant principal at Annunciation and took over as principal three days before Aug. 27.
Deacon Conneely believes he and other Annunciation leaders were there for a reason. Both he and Father Zehren were on the altar that morning. DeBoer was at the back of the pews where he usually sits during school Mass.
“People say to me all the time how impressed they are. ‘Your pastor was new, and your principal was new, and all these people who were just arriving at Annunciation,’ and they say, ‘We’re so glad you were there,’” Deacon Conneely said. “I have to believe them that we were there together for a purpose. We were intended to come together and work as a team, and we didn’t have any history. We just had to make it happen because we knew we had to be a unified group leading the parish.”
Bringing experience to bear
Something Annunciation staff have shared with each other is that “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.”
“Well, God has an awful lot of confidence in us here at Annunciation,” DeBoer joked. He added that sometimes “you have to laugh through trauma.”
He believes God gives each person the right tools to honor their vocations. Annunciation has been blessed with that, DeBoer said.
“I think we do all have the tools we need,” DeBoer said. “Sometimes you need a little more help to learn how to use the tools in your tool bag, but they’re there, and that’s why it does take the community. It’s not one person’s job to do it all.”
To do his work, Jesus assembled a team of 12, DeBoer said. A team of four was quietly assembled at Annunciation before the tragedy.
When Clapp was hired, she brought her 29 years of experience in education. Clapp was at Our Lady of Grace in Edina in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. For three years, she was at Breck School in Golden Valley. She was at Blake School in Hopkins for 13 years.
When Father Zehren arrived at Annunciation, he was the deacon’s third pastor in just two years.
“Everything was new to me each year, trying to adjust to Annunciation, but I knew that it was an established parish in south Minneapolis with a school that had a strong reputation,” Deacon Conneely said. “I wanted to, as a new deacon, be part of that whole culture, parish and school.”
Before Deacon Conneely was ordained, he practiced law at a large la
w firm for 37 years. He was familiar with the fallouts that could arise from such a publicized tragedy, he said. On behalf of the parish, he used his experience as a lawyer to help protect the parish from “the outside world” and to advocate for it through contracts, publicity and other efforts.
“I felt like my gifts as a lawyer helped me be ready to tackle all those things,” Deacon Conneely said.
DeBoer said that he and Deacon Conneely were blessed to both even have a year at Annunciation under their belts. They had learned names and developed relationships.
“(One) of the miracles of the year is we did have a ton of new folks in leadership roles, and we just had to kind of … learn by doing this job of recovery and guiding and navigating communities through it. I had the advantage of at least knowing people’s names,” DeBoer said. “There are so many people here, despite all the new leaders. There’s great retention here at Annunciation among the faculty and staff at the school, and in many ways the parish staff as well. While the public-facing leadership team was brand new, there (are) some real anchors and great dedication among the staff here at all levels. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to lead a team of teachers that were new or not rooted in the community.”
The data speaks for itself, DeBoer said, with 100% of parish and school staff returning to work after the tragedy. New leadership leaned on this veteran presence and institutional knowledge.
“That was the blessing,” DeBoer said. “The reality is we had a new reality in front of us, and so I think that combination of institutional knowledge and tradition, as well as new energy, new leaders, new vision; it’s always striking that balance. I think we’ve all learned how to be better listeners in serving together.”
Per the Washburn Center for Children — a mental health service in Minneapolis — Annunciation was prepared for a trauma response of best practice, Clapp said, meaning “they had a strong social and emotional curriculum where children were used to talking about their emotions and knowing themselves in space and time.”
“If you walk into classrooms in Annunciation, you’ll see mood meters, you’ll see sensory corners, you’ll see all the best practices, and they’ve worked on that for years and years,” Clapp said. “And then a set of procedures when behavior arrives that you’re asking an adult for help and engaging versus a punitive system.”
At Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, DeBoer was a business major. In 2005, while he was in college, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.
“I just felt called to be in that community,” DeBoer said. “I went down there a bunch of times during college.”
DeBoer worked with Catholic Charities and Operation Helping Hands. Then he applied for the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and was placed in New Orleans at Good Shepherd Catholic School as a teacher.
“I began my professional educational career in post-Katrina New Orleans and taught religion there in a community recovering from this collective trauma,” DeBoer said. “That’s where I learned how to be an educator. I didn’t study education; I learned by doing in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and then got my credentials afterwards.”
DeBoer said his first professors were the children and parents of New Orleans coming out of Katrina. The community that welcomed him also modeled what healing looks like in the face of disaster, he said.
“I think that those six years in New Orleans were really transformational for me and sparked my call to leadership,” DeBoer said.
When DeBoer was 28 years old, he became the fifth principal in six years at a Catholic school in Seattle that had a “great deal of challenges.” The school was struggling with enrollment and its Catholic identity.
“I just said, ‘Let’s show up and bring my best self’ and go all in to try to transform that school. And it was a long eight years, but serving there in that community, I just learned a lot,” DeBoer said. “I learned about making mistakes. I learned about learning from mistakes. I learned about the need for that partnership between parents and staff to serve kids collaboratively with creative solutions.”
In the Twin Cities, DeBoer worked for Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Minneapolis and Totino-Grace High School in Fridley, two “very different Catholic high schools in our local archdiocese,” DeBoer said.
“I learned a lot more about the local landscape,” DeBoer said. “And again, just meeting kids and people where they’re at.”
DeBoer believes God sent him to several places, including mission trips to Ethiopia where he met his wife.
“In every place I’ve served, there’s been challenges,” DeBoer said. “You just learn from people who’ve done amazing things, and then I try to incorporate that … here. God has sent me a number of places, and I do feel like that journey, my life, has been more of that spiritual chiseling to serve in this capacity at this time, at this place that nobody should have to serve in, but I do feel blessed that my prior experiences did prepare me to try to minister here to the best of the needs of the community at this time.”
In an email to The Catholic Spirit, Father Zehren wrote that his years as a priest taught him that blessings come to a shepherd who “doesn’t run at the first sign of danger.”
“As Moses told the people at the Red Sea, ‘Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you,’” Father Zehren wrote. “If you quit in the middle of the story, you never see the happy ending that God brings about.”
“It’s true that I was new to Annunciation,” Father Zehren wrote. “We hadn’t been working together long. It’s like the apostles — they didn’t have time to prepare before answering the call of Jesus. They heard His voice. They knew to answer without hesitating. Each had gifts for the mission.”
During workshop week, when Clapp was supposed to start, she had emergency gallbladder surgery. She recovered at home until the first day of school, Aug. 25, 2025.
“Of course, the first two days of school, all administrators overdo it,” Clapp said. “I had four incisions that I was caring for. So, Matt (DeBoer) said Tuesday night (Aug. 26), ‘I want you to rest tomorrow. Sleep in. We have Mass (in the morning) if you want to come in the afternoon. Take your time.’”
Clapp was home the morning of Aug. 27. At 8:30 a.m., she heard sirens.
“I’ve never heard that many sirens,” she said.
That afternoon, Clapp hit the ground running. The first task was taking care of Annunciation’s families, children and staff, she said.
“What I brought to bear is a variety of experiences working with many community stakeholders, a variety of experience in emergency procedure preparation, and a handful of low-level emergencies that we dealt with in (my) 29 years in education,” Clapp said. “I just felt like I was the freshest person, obviously without the trauma of that morning. I was just in a very different space.”
Larger than a parish
Annunciation has always been a parish, but after Aug. 27, it became for some people a cause, Deacon Conneely said. It became “something to pray for, something to support financially, something to try to help heal, and so it really became something larger than a parish.”
“Everyone knows about the tragedy, and people in my circle of friends or family, they will tell me how they heard about it, or who was praying for us, from all different states, all different faith backgrounds,” Deacon Conneely said. “It really has become something to rally around. People don’t want to see the evil win, they really want two things: They want this to never happen again, and they want us to be able to heal from what did happen.”
Leadership at Annunciation wants the parish to remain known as a parish and not just one more name in a long line of communities dealing with the tragedy of a school shooting, like Columbine, Sandy Hook, or Uvalde, Deacon Conneely said.
“We want to grow into something,” Deacon Conneely said. “One of the lines we use is that we don’t want this tragedy to define us; we want it to refine us.”
Clapp and her husband have been parishioners at Annunciation for 20 years. They live in the neighborhood. When Clapp walks her dog on a school day, she hears children on the school’s playground during recess.
When she applied for the position of dean of school culture last spring, it was exactly what she wanted. She could walk to work and be part of a close community.
“Everyone that you meet in this neighborhood has a really strong connection to (Annunciation), whether they’re Catholic or not,” Clapp said. “My understanding of Annunciation was just always a really tight-knit community and academically excellent for children.”
“One of my colleagues says, ‘Grief and joy hold hands.’ I think Catholics really understand that hope is the opposite of despair. Joy is the opposite of grief. But both (can be) held together in a way that is consecrated,” Clapp said. “This community, because of all that was really in place, very tight knit, very joy filled, we were able to share that story.”
Part of the growing is a new preschool. Annunciation had been the landlord for an entirely separate preschool on its campus. Now, Annunciation has made it their own: Annunciation Preschool.
“We had a really good cooperative relationship with the company that was running (the preschool),” Deacon Conneely said. “But the shooting tragedy just heightened our resolve to make Annunciation a place where even younger families could bring their kids, and that we could, so to speak, seed the classes coming up. Instead of entering at first grade, second grade, third grade, have preschoolers who are going to be the future students of Annunciation who weren’t impacted directly by the tragedy.”
To DeBoer’s surprise, his words have made the front page of newspapers and filled news stories. Sometimes people around his Minneapolis neighborhood recognize him. But when a child recognized DeBoer while biking, and the child shared that he was friends with a student at Annunciation, DeBoer said that impacted him more than any other recognition.
Still, he said he doesn’t feel like there’s anything special he’s done well or not well, but he continues to value the ministry of presence. Jesus was always present to whomever was in front of him, DeBoer said.
“My model is to be present to the various needs of a family or a child,” DeBoer said. “We have an amazing team of adults here that shares in that. It’s not one person’s job. It’s our collective (responsibility) to be Christ to the kids. That’s our collective role in Catholic education. Just showing up for families in the darkest of moments and in the joys as well. That’s been the primary motivator for me, to continue to show up. Everybody deserves the gift of someone else’s presence.”
There is no doubt that there have been challenges on the journey as a new principal in the aftermath of such a tragedy, but DeBoer said he is all in with Annunciation.
“My three kids do go to Annunciation, and so in every sense of the word, I’m all here,” DeBoer said. “I’m here as a parent. I’m here as a colleague. I’m here as an employee. It’s really just walking with people on the journey.”
Into the way of peace
Every year, Annunciation School has a theme for the coming school year. In 2025, that theme was “A future filled with hope.”
This year, the theme is “Guide our feet into the way of peace” pulled from the Canticle of Zechariah in the Gospel of Luke. The full verse — “In the tender compassion of our Lord, the dawn from on high shall break upon us to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace” — hits home, DeBoer said.
This verse shows that “God is our guide, and that light from above that we’ve talked about in all our recovery work, and that light will guide us, will lead us forward.”
“It gives us a little more clarity about what that destination is. It’s peace,” DeBoer said. “Peace within ourselves, peace within our community, peace in the world, and so there’s a lot that we can do with it. We’re also trying to lean into more service-learning work in our school year. So, what does it mean to be a peacemaker?”
The theme’s logo will feature a star — a tribute to the star of Bethlehem that’s “bringing the Prince of Peace into our world,” DeBoer said, and also because Minnesota is the North Star state.
“Who is our guide? God, that light,” DeBoer said.
Hope, Deacon Conneely said, is sometimes talked about “in physical terms and transactional terms;” many hope that things go well. But the theological virtue of hope is one that “tells us that regardless of how the world treats us, regardless of how evil appears, regardless of how we are challenged in life,” there is a life beyond this one. This hope “girds” people in times of tribulation.
“We know that there’s a life beyond this life, and (hope) allows us to accept things we otherwise don’t want to accept,” Deacon Conneely said. “That’s the real hope, and I think sometimes we can all get lost in the false hope of presuming that life’s going to be OK.”
Deacon Conneely said that God was “Always there, always present, always looking out for us,” even in the face of evil, and “especially in those days and weeks after the shooting.”
He saw God in the expertise people shared after the tragedy “without ever blinking.”
“Whether it was social workers, police, archdiocesan representatives, city representatives — everyone brought their expertise, and I could really see God in their work, and we had to come to rely on those experts very heavily,” Deacon Conneely said.
Deacon Conneely felt blessed to be matched with a trauma counselor the day following the shooting.
“He helped me on a personal journey of recovery and reframing the events so that I could continue to fulfill my role as a deacon,” Deacon Conneely said. “God sent us the experts that we need, and for me in particular, in the person of my trauma counselor.”
“I don’t wish this on anybody,” Clapp said. “But I’ve also met amazing professionals.”
The past year has been challenging for DeBoer’s faith, but for him, faith is the driving force of who he is, what he does and how he does it. It’s hard for DeBoer to imagine his life without that faith.
“At the end of the day, (with) my professional experiences prior to this day, I do feel prepared to be present to the challenge in front of me professionally,” DeBoer said. “The comfort of my prayer life gave me that one thing I could control: these 10 minutes every morning, and the wisdom that comes from the saints and even other scenarios of faith communities throughout history that have had to navigate things.”
Serving in a faith community allowed Annunciation to progress in recovery in a more meaningful and communal way, DeBoer said.
“Imagining navigating this without a faith center, it’s hard to really fathom that, and there’s not exactly the model of a Catholic community going through this before, but there’s other faith communities, and I think that’s what we’ve heard throughout this,” DeBoer said.
Deacon Conneely said this tragedy could either send him on one path, reserved and withdrawn, or open and “ready to carry the new cross” given to the Annunciation community.
“I think that answer is still being discerned,” Deacon Conneely said. “I’m not sure where God wants me, but I do know … that I’m supposed to be a deacon, and I’m just supposed to do whatever God wants me to do. And at the same time, I have my own healing to do, and I have to take care of my married life and my family’s well-being … and that’s the biggest balancing act in this whole thing is keeping the faith, keeping my first vocation intact, my marriage, and then being the kind of deacon God wants me to be.”
A day after the shooting, two brother deacons came to the Annunciation campus to visit with Deacon Conneely. Together, they prayed evening prayer with him and one of them prayed over Deacon Conneely a “special blessing for victims of a crime” found in the Book of Blessings.
“That was just a beautiful gesture of fraternity that he did for me, and in the months that have followed, my deacon classmates have set up a Zoom call early in the morning so that I always have someone to pray morning prayer with,” Deacon Conneely said. “Again, that fellowship has just been huge in lifting me up over these past months.”
Forward motion
Clapp said her faith life has grown exponentially, in depth and breadth, this past year. The biggest contributor is joining the Annunciation school community. She said when she signed her contract in April 2025, her plan was to be in a faith community where schooling and faith are intertwined.
“It was very important to me to reclaim the church space, and I am excited for the journey of worship at Annunciation,” Clapp said. “I’m grappling personally with an omnipresent God and the notion of free will and how evil emerges.”
One of the joys of Clapp’s job is that she gets to be present in the cafeteria during lunch every day. Those 25 minutes before recess, Clapp said, are an important part of each student’s day.
“I get to see the very real day-to-day of how a child is doing,” Clapp said. “I get to see every child and notice their patterns. … It’s also when the structure gets loose. That’s when we know children are going to show different behaviors. They’re not getting a grade on it, so they tend to push boundaries. And a lot of that’s all very normal.”
A few weeks following Annunciation’s return to school after the tragedy, Clapp said, she was in the cafeteria during lunch.
“So, we’re back. We’re full days. We’re full weeks. It’s all of the things that we’ve been praying and asking for. And out of the corner of my eye, I see a cheese stick fly across the lunchroom,” Clapp said. “I’ve never been so happy, because that’s what kids do when they’re pushing the cafeteria boundary in every place I’ve ever worked. It’s so normal. It was so great for a middle schooler to try that, and to have those really normative experiences take place along with the recovery work.”
Clapp said she was honored to serve in that moment, to be the person to walk over and gently remind the student not to do that. Annunciation staff want children to be children. Knowing the children experienced “something really challenging and are experiencing deep loss,” Clapp said she is honored to serve them.
Before Aug. 27, Deacon Conneely said that he believed he could be a self-sufficient, successful, problem-solving person. But what he learned from that day was that evil, pain, death and loss can strike anywhere at any time.
“The response to that isn’t discouragement,” Deacon Conneely said. “My response has been resolve, and a word we use all the time in Annunciation is hope. And hope has really become a new facet of my faith that I didn’t fully appreciate before 8/27, and now it’s one of the biggest things we rely on, and that I rely on personally.
“The message that I’m receiving, and that I have received over the past year, is that the darkness of that day and the evil that came into our sanctuary is never going to win, and there’s always going to be more light, and more love, and more goodness,” Deacon Conneely said. “Father Zehren said it in his first homily post-8/27: We just have to wait and see what Jesus is going to do.”
