In biblical times, people who had leprosy were ostracized from society, condemned to live in regions outside of everyday life, and cry out “unclean” whenever anyone approached them. But they had legitimate reasons for putting these persons outside the circle of everyday life. Leprosy held the danger of contagion. Fr. Rolheiser writes that today, without any legitimacy, we’re still designating certain people as “lepers” unfit to flourish inside the circles of everyday life. We classify them as “losers” and condemn them to the fringes. They’re the new lepers. Examples of this abound, but perhaps we see this most simplistically played out in our high schools where there is always a popular crowd, an “in” crowd who dictates the ethos, decides what’s acceptable, and holds down the center of the community, even as they don’t constitute its majority. Most students are outside that more exclusive inner circle of popularity, on the edges of it, trying for full acceptance, not entirely “in” and not fully “out.” But there’s always another set, the ones seen as “losers,” as not measuring up, as not worthy of full status and recognition. This group is not permitted to fully belong. Every human circle has that category of persons. There are a myriad of complex reasons, many to do with mental health, which can help explain why, sometimes, tragically, a high school boy will take up a gun, come into his school, and shoot his classmates. But it’s hard not to notice that, almost always, it’s a young man who has been deemed a “loner,” a loser. We can’t blame his immediate peers and his classmates for deeming him such, however consciously or unconsciously this is done. His classmates are victims, not just of this young man’s illness and rage, but also of a society that blindly helps produce this kind of illness and rage. I’m not a parent, but if I were, I would try with all the moral powers that I possessed as a parent to have my children purge their vocabulary of racial, gender, and disability slurs. Both society and the church are houses. We have, thank goodness, in recent decades forbidden the use of words that disparage another person based on their race, gender, or disability. It’s time we forbid some other slurs inside the house!