MINNEAPOLIS (OSV News) — Four leaders had barely arrived at Annunciation Church and School 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.
“I have to believe … that we were there together for a purpose,” Deacon Conneely told The Catholic Spirit, newspaper of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. “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.”
When Clapp was hired, she brought her 29 years of experience in education. When Father Zehren arrived at Annunciation, he was the deacon’s third pastor in just two years.
Before Deacon Conneely was ordained, he practiced law at a large law 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,” DeBoer added. “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.
According to 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.
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.
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.
“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,” he said. “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.”
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,” he said.
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.”
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” 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.”
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