Videos showed a man alleged to be Rittenhouse shooting a looter in the head, and then running down a street with a rifle while being pursued by several people shouting that he had already shot someone; he fell, turned around, and fired the rifle several times at his pursuers. Rittenhouse was arrested on Wednesday in Illinois and charged with first-degree intentional homicide.
Archbishop Listecki prayed for peace on Thursday morning, emphasizing that prayer must be the first response to the unrest.
"We're praying, obviously for people to open up their hearts," he said, to find a "peaceful way, and not a violent way" to resolve conflict.
"God is the one who changes the hearts and the minds of people," he said.
When asked by reporters if he had a response to the cause of the protests, Sunday's police shooting, Listecki said that "we have to take a step back" and wait for "all the facts" of the incident to surface.
"You don't want any type of issue to be co-opted," he said, noting that "outsiders" have tried to co-opt such incidents. "You hold up the video, nobody's seeing the outside. Nobody's seeing what's going on," he said of the video of the shooting of Blake, noting that it's "just one eye that's taking in everything."
According to press releases from the Kenosha Police Department and the Wisconsin Department of Justice, officers on Sunday had responded to a domestic incident at the site of Blake's shooting; a woman had called police, reporting that her boyfriend, reportedly Blake, was present without her consent.
The Wisconsin DOJ is leading the investigation into the shooting with the assistance of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), which has launched a civil rights probe into the incident. The Wisconsin DOJ said that Blake told officers on the scene that he had a knife in his possession, and that agents removed a knife from the driver's side floorboard of the car.
Matt Hadro was the political editor at Catholic News Agency through October 2021. He previously worked as CNA senior D.C. correspondent and as a press secretary for U.S. Congressman Chris Smith.