Parishioner who called 911: Man who tried to pray about migrants ‘stumbled’ off altar | Opinion
Last week, I wrote a column about a Kansas City Catholic, Jimbo Gillcrist, who returned to the parish he’d grown up in, Holy Spirit in Overland Park, and five minutes before Mass started, walked to the pulpit and began what he’d hoped would be a conscience-stirring prayer against mass deportations. He didn’t get that far, though, before being removed and handcuffed by police.
On that much, everyone agrees. But here’s the other side of the story, thanks to Jennie Punswick. Her husband Kevin was one of those who ran to the altar, believing that the church could have been under threat, while she was among those who called 911.
Church officials didn’t respond to my messages seeking comment before the first column ran, but Punswick and another parishioner did after it was published, and I’m glad.
The Punswicks were just walking into church when Gillcrist stepped to the microphone. “We knew something was off” right away, she said, because “he was literally in the wrong place.”
That’s because the pastor, Father Justin Hamilton, had recently made the pulpit “a place of privilege for the Word” only, meaning that, say, “fish fry announcements come from another mic stand on the side.”
Still, when Gillcrist started to pray the Our Father, those in the pews initially joined in, she said. That’s visible on the short video that the friend who came with him started to take, before a parishioner stepped in front of her to stop her from filming.
But when those in the pews saw that Gillcrist was going off-script, Punswick said, the feeling in the church quickly changed to, “Wait, we’re being tricked here.”
At first, “Father came up and peacefully asked him to leave. When he refused to leave, that’s when he was forcibly removed.” But “he was in no stretch of the imagination ‘tackled,’” as he’d told me he was, she said.
‘He fell hard, but he was assisted back up’
While holding on tight to the pulpit as four men moved him, “he stumbled,” Punswick said, and fell down the four or five steps off the altar. “He fell hard, but he was assisted back up, and he walked out very proud.”
Several people took their children out of church, while Punswick stood in back and told people “it’s under control, the police have been called, everything’s OK.” But initially, “it was very scary,” for a combination of reasons.
First, she said, people were acutely aware that St. Patrick’s in Wichita had only recently been vandalized, by someone who’d reportedly broken windows, candles and a statue of St. Patrick. Graffiti included the web address connected to a Satanic “Black Mass” in Topeka.
Parishioners also knew, she said, that another Overland Park Catholic church, Ascension, had been targeted in 2022. When that parish, which had been advocating for removing the right to abortion from the Kansas Constitution, was vandalized, a statue of the Virgin Mary was splattered with red paint and the words “My body my choice” scrawled on a wall on the adjoining Catholic school. “Mary was desecrated” in that incident, Punswick said, while “we’ve had politically motivated theft” of signs.
Perhaps most pressing, though, on the day Gillcrist walked into the 11 a.m. Sunday Mass in his old parish, “everyone is on guard for Satanic worship less than 45 minutes away, not because of fear but because of conviction.”
That’s because the leader of a group calling itself the Satanic Grotto had been promising to desecrate a host. He didn’t have one, and ended up mocking the very idea that he was going to do something to “Jesus trapped in a cracker.” But believers did not find him or his threats funny.
‘Terrifying’ threats of desecration
The prospect of that happening was “terrifying,” Punswick said, and against that backdrop, the appearance of Gillcrist at the pulpit “is an entirely different event.”
As distraught as I am over the criminally inhumane way migrants, including those who have done nothing wrong, are being treated right now, I do also understand why Gillcrist’s appearance set off alarm bells at Holy Spirit.
This is a frightening time in the world. And from Thomas Becket, the archbishop murdered in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170 to those kind people murdered at Mother Emanuel AME after welcoming and praying with their killer in 2015, horrible things, as I said in my first column about this, have happened in churches throughout history. Of course that’s even more of a risk in a culture awash in guns. On Thursday, as I was writing this column, I got word that a priest in Seneca, Kansas, had been fatally shot in his rectory.
So yes, I also understand this other side of the story, and why parishioners were made uncomfortable in a way quite different from what Jimbo Gillcrist intended.
Jennie Punswick also said his assumptions about his old parish were off-base, in particular that word about marginalized communities might not have reached them. A church isn’t Hyde Park, and I get that, too.
‘There are some wounds’
She said if he’d really wanted to change a mind or a heart, he would have shown up for Doughnut Sunday and started a conversation. Is it too late for that, I asked?
“There are some wounds there,” she said.
He “elbowed (a priest) to hold his ground. He was the aggressor.” And to her, he forgot that while “as Christians, we’re called to boldness, Mr. Gillcrist did this imprudently,” in a way that sowed fear. As a result, he did damage to his cause, she said, and in my reporting on his actions so did I. Fair enough.
Gillcrist is on one of the oldest pilgrimage routes in Europe at the moment, walking part of the Camino of St. James in Spain, which leads to the tomb of the apostle James. When he gets back, I’m going to ask what he thinks about trying to schedule a conversation of some kind at Holy Spirit, with no element of surprise, no recordings and no reporters, maybe just in time for Easter. Because he and they have in common that they believe wounds can be healed.
This story was originally published April 4, 2025 at 10:43 AM.
