On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman performed the first televised mass shooting in American history. FBI agents then interviewed a Catholic priest in Alaska who had known Whitman and his family. Jo Scott-Coe discovered the report of this interview nearly fifty years later. As a stray Catholic, she was intrigued. The winding path of the priest’s buried story led deeper into the rabbit-hole of mid-century American (and mostly male) power structures in the Church, in middle-class white families, in marriages, in scouting, in the military. Employing a three-part structure, MASS probes the hidden wounds of paternal-pastoral failure and interrogates our collective American conscience.