A Homily for the Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Ezekiel 33:7-9 Romans 13:8-10 Matthew 18:15-20
Twenty-five years later, I realize how different Sept. 11 was from Sept. 12. I can easily divide my experience of the two days. The first was all about hurt. Hate began on the second day.
On Sept. 11, I was preparing to celebrate Mass at St. Augustine Parish in Park Slope, Brooklyn, when the radio went silent a few minutes before 9 a.m. that Tuesday. I was still in my room, hurrying lest the Mass start late. I do remember thinking, that’s odd. NPR just disappeared. Their transmission tower was atop the World Trade Center.
They had been reporting that a plane had hit one of the center’s towers. It had not been all that long since a small plane had struck the Empire State Building. I remember thinking, do they give anyone a pilot’s license?
The pastor, Father Whelan, concelebrated the Mass. In addition to his parochial duties, he was a chaplain for the Metropolitan Transit Authority police. Father Whelan’s beeper, which he always wore on his belt, sounded during the distribution of Communion. He stepped into the sacristy and did not reappear until Mass had ended. He then told us that a second plane had struck the World Trade Center. This was no accident. Everyone should return to their homes. The city was under attack.
Father Whelan and I could not turn away from the television screen that morning, but the Kansan in me suggested that we go up on the roof of the rectory, which is less than five miles from the World Trade Center. See what we could see. A wall of smoke covered lower Manhattan. It climbed skyward, beyond sight.
Because the subways had been shuttered and bridges were closed to traffic, people were hiking home at midday, across the Brooklyn Bridge, as though we lived in a small town and walking home had always been a possibility. One of the priests living at Saint Augustine had gone to Times Square to see a movie. He walked 10 miles to come home.
Like most Catholic churches, St. Augustine held a special, unannounced Mass that evening. The place was full. People were crying. We sang “America the Beautiful” with unprecedented fervor.
Right after Mass, Father Whelan received a new message. Chaplains were to report to the Brooklyn M.T.A. headquarters. He asked if I wanted to go with him. I said, “Yes.” Neither of us knew where we were going. We were, as he would put it, “responding.”
New York streets are never empty, but we drove to downtown Brooklyn on roads that were under curfew. A police officer was on every corner. They saw our Roman collars, and no one stopped us.
It took time to report to the correct office in the M.T.A. building. Father Whelan showed his badge at every door. We were entering a command post under attack. I kept saying, “I’m with him.”
We waited an hour in downtown Brooklyn because two more chaplains were on their way. We were then taken by a police cruiser to One Police Plaza, a few blocks from Ground Zero.
The woman police officer who drove asked us if we minded if she sped across the deserted Brooklyn Bridge. “We’ve received reports that they’re going to blow the bridges. A truckload of explosives has been seized on the George Washington Bridge.” We said that speeding would be fine with us. She made a small joke. Would there still be enough time for her to go to confession?
Four hundred forty-three firefighters, including a chaplain and two paramedics, of the New York City Fire Department; 37 police officers of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police Department; and 23 officers of the New York City Police Department died in the attack.
Most New York police officers do not live in Manhattan. It is too expensive. They live on Long Island or Staten Island or Rockland County. Police units were sent to retrieve the families of those who were missing. We were there for the families as they were collected throughout the night.
I always began by asking family members if I could get them water, food or a blanket. Provisions had been stockpiled to withstand a siege. Then I would ask who was missing. That is when I learned that New York City cops, like firefighters, grew in families. For almost every police officer missing, there was another—a sister, a brother-in-law—here with the family.
I spent a lot of time with a young bride and her mother-in-law. We kept talking about the emergency rooms, where her husband, her son, might be. Sometimes they announced that a hospital had received someone in uniform and that badge numbers would soon be known.
I remember the brother-in-law of a missing officer, also a cop, pulling me aside. “Father, he’s not coming back. He’s not out there wounded. Either you lived through this, or you didn’t.”
A Spanish-speaking family wanted to pray the rosary for their missing son. Their daughter, a police detective, asked if I could lead it. My Spanish was muy pobre. So I asked her mother to start, and I joined them.
And I remember three young Black women, huddled together under a blanket. I thought of Michelangelo’s Pietà. They quietly refused all conversation. They just held each other and cried for hours. Somewhere around 2 in the morning, I brought them water.
We stayed there through the night. Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik and Mayor Rudy Giuliani came to speak to the families. They said they were doing all they could to find their people.
There was no talk that night of hatred or revenge. Only pain, terror and disbelief. Those of us at police headquarters had been cut off from the media. I am not sure that we knew who had attacked us.
Somewhere between 3 and 4 in the morning, we were told that a cruiser was coming to take us home. As we waited on the street, flakes of ash were still falling like heavy snow. An open caisson came down the street, full of soldiers with rifles. I remember thinking, I never thought that I would see a day when the National Guard would be summoned, not responding to a natural disaster but protecting the homeland.
Just before the cruiser arrived, four or five firemen emerged slowly from the wall of light that was Ground Zero. It followed them down the street, like a corona. They were so dirty, so tired, and so young! Every one of them spoke as he passed us. “Hi Father.” “Hey Father.”
With less than three hours of sleep, I celebrated Mass the next morning at Saint Francis Xavier, also in Park Slope. Then I headed to the Staten Island Campus of St John’s University. The roads and bridges were open again. I taught four classes that day.
Honestly, I assembled four classes and let the students talk. Each of my classes had lost at least two family members: an uncle or an aunt who worked in finance, a brother who was a fireman. I remember a young man saying he wanted to see Afghanistan bombed back into the Stone Age. The young people seemed filled with rage. Hurt had given way to hatred.
Why was that? Hurt is always going to come first. We do not decide to be hurt. It hits and penetrates. At first, we have no response, only pain too deep to allow us to focus. The less evolved portions of the brain take over. We flee, and we weep.
It takes time to hate. It involves a decision. I remember being a bit startled by the expressions of hate the next day. I was not more virtuous in hating less. I was still recoiling, taking in the loss of lives made so evident in those classes. How could so many of my students have lost so much in so short a time? Even now, I cannot conceive the enormity of their loss.
So much of that day’s hatred was a delayed response to the previous day’s grievous hurt. The next day no one quoted Jesus on loving our neighbor. No one recalled the words of St. Paul about all the commandments being summed up by love.
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Love does no evil to the neighbor;
hence, love is the fulfillment of the law (Rom 13:9-10).
The principal duty of every country is to defend its citizens. One can easily debate the wisdom of our country’s response, but I still take satisfaction in the justice visited upon Osama bin Laden. Justice is preventative. But unlike justice, hate cannot be directed. We aim it at others, but it always wounds us as well. Hate is self-consuming.
Remember the comfort we felt on Sept.13, two days after the attack, when two of the steel beams at the World Trade Center emerged from the rubble in the form of a cross? By that time, we had only begun to realize that hate cannot defeat hate. Only love can.
Politics
Faith
Culture
Vatican
Scripture
Podcasts