25 Years Later, the Catholic Heroes of 9/11 [Audio and Transcript: 15-Minute Listen]

 

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The story of 9/11, to me, is more about the ordinary virtues of everyday Catholic heroes than it is about terrorism or anything else. Actually a coincidence put the National Catholic Register in an extremely strong position to cover September 11, 2001.

And it changed my approach to the way I did my job. I first wrote for the National Catholic Register when I was in college 32 years ago, in 1989, and I’d been editor since 1999. I became editor shortly before the Columbine school massacre. And I actually have, Jim Beckman, who is at Oklahoma City Archdiocese, to thank for my new approach to covering tragedy in the Catholic Church.

He was a youth minister in Columbine, and he made it a point to minister to those high school kids. And he said, “We as a Church have got to stand up right now and say there is an answer. There’s a hope you can cling to. There is a hope that gives us reason to go on even in the midst of this terrible tragedy. Jesus Christ gives us a reason to carry on.”

That transformed the way I looked at Columbine. It transformed the way I looked at every tragedy that we had to cover. And so, when 9/11 happened, it transformed the way I looked at 9/11. We were right there in New Haven, basically on the commuter train line to New York City.

So we are right there at the heart of where the Twin Towers were struck and came down. By providence, a number of our staff happened to be in New York as well. Our former associate editor, Joe Cullen, was actually at Mass, two blocks away from the World Trade Center, and gave us an eyewitness account.

Our former staff writer, Brian Maguire, was at Columbia Journalism School in the city, and he interviewed people at Ground Zero for us. We had a staff writer, Josh Mercer, who’s now at CatholicVote, but he was in Washington, D.C., and he reported on what was happening at the Pentagon there. We had future news editor John Berger give us some of the first coverage of Father Mychael Judge, the firefighter chaplain who was killed at the site, and Andrew Walther, who later became a leader in the Knights of Columbus, provided a balanced piece on Islam.

What we provided was some of the best September 11th coverage in Catholic journalism, and I frankly think some of the best September 11 coverage anywhere, because we were seeing the real story of our time. We were seeing the real story in the Church.

Whereas many Catholic journalists spend their time writing about how the world changes the Church, we were writing about how the Church changes the world. And that’s not only the story of the Church in our time, that’s the story of all time. So that day, we sought out the stories, and we found some very beautiful examples of how the Church is transforming the world and not the other way around.

At Impact

I’ll never forget Father Peter, an Indian priest who was saying Mass that morning in Our Lady of Victory near the World Trade Center. As Mass was ending around 8:45, they heard the first impact and nobody knew what it was, of course. Eventually someone came running in with debris already all over him. After the second blast came, somebody came inside and said someone outside on the steps was dying. The priest went out and administered the last rites right there on the steps to the church.

Then he said people were running past him, hurriedly giving him confessions or saying, “Just give me absolution, Father,” as they ran away.

There were a lot of priest heroes that day. This story isn’t told often enough: The fire department and police in New York were mostly Irish and Italian, and as we reported at the Register, the fire department immediately called out for priests to give people absolution as they were entering into the buildings.

Father Mychael Judge was one of those who gave absolution to firemen who were entering the building. He was struck by a piece of debris and killed outside of one of the towers. One of the firefighters told us that as they carried his body by (there’s an iconic photograph of this scene) the people who were busy at Ground Zero stopped and took off their helmets and hats and watched his body pass by.

Father James Hayes worked closely with the fire department, and he got a call when the first plane hit. He got in a taxi immediately and they was headed toward the World Trade Center when the second plane hit. So the driver just kind of let him out as debris and glass were flying in the air and wished him luck. He said as he was walking around the Trade Center, the thing that struck him most was seeing empty shoes on the sidewalk. People were just abandoning their shoes and running away faster in their bare feet, and groups were huddled inside stores and buildings.

Then, he was engulfed in a cloud of debris and took cover under a car. He came back to Ground Zero the next day, and showed his identification card. He saw a big guy in a hard hat with lots of tattoos who walked by. The guy said, “Thank you, Padre,” and handed him a piece of paper. He unfolded it and it said, “When death strikes down the innocent and young, for every fragile form from which he lets the panting spirit free, 100 virtues rise in the shapes of mercy, charity and love to walk the world and bless it.”

Another priest, Father Chris Hynes, was three blocks away from the towers when the attack started and he was still there ministering when the first building came down. He saw a police officer running toward him, coated in ash. He went into a department store, got a bottle of water, and poured it over the policeman to kind of clear his eyes. The policeman laughed and said he was one of the first of New York’s looters.

At Ground Zero

Father Gino Silva’s story is one that has always deeply affected me. He came later and helped at Ground Zero. He said the workers weren’t able to find bodies at all. They could just find remains, which they would place in plastic bags, so he and a rabbi were blessing the remains as they came by. He said it was exhausting work that would last all day. Then he would go home to his parish, where he’d have to minister to more people because his parish was one of the hardest hit with victims by the tragedy.

He told a heart-rending story about a family that he knew from his previous parish who called him up and asked him to come over. He arrived at their home covered with ash and dirt from Ground Zero and their little girl, a 7-year-old to whom he had given First Communion, came running up to him and said, “Father Gino, did you dig out my daddy?”

He said, “All I could do is keep hugging her.”

We later interviewed an Olympic rower named Jason Reid who said that he also helped at Ground Zero. He said it was the example of seeing a priest blessing the body parts of victims that first made him interested in the Catholic faith, and he later converted.

A lot of people were changed that day. A lot of people were changed later. I remember Pope John Paul II saying, “I appeal to all individuals, families and communities to pray the Rosary for peace, if possible daily, so that the world will be preserved from the dreadful scourge of terrorism, so that hatred and death will never have the last word.”

So our family, for one, had not prayed one the daily Rosary up to that point. But we have ever since.

Over Pennsylvania

But maybe the story that affected me the most was that of Tom Burnett. This was a story we actually covered later. Tim Drake did a story for the National Catholic Register called, “To Pray, To Act, To Fight: A Hero’s Life.” Tom Burnett was actually on United Flight 93, which went down in Pennsylvania after its passengers rose up and refused to let the terrorists take it.

His wife told us that a year before September 11th, 2001, Tom Burnett started to go to Mass daily, and he would come back after Mass to tell his wife about it. He kind of sheepishly said he was going to Mass every day, but that wasn’t something he had ever did, so she asked him why. He said he didn’t know. He thought there was some kind of message that God wanted to give him, so he wanted to spend time at Mass and in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament to hear what it was.

She pressed him about what this message might be. Finally, he said, “All I know is it’s going to impact a great number of people, and it has something to do with the White House.”

She said, “Do you think you’re supposed to run for office?”

He said, “No, no, no, it’s not that.”

But he found out a year later and we all found out what it was. Dina, his wife, said that she could hear in the recordings of the 911 calls that her husband was one of the those leading the passengers to attack the terrorists.

Those We Lost

So, like I say, when I think about 911, I don’t think about terrorism or military actions or Islam. I think about Catholic heroes, because the majority of them, as I said, were Catholics. There were also a lot of Knights of Columbus. We remember going to the Knights of Columbus headquarters, and they had a display showing all the Mass cards that had been printed for these men and women’s funerals and it was really heart-rending to see. But it was beautiful to see because they didn’t just die attempting to do good for others. They died succeeding in saving large numbers of people from almost certain death. About 80% of the people who were at work that morning were saved from the buildings, which is astonishing if you think about it.

So ordinary virtues basically saved the day for these people. They were prompt. They responded quickly to the call. They did their jobs efficiently. They generously put concern for others before concern for themselves; but that’s their job.

Timothy Stackpole was a 42-year-old firefighter who was on his way home from his shift. He had already completed his shift when he heard the call. So, he made a U-Turn and went back to the Twin Towers. He had barely survived a fire that he had been in in 1998, and his recuperation took him two years, during which he actually started to do marriage prep for his parish. But he returned to his post in March 2001, and therefore he was at his post in September 2001.

A priest and a firefighter were the last people to see him alive. He went into the building, but wouldn’t let the other firefighter go. He said, “You don’t have your mask.” So he went into the building, and shortly thereafter, the building came down.

Police Officer Jerome Dominguez, 37 years old, was helping people down from the 20th floor of one of the towers. When one of his coworkers, another police officer, said, “You better head down now. This building is going to go.” He said, “No, I think I can get more people.”

So he headed back up, and that was the last anyone saw of him. His father said, “Thank God we have the faith. That’s how we hold up.”

So these heroes of September 11th weren’t exactly martyrs. They weren’t exactly saints. They were just ordinary Catholics who were doing what ordinary Catholics are supposed to do. And to hear the testimony of their family members is incredible.

Jean Palumbo, a mother of 10, talked about her husband, Frank, who died on 9/11. She said, “This event has been a great evil, but God’s love has exceeded this evil.” She credits Frank with her own Catholic faith and says, “The Lord gave him to me. The Lord took him away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Imitate 9/11 Virtues

It’s highly unlikely that we ordinary Catholics today are going to be called to rescue huge numbers of people from a burning building. But I tell my children that we have to imitate the virtues of the 9/11 Catholic heroes.

The letter of Saint Jude actually says that Christians should imitate firefighters. Saint Jude imagines a future society where people would give in to all sorts of unspeakable sins, and there would be sin everywhere. That sounds familiar! And he says that Christians are to “save others by snatching them out of the fire.”

His simple plan is to pray, avoid sin, and bring others to the Church. The spiritual battle for souls that we face now is very much like the battle at the World Trade Center. The spiritual enemy we’re facing doesn’t want to compromise with us. It doesn’t want to negotiate with us. He simply wants to kill as many people as possible and drag them down to where he is. So in this ongoing battle, God needs each of us Catholics to be heroes.

And that brings me to one last Register 9/11 scoop. Our reporter, Wayne Laugesen, talked to former New York Mayor Ed Koch in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. What he said is really remarkable. He said that after watching the Twin Towers fall, he immediately went to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Well, why Saint Patrick’s?

He said, “Unlike a lot of other religions, Catholicism is not a salad bar. It’s very clear what Catholicism means and what it is about. You either are, or you are not, a practicing Catholic. Those who are not Catholic see this, and they admire it. That’s one reason people turn to the Catholic Church at a time like this.”

I think that’s a great way to end this lesson on Catholic living from 9/11.

We are given in the faith a gift that is incomparable in value. It is, as I said, the story of our time — the thing that is moving the earth; the thing that will last into the future, when nothing else from our time will. The faith will last, and what we do for the Church. When you fulfill your Catholic duties, as much as they can seem like drudgery — when you pray, go to Mass, teach your children, and bring other people to Church, you are writing the story of our time.

A version of this previously appeared on Benedictine’s Catholic Living.