Mass on 9/11: Scripture on the Mark

Scripture can speak personally to each of us, but this Sunday readings at Mass on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 seem to have been penned just for this occasion.

Catholic Churches worldwide use the same scripture readings each Sunday. They follow a set, repeated pattern—a three-year cycle— from week to week and year to year. People who go to Mass often hope to find special meaning in a reading and often do. When worried, they might hear Scripture’s oft-repeated message: “Be not afraid.” Yet there is a certain randomness to it all, which is why I was stunned to read the Scriptures for the tenth anniversary of 9/11. They are right on the mark.

The first reading comes from the book of Sirach and starts “Wrath and anger are hateful things.” It adds, “Could anyone nourish anger against another and expect healing from the Lord?” My first instinct is: Take that, you terrorists!

But on the same day the Gospel reading from the Book of Matthew delves into how often we must forgive others. It recounts the tale of the ungrateful servant who after his own debt was forgiven by the master unmercifully dunned a man indebted to him. When his master heard of his unforgiving behavior, he called him a “wicked servant” and asked, “Should you not have had pity on your fellow servant, as I had pity on you?” Looks like a word for the wronged here.

Scripture’s message of forgiveness begs for hearing at this critical time. As a nation, anger abounds against those deserving and undeserving. There is anger at raging Muslim terrorists who masterminded assaults. When they cannot be reached the anger is then turned on innocent and peaceful Muslims, just because they hold on to faith in Allah. In a most obvious example, some months ago it meant people opposed a Muslim center with a mosque two blocks from the 9/11 site in New York. Recently it has meant that New York’s Mayor Bloomberg won’t have a prayer at the city’s commemorative ceremony to mark 9/11 because he can’t figure out which religious figure, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or other, would be acceptable to all.

In other areas, there is anger at bureaucracies because they ineptly armed firefighters and policemen with radio equipment that proved useless in New York skyscrapers. There’s anger at bureaucracies with such a proprietary sense that one government agency wouldn’t share information with another.

Overall, there is anger at anyone who is different, speaks with a foreign accent, or dares not speak English in America.

Scripture advises that anger clouds our vision and hardens our hearts. It makes us base rather than noble. It blinds us to our own failings and encourages a dangerous arrogance. It makes us forget we need forgiveness as individuals and as a nation.

In the coming days, media will captivate us with stories of heroes of 9/11, people who forgot themselves and rushed to help others. People terribly injured who struggled against the odds and became whole again. We’ll meet the children of 9/11 who lost a parent but gained a hero in heaven. We’ll meet many whose lives were changed by the experience.

Sadly, we’ll also see anger, some justifiable, but much the kind of anger that spawns a thirst for vengeance and weakens us as a people and as a nation.

Yet I am sure that as we mark 9/11, we will meet those who will inspire us because they embraced forgiveness. Some may have found the ability to forgive almost immediately; others, over time. They will be the ones who have touched into the divine and carry an unmistakable grace within them. Such forgiveness has not come easy for them, but those who have found it will stand as a touchstone of goodness for us all.

The Church's Noblest at Ground Zero

There are times when the church makes you feel proud. Priests' responses to 9/11, 10 years ago, is one of them.

This became evident as the U.S. Bishops' Office of Media Relations interviewed and sought reflections from a few persons for The Catholic Church Remembers.

Cardinal Edward Egan, retired archbishop of New York, was one of the first responders that fateful morning. He headed for Ground Zero when he heard of the attack. As he was on the way, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani called and asked him to go instead to await the injured at St. Vincent's Hospital. Thus began the cardinal's critical service to a city in need.

The first person he met at St. Vincent's was a woman, burned from head to foot. The second was one of his priests, a fire department chaplain.

By rank, a cardinal is like a U.S. senator or a general, a big-time leader you don't expect to find on the front of any war. Cardinal Egan didn't see himself that way.

"I kept saying to myself, 'I'm not a fireman, a fire person, a firefighter,'" he recalled on video. "'I'm not a police officer. I'm not an emergency worker. I'm a priest and I'm going to do everything that a priest can do under these circumstances.'"

Afterwards, he worked at Ground Zero, a site so contaminated that officials told him to discard all his clothes when he returned home. He anointed bodies, listened to rescuers, and consoled both the disconsolate and their consolers. He celebrated funeral Masses at St. Patrick's Cathedral and led prayers when President George W. Bush arrive at Ground Zero and at an ecumenical service he organized Yankee Stadium.

Other priests sprang into action too. Msgr. Kevin Sullivan, head of Catholic Charities of the New York Archdiocese, saw that it was not just Wall Street people with significant finances who were affected. It was also those who live on the edge, such as the wait staff at Windows on the World, the restaurant atop one of the Twin Towers. Msgr. Sullivan contacted the unions and said Catholic Charities would pay the salaries for six months for restaurant workers there who were suddenly out of work -- enough time, he thought, for them to find another job.

Other priests made their way to the scene, most notably the fire department chaplain Franciscan Father Mychal Judge, the first officially recorded fatality of the attack. When rescuers found his body, firemen carried it from the rubble, not to a mortuary van but to the sanctuary of a nearby church.

Other clergy responded as priests too. The city established a site for those looking for missing family members, a place with counselors and social workers. The line went on for blocks and priests walked alongside it and helped people accept the inevitable: a loss of someone only to be found again in heaven. A veteran psychiatrist told Cardinal Egan that he was amazed when he interviewed families and saw how deeply they had been touched by their sidewalk conversations with priests.

The church knows the importance of chaplains and designates priests to help emergency workers such as police, firefighters and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents. These public servants need one of their own in crises and at 9/11 their own priests responded.

9/11's own, however, also turned out to be not just official chaplains but also priests in other ministries, like Msgr. Anthony Sherman, a Brooklyn pastor who counseled strangers and led funeral Masses for the dead from his parish, some whose bodies were never found. And Jesuit Father James Martin, an editor at America magazine, who worked with rescuers in the aftermath. And other unnamed and unrecognized priests who offered the sacraments, encouragement and human consolation. They rose to the heights of their calling in the depths of that tragedy.

Cardinal Egan calls Ground Zero, "Ground Hero." He speaks of a medical intern who stayed on duty though his father worked high in one of the twin towers, of a widow with babe in arms in the front pew of St. Patrick's for her husband's funeral, of the police who demanded for five days that the cardinal wear a gas mask to protect him from the contaminated air at the site but didn't wear their own because the masks impaired visibility.

New York's fire department, which lost 343 members, is known as "New York's Bravest," and the police department is known as "New York's Finest." Looking at the church's response to 9/11, the priests who responded would say they were "just priests," but surely they were "the Church's Noblest" too.