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Richard John Neuhaus

This morning, at the corner of Fourteenth Street and First Avenue, I turned around to look again at where the towers were. It was exactly a year ago, on a Tuesday morning of such beauty as inspires songs about autumn in New York, that on the way to say the nine o’clock Mass we saw the first plane strike, and then the billowing clouds of desolation appealing to the skies. A small crowd had gathered at the corner, looking up in the curiosity that preceded shock. “There must be thousands of people in there,” I said. “Pray for them.” Then I went in to the altar of God to offer the Sacrifice of the Mass, the sacrifice of the cross that anticipated, caught up, and mysteriously redeemed all the desolations of time. After Mass, when we learned the full horror of what had happened, I went to the hospitals in this part of the city to do what a priest does. The emergency rooms were empty. After a while, we knew that the few who were found were being sent not to the hospitals but to the morgue. There are usually about a hundred people at the nine o’clock; this morning there were several times that. The first lesson was St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 7: “For the form of this world is passing away.” The gospel reading was the beatitudes from Luke. “Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh.” There was in the congregation a palpable hunger, and there was weeping, and there was faith, in the painful awareness of a form of the world that had passed away. The papers contained little else this morning. At a loss for what to do on momentous occasions, the Times, as is its custom, published a thick special supplement with second-rate writers repeating third-rate thoughts about “what has changed,” the usual babble by which we ward off silence. At Ground Zero this morning they are reading the Gettysburg Address—a spiritually, ritually, and rhetorically deprived society reaches back to a time when we knew how to speak in public about dedication, sacrifice, judgment, and the purposes of God. Not everything was so embarrassingly inadequate. On Frontline the other night, PBS showed the two-hour documentary produced by Helen Whitney, “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero.” Get a tape of it if you can. It has been many years since I have seen anything on television that caught the significance of a solemn moment so exactly right. The pollsters debate whether there has been a “spiritual renewal” since September 11. How little of the truth is accessible to their methodologies. You should listen to those with whom Helen Whitney spoke. You should have been at Immaculate Conception—or, I expect, at thousands of other parishes across the country—this morning. I thought it jarring at first when an elderly priest said afterwards, “They chose exactly the wrong time to try to take out the Church.” He was referring to this year’s media storm over priestly scandals, believing, as he does, that it was mainly a scheme to destroy the Catholic Church, or at least to eliminate its public influence. I think he is wrong. The crisis was not and is not mainly about that. But he is right about the indomitable strength of the community gathered by the only hope that endures. “For the form of this world is passing away.” “Blessed are you who weep. . . .” Such were my thoughts this morning as I turned back at Fourteenth and First to look once again at the bright sky where the towers used to be.

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