Movie fantasy is now inadequate to describe our reality. No terror conjured by Hollywood could match what the people in our city saw and heard and felt in their bones that day.
Monsignor Ignace Sadek, the elderly pastor of the Maronite cathedral near the Brooklyn waterfront, went to the promenade park overlooking lower Manhattan and prayed for absolution for the dying as the towers burned. When the first building crumbled, and the terrible cloud of smoke, debris, and incinerated human remains began its grim march across the harbor, Monsignor Sadek remained at his post praying. The falling ash turned him into a ghost. Still, he stayed as long as he could. This is a man who came through the civil war in Lebanon, and he doesn’t run.
"People could see I was a priest," he told me later (he is my pastor). "They ran to me and knelt at my feet, and begged for absolution." Think of that: The people of this proud, defiantly secular city, driven to their knees in prayer, begging for mercy in a hot, gray fog. That is what purgatory must be like.
A Catholic colleague tells me a devout friend of his in Washington, D.C., always takes the same flight from Dulles Airport to LAX. But the weekend before September 11, he had a strong feeling that he should cancel his reservation. He fought it, !but finally succumbed. The plane he was supposed to have been on crashed into the Pentagon.
I told my wife this story, hoping to cheer her up. It made her cry. "Why didn’t God warn the others, too?" she asked.
On the afternoon of September 11, I ran into an immigrant Arab Christian friend on a street in our neighborhood that is home to a number of Muslim-owned businesses. "Listen," he told me. "If you ask these Muslims in these shops what they think of the attack, they will tell you it’s horrible. But that’s not what’s in their hearts. I’m telling you what I know."
After a prayer service for the dead at our Maronite church (which lost six parishioners in the calamity), I talked to some young Arab immigrants about their fears of anti-Arab pogroms. One of the young men had just been deported from our great ally, Saudi Arabia, because he had been discovered praying to Jesus in a private house. These people argued that Americans shouldn’t stereotype Muslims. They said that they were friends with many good Muslims here.
"Tell me," I asked them, "do these Muslims donate money to the terrorist cause?" All admitted that yes, many of their friends do.
Rod Dreher was so moved by this expression of faith that he named his 2nd son after Monsignor Ignace Sadek. Since posting this report to Crisis Magazine, Rod and his family have relocated to Dallas, TX.
Thanks for the post. I think the part of the article about the crosses was fascinating. I hadn't heard about that.
"A small stir was made in the media about demonic faces photographed in the smoke !and fireball of September 11. But you probably haven’t heard about the crosses. My Lutheran uncle is an FBI chaplain. He phoned me from ground zero and told me a small field of crosses had been discovered in the rubble of World Trade Center 6.
They were a series of massive I-beams that had fallen from the top of the tower that was second to collapse. The beams landed in a peculiar fashion, as if they were crosses that had been planted upright by an unseen hand."
Msgr. Sadek is a great and holy man of God. A saint - in the way that people who come in contact with him know that they have been in the presence of a saint.