NEVER FORGET!
Author: Jimmy Akin
Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live." View all posts by Jimmy Akin
Thanks, Jimmy. I won’t forget. I just hung my flag up and said a prayer for all those lost on that horrific day.
Where were you that day?
My mother and I were in a hotel room in Rhode Island, getting ready to fly back to Houston. I turned on the TV and saw that the first tower was on fire. The commentators mentioned a small plane flying into it, and the first thing I thought of was that incident with the B-25 hitting the Empire State Building in the 40’s…in deep fog. But this was a bright sunny day.
A few minutes later I watched– live– the dark shape of a airliner quickly turning into the second tower and bursting into flames. My first thought was that an airline pilot was checking out the damage of the first tower and accidentally flew into the second. It didn’t occur to me that what we had been witnessing was a terrorist attack.
I phoned my family and friends in Houston to turn on the TV. They were still asleep when I called, and they thought that I was making it all up. Some even went back to sleep, not even turning on the TV.
It wasn’t too long after calling them up that I knew that this wasn’t an accident, and that I wouldn’t be flying that day. We decided to drive back home.
As it happened, we passed through New York City, driving west on the George Washington Bridge. I recall seeing haze where the towers would’ve been. I saw a fighter jet circling overhead, and apart from that, no air traffic whatsover. It was an eerie sight.
Driving through Kentucky, there was news over the radio that armed men were seen on some river. I saw an overpass with a giant American flag draped over the side.
We decided to pass through Hanceville, Alabama, so we could go to Mass at the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament. It was a refuge of peace after experiencing all the anxiety of the past day or two.
Peace.
That’s what we prayed for.
Sorry, that was mine.
I was a DRE at the time, had just gotten out of Mass, and gone over to the rectory. The secretary told me what had happened (both towers were hit by that point).
I went over to my office and turned on a TV, only to see the view of a camera positioned near the Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C, with smoke rising along the horizon. I thought to myself, “This isn’t New York. What’s going on?”
When the first tower fell, I really didn’t know what was going on. The channel I was watching wasn’t viewing the towers at the moment when it fell. Someone I was with suspected that it had fallen, but I didn’t believer her. When I saw the second tower fall, I was terribly shaken and went straight to the church to pray.
That night the parish had scheduled an adult education presentation on the spirituality of hospitality. Seemingly an odd topic to be discussing under the circumstances.
I made an executive decision to go on with it. However, we added to the beginning the praying of the office for the dead (Mass was offered earlier in the day). About 40 people showed up–a good crowd for the parish where I worked.
After it was over, I went out to the parking lot and looked up at the sky. No con trails, no flashing lights from any aircraft. It was eerie indeed.
But in the midst of all of this, my wife and I were just beginning to suspect that we were expecting our first baby. Michael Joseph was born the following May.
I’m an employee of the federal government. As it happened we were supposed to have an all-hands meeting that morning in our main conference room, which has a giant video wall. Usually the video wall is used to display PowerPoint slides. But with this historic event unfolding, we got instead the CNN broadcast.
We saw the second tower come down, live, on the CNN feed. Watching that produced one of the most awful feelings (aside from actual physical illness) I’ve ever experienced.
It was a tough day for everybody. Here in NYC it was a beautiful day with few clouds just like 2001.
I am a NYC cop and after getting up and doing my morning prayers remembering the cops who died that day in my daily intentions I picked up the newspaper to see that two detectives in Brooklyn were shot to death the night before. This incident just adds to the saddness cops will feel on this day for years to come.
I had a normal morning that day listening to Catholic Radio (re-broadcast of the previous days Catholic Answers), and when walking through the halls of the office building a lady asked if I had heard about the towers in new york. That was my first encounter of the events. After that people at work were talking a little bit about it until someone brought in a radio and we listened to that for a while until someone brought in a TV. That’s when I saw for the first time what I’d been hearing about. Seeing the towers fall was unreal.
I went to Mass that day at 12:00 PM PST with our Bishop (Reno, Nevada), and went to a prayer service that night with my fiance.
-Why- did you put up pictures of people committing suicide????
1) It is not clear that the moral character of their act constituted the sin of suicide. These people were trapped and unable to escape a raging fire by any other means. Going out a window to escape a fire, knowing that doing so will result in one being killed (an undesired consequence of going out the window), in order to avoid being killed by a fire seems to fall under the law of double effect.
The sin of suicide involves treating your own death as an end or as a means to another end, but there are actions that one can undertake knowing they will lead to one’s own death that do not treat it in this manner–i.e., where the foreseen death is an undesired side-effect of the action rather than an end or a means.
For example, jumping in front of a bus in order to save someone else is such an act. Your death is not the goal you are seeking (your goal is saving someone else) and your death is not a means to achieving that goal (i.e., your death is not what causes the other person to be safe; it is your shoving them out of the way that does that). In this case your foreseen death is a side-effect and the law of double effect may apply.
The same seems to apply to going out a window to escape being burned to death in a fire. Death on the sidewalk is neither a means nor an end. It is an undesired but foreseen side-effect of escaping from the fire for a few more seconds.
2) It was part of the horror of that day that people were driven to such desperate acts, and this is part of what must not be forgotten.
Thanks for the photos, Jimmy. Several of them I hadn’t seen before.
No danger that anyone in this household is going to forget. No, we didn’t lose anyone, but I have two sons in the military (one Army, one Marine) part of whose job it is to deal with (shall we say) the “root causes” and see that this stuff doesn’t happen to us again.
We pray every day for President Bush and all the other head-of-the-line decision-makers in Washington – asking God to grant them victory over our enemies AND the wisdom to know what to do in order to establish a just and lasting peace.
It’s a tall order, I know. That’s why we’re asking God to help.
I am sure that we will never forget, Jimmy. I was in my junior year of high school when the tragedy occurred. The Twin Towers were visible from my school in Brooklyn. It was a sad day for all of us. God bless America.