9/11 and the triumph of hope

A horror that united the faithful worldwide in prayer

Growing up in the 1990s, when other boys my age were buying Shoot! magazine and Smash Hits it was always religious magazines and books that brought me to the Carlisle Bookshop on Omagh’s High Street.

The first time I ever bought Time magazine was in 1994 when St John Paul II was named ‘Man of the Year’ in recognition for his role in bringing an end to Soviet-style communism, and a new era of freedom in central and eastern Europe.

Transformative

That same year, as a 15-year-old, my parents had gifted me a book that had a profoundly transformative impact on my life. As I thumbed through Crossing the Threshold of Hope by John Paul II, I was intrigued: a pope speaking in his own voice, on the largest human questions, just as the Cold War world was giving way to the millennium he had been preparing the Church to enter.

The questions were the ones people actually ask. Does God exist? If he does, why does he hide? Why is there so much evil? What does ‘salvation’ mean? Why so many religions? What about Buddhism, Islam, Judaism? Was God at work in the fall of communism? Is there hope in the young? Does eternal life exist?

Piety

John Paul did not flatten the questions into piety. He moved through Scripture, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Husserl, and his own experience of occupation, Marxism, and working with young people in Poland.

I saw in John Paul II, a wounded century’s most visible Christian pastor answering, in public and in the first person, whether hope is still rational.

September 11

It was a question I returned to often after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the US. It is a question I have returned to at times of immense tragedy or profound suffering in my own life: is hope still rational?

The 9/11 attacks were such a contrast to the optimism that opened the new millennium. On Christmas Eve 1999, I watched an ageing pope walk through the Holy Door of St Peter’s Basilica inviting the Church — and, in a real sense, the world — across a threshold.

Behind him lay a century of camps and walls, and also the astonishing collapse of European communism: a fall he would later describe as the system’s own inner failure, yet one prepared by a “revolution of conscience” in which prayer, solidarity, and the stubborn dignity of the human person had mattered more than tanks.

The calendar itself seemed to bless a new beginning. Then came a Tuesday morning in September 2001.

The images are now part of the world’s memory: airliners turned into weapons, towers that had seemed permanent collapsing into fire and dust.

For people of faith, 9/11 was more than a terrorist atrocity – it was a blasphemy of the most egregious sort.

Innocent life — the Imago Dei — was treated as fuel for a spectacle of hatred, and the name of God was invoked to bless it.

Yesterday was a dark day in the history of humanity, a terrible affront to human dignity”

John Paul II watched the events unfold on television at Castel Gandolfo. His spokesman later recalled that the pope was shaken not only by the scale of the slaughter but by the question it forced: how could man descend into such an abyss of evil?

The next day, at the General Audience, he set aside his prepared catechesis. “Yesterday was a dark day in the history of humanity, a terrible affront to human dignity,” he said.

He condemned the attacks with “indignant” force and added a sentence that still sounds like a judgment on every ideology of blood: “the ways of violence will never lead to genuine solutions to humanity’s problems.”

Then he gave the only reply that does not flatten the mystery: “The human heart has depths from which schemes of unheard-of ferocity sometimes emerge.”

What, then, of the optimism of 1989 and 2000? A Christian response must distinguish hope from historical optimism. Optimism is a weather report: it assumes that after winter comes spring because that is how seasons work. Christian hope is a theological virtue. It does not deny winter. It trusts the One who passed through death.

Shatter

September 11 did shatter a particular mood — the sense, widespread in the West after the Cold War, that the great ideological monsters were dead and that globalisation would complete what 1989 had begun.

What 9/11 revealed, with terrible clarity, was that a new form of contempt for life had organised itself across borders: not a state in the old totalitarian sense, but a network willing to use the open world’s own instruments against it.

The question remains: is hope still rational. As believers, what do we do with a hope that has been wounded, but not extinguished? First, we tell the truth about evil. Sentiment that cannot say “this was wicked” cannot say “this was redeemed.”

The pope who helped bury an empire of lies also taught us that another empire of lies can rise from religion’s counterfeit”

The victims of that day — Christians, Jews, Muslims, unbelievers, firefighters who ran toward the fire — were not abstractions in a clash of civilisations. They were human persons, made in God’s image and likeness.

The Mass, which is the memorial of a murder transformed into sacrifice, remains the Church’s most honest commentary on 9/11: violence is real, and it is not the last word.

The millennium did not become the springtime some expected. It became, like every age, a field in which the wheat and the weeds grow together. The pope who helped bury an empire of lies also taught us that another empire of lies can rise from religion’s counterfeit.

Hope

Christians do not wait for history to become safe before they hope. We hope because Christ is risen, and therefore even a dark day in the history of humanity is not permitted to be the last day.

That is my memory of September 11: grief without despair, condemnation without hatred, and a hope older than any millennium, and stronger than the Fall.