Charity at Ground Zero

Downtown New York stopped for the Cross passing by. The Way of the Cross, organized by the CL community, traveling over the Brooklyn Bridge, arrived a short distance away from Ground Zero. Almost three thousand participants, the mayor’s greetings, and the testimony of one of New York’s firefighters

by MARCO BARDAZZI - photo by james leynse (ag. contrasto)

The traffic was chaotic, as always. Busy people, deafening sirens, the noise of jackhammers working to rebuild a slice of the city devastated by terrorists. It was a typical early afternoon of a working Friday in Manhattan, the rushed, tired faces of people counting the hours until they can escape and take refuge in the nothingness of the weekend. Suddenly a wooden Cross emerged, followed by thousands of people, walking in silence. It was an overwhelming image, just as the image of Christ climbing up to Golgotha must have appeared one morning 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem.

This time, the Cross did not turn around after traversing the Brooklyn Bridge, as it had done every Good Friday in the six years before. This year, it went into the heart of the city, attracting the attention of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who heard the unusual sound of Crux Fidelis under the windows of City Hall and came out to thank us for the gesture. It continued on its way, this apparently fragile piece of wood, passing from Jonathan Fields’ hands into those of Firefighter John Bartlett, headed straight for the crater of Ground Zero, the open wound in the middle of the financial capital of the world. It was followed by 2,500, maybe 3,000 people, just as many as had died on September 11th in the terrorist attack. Cross and Resurrection.

The traffic stopped, families of tourists asked for songbook copies and joined the procession, while the police looked on, amazed at the silent order of this strange crowd snaking its way through New York’s oldest streets, a few steps away from Wall Street and Broadway. “With a few pounds of wood and iron,” wrote a New York Times journalist the next day in a long article, trying to give sense to the presence of the Cross in this context, “they hoped to relieve some of the incomprehensible emotional weight resulting from the tangled steel, glass, and concrete at the site of the World Trade Center.”

Firefighter John
In reality, the provocation offered by the Cross and the presence of thousands of people who took up the proposal of the New York community of the CL Movement was much more profound. Firefighter John Bartlett, of Engine Company 167 on Staten Island, explained it in simple words in front of a jumble of TV microphones asking him what he felt as he carried that piece of wood to the place where 343 of his coworkers had died. “Christ’s life, death, and resurrection,” he said, “are the hope of all mankind and are just as real as the collapse of the World Trade Center. We cannot prove it scientifically, it is a question of faith, but I know that it is real like the collapse of those skyscrapers. It is a reality.”

The seventh year of CL’s Way of the Cross in New York made the six earlier editions seem like a long preparation to reach this exceptional moment, during the most difficult Easter that the city and the whole world have experienced in many years. The signs of what was about to happen on Good Friday were already visible in the weeks before. Lots of phone calls to the Movement office, participatory confirmations, even thanks in advance from the family members of the victims of September 11th, who had noticed the posters and flyers distributed in churches and public places. The decision to continue the traditional itinerary as far as St Peter’s Church, a short distance from Ground Zero, struck and touched many and attracted more than the usual attention of the media and the city authorities.

Who are you?
When the procession set out from St James Cathedral, in Brooklyn, accompanied by an unexpected sun and under the surveillance of a police helicopter, there was the immediate perception of taking part in an event destined to leave its mark on many hearts. Firefighter, police, and Port Authority (the city agency which had jurisdiction over the World Trade Center) uniforms mixed with the victims’ families and ordinary people who came from all over the city and other places as well. A Southold Fire Department bus brought dozens of people from the farthest tip of Long Island. Cars came from New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania pulled up. When four busloads of faithful brought by Fr Luca from Massachusetts arrived, the cameramen of the numerous TV crews stationed in front of the basilica in Brooklyn stared in astonishment. “Who are you, to manage to organize something like this?” one of them asked.

The choir, directed by Chris Vath and Cas Patrick, immediately became the “glue” uniting in prayer the long procession of people that, falling in behind Jonathan and Auxiliary Bishop Ignatius A Catanello of Brooklyn, set out toward the oldest and best loved of New York’s bridges. When the Cross reached the first bridge pillar, the tail of the procession was still on the access ramp, hundreds of yards behind. “The last time so many people crossed the Brooklyn Bridge on foot, a little more than six months ago, it was on a panicked exodus,” noted the New York Times. The terrified flight from the cloud of dust and death in Manhattan, on another sunny morning, came to mind with every step taken in the opposite direction from that of the crowd in September.

In front of City Hall
At the first pillar, with the cars whizzing past under the pedestrian walkway, while the loudspeaker system broadcast the Stabat Mater and Péguy’s words, the void in the sky where the Twin Towers once stood loomed painfully behind the Cross. Many thought back to the 2001 picture of the Way of the Cross, which appeared a few months ago on the cover of Traces (Vol 3, No 9). The station at the second pillar had to be eliminated in order to respect the schedule, which was thrown off almost immediately by the massive participation. At a marathon pace, the procession reached the other side of the East River and stopped in a large space outside New York’s City Hall. The Cross stopped in the nerve center of the city during one of the moments of its greatest traffic and activity. Attracted by the crowd and a powerful sound system, dozens of people stopped to listen to the songs and meditations, and many of them decided to join in the event.

Accompanied by a group of assistants and bodyguards, Mayor Bloomberg (a Jew who in January took the place of the Catholic Rudolph Giuliani) came out of the armored gates of City Hall and discreetly approached the microphone at the foot of the Cross. He waited in silence until Naomi Flansburg finished one of the readings, then was introduced to the crowd by John Touhey (who for hours split his time between the role of reader and that of spokesperson to be “thrown to the lions” of the TV cameras).

Bloomberg recalled the importance of the Passover and Easter period for Jews and Christians. "This time of year is a time to look back and a time to look forward,” the Mayor said. “We lost 400 people, men and women who ran against all instinct into burning buildings to save 25,000 others. That was the past. The future is what we're trying to build for them. Your group,” he said in closing, “is an example of the kind of devotion possessed by the people of this city.”

After the stop at City Hall, the Way of the Cross entered its most complex and moving segment. Leading a crowd like this to Ground Zero, on the clogged sidewalks of Manhattan, was a challenge for the most stout-hearted. Even the police, willing and incredibly kind, seemed perplexed. Angelo Sala and the group of organizers had studied the route and made inspection visits for weeks, but the result was difficult to predict, for one very simple reason: nobody had ever tried to do anything like this before.

In Bartlett’s hands
But when the Cross set out on its way, entrusted now to the hands of Firefighter Bartlett, everything seemed simple and linear. Once past Broadway–which remained paralyzed for more than a quarter of an hour–the police officer who was bringing up the rear of the procession approached one of the organizers and asked for a songbook. He exclaimed, “Do you know that you guys have really organized something great here today?”

For several hundred yards along Church Street, the Cross faced the construction site of Ground Zero. The procession went as far as it could toward the crater of the World Trade Center, then entered St Peter’s, the oldest Catholic church in New York (founded in 1785). It is a place charged with meaning. On September 11th, for example, the firefighters carried there and laid on the altar the body of their Catholic chaplain (the first person officially pronounced dead in the disaster), Fr Mychal Judge, killed in the first of the two collapsed towers as he was blessing someone who had died.

In front of that altar and a crowd that packed the entire church and spilled out onto the steps outside, Firefighter Bartlett received endless applause when he explained that if there is any meaning in the tragedy that struck the corps of firefighters, “it is only in the sacrificial element of the deaths of those men. It is only their sacrifice that has given those events a meaning and allows us to compare them to the transcendent sacrifice of the Cross.”

“Jesus experienced every kind of suffering,” said Bishop Catanello. “My death, your death, and the death of every human being has been experienced by Christ. And also the death of those who died in this place. After Christ, death is not the last word for man.”

Thanks to the sound system set up outside the church, the gentle notes of Qui presso a te and the words of passages from Fr Giussani’s writings reached all the way to the gaping hole of Ground Zero, defying the noise of the traffic and the construction equipment.

Hours later, in Brooklyn, a group of friends tried to ask themselves “while the iron was hot” about what had happened. “Today, for once, we were not ashamed to carry the Cross,” Angelo summed things up. “What we testified to the world, which was so striking, was nothing other than the relationship we have with Christ.”

The Center of the Universe and of History
The testimony of John Bartlett, of one of New York’s firefighters, at the end of the Way of the Cross
Our meditation is complete, Jesus is laid in the tomb and we find ourselves, ironically, standing at the foot of the World Trade Center, Ground Zero, which has become a final resting place, a tomb, for far too many people. Though we are always mindful and mournful of the thousands of innocent lives that were so tragically lost in the events that took place here, my attention must turn to my brother firemen, the police, and EMT’s first, by my kinship with them and secondly, yet more significantly, because their deaths in a particular way have a sacrificial dimension. If there is any meaning or cause for hope, if we can recall those events and draw any inspiration from that incomprehensible act of hatred, it is only in the sacrificial element of the death of those men.

You may ask, “But why is that so important, so significant?” The answer quite simply is because the bedrock of Christianity is sacrifice. It was only the sacrifice of those men that gave those events meaning and allows us to liken it to the transcendent sacrifice of the Cross. For it is only the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ that true meaning is given to any and all the events of life for all men, for all time. For this reason Pope John Paul II writes, “The Redeemer of man, Jesus Christ, is the center of the universe and of history.”

In these times, as in all times, to be a Christian is to believe in the answer that God has given to our doubts, our fears, and our anxieties. Our faith makes us adversaries of the absurd, it makes us witnesses to the only thing that is meaningful and it enables us to provide meaning to that which has none.

As for me, when I ponder life, death, and the meaning of it all, time and again I am drawn to the unique Christian claim expressed so clearly and succinctly by the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council: “In reality it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear… Christ the Lord, Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father, and of his love, fully reveals man to himself, and brings to light his most high calling.” In closing, may we prayerfully proclaim: Lord by your Cross and Resurrection you have set us free; you are the Savior of the world and may the Passion of our Lord, Jesus Christ, remain always in our hearts and may the reality of the Resurrection bring all of us peace of mind and stillness of heart.

Los Angeles
Our Way of the Cross was held on Hollywood Hill, in Griffith Park, from which you get an impressive view of the whole city. We agreed to meet at 4 pm, and we walked and meditated together until 6 pm. Between singing Crux Fidelis and Stabat Mater, we read passages from the Gospel, meditations by Fr Giussani, and pieces by Péguy. There were about fifty of us, among them friends of friends and some people who had read the notice about the Way of the Cross in Tidings, the diocesan newsletter. Passersby stopped to watch; some stood listening in silence for a while before going on. A girl who was jogging stopped an instant to make the sign of the Cross. Everyone’s participation was filled with attentive, alert silence. Our friends, returning home in the evening, wrote us to thank us for the opportunity to live together the memory of this fact that is so essential to our salvation. A couple who came because they had read the notice said that they would like to take part in our School of Community. In the context of what is worrying the world and in particular our Church, it was important for us to center our gaze once again on Christ who loves our life and inexorably changes our “I.” Everyone’s awareness that His presence is our salvation was strengthened. We discovered ourselves to be companions chosen by Him, one by one, to continue His “course in the world.” This filled us with emotion and the desire to be faithful, with the same faithfulness and the same love that are constantly directed at us. As Mauro said at the end of the Way of the Cross: “When we started singing and I lifted my arms to direct Crux Fidelis, I felt that in that moment my being there was saying, ‘Yes, I love you,’ looking at the people who were there to make memory of His Passion. I also desired that this be true for the entire city spread all around me. What Christ then builds on this little ‘Yes’ is in His hands; all that is left for me is to look at and love how He reveals Himself in the world. I want Christ to be acknowledged by me, by all my friends here, and by this whole city.”
Guido

San Francisco
On Good Friday, we walked the Way of the Cross in San Francisco. We started at Coit Tower, which is a tower on one of the hills overlooking downtown San Francisco. From there we came down, doing four stations up to the sanctuary of St Francis, on the edge between the Italian and Chinese quarters of the city. Some eighty people (more than half of them not in the Movement) followed the Cross through crowded streets, in the middle of the traffic, past people seated in the cafés. Channel 5, one of the main TV stations, filmed a good part of the Way of the Cross and interviewed one of us, and this appeared on the evening news. I want to emphasize the attentive participation of everyone, including those not in the Movement, people I had never seen before who heard about it from the various announcements, flyers, and mailings. Looking at them, I thought about how the greatness of our charism is, that it does not try to persuade anyone about a project or an idea, but every moment rediscovers that Christ is the truth of everything in life. This is the real point of positivity and unity.
Bruno

Washington, DC
Dearest Father Giussani It is Friday evening. We have just returned from the Way of the Cross that we walked in the very center of Washington, following the Cross in front of the Capitol and all the monuments that are the symbols of American power. Unity, silence, emotion, people truly of every race and age (including families with children in strollers)–everyone behind the Cross. The people around us would stop to watch us, at first somewhat curious, snapping pictures, then they took off their hats or stopped what they were doing and followed us with their eyes, in silence. Some joined our procession, immediately united in song and prayer. It came back to me what you told us, that Americans are simple people and that when they encounter something “they are not possessive” and “their sociability is not faked.” Fr Gius, we were completely united. What a great thing we carry, in these humble earthen vessels! We are so small, I am so small, but we carry with us what all the world awaits (as you told us). What a great thing you have brought into our lives! Last week you reminded us of the greatness of the Event. Well, this was really an Event. I kept asking myself what Jesus wanted to tell us, what He wanted to tell me. For me, seeing all these people affirming their love for Jesus in a moment like this, in a place like this, made my heart leap. A colleague of mine (not a Catholic) who came with me told me that this was an incredible afternoon that has changed his way of looking at himself and his city. When we arrived in front of the Washington Monument obelisk (the supreme Masonic symbol) in the midst of all the American flags, with the people crowding around, the reader read your words: “Christ, who died and rose again, is the reason for hope that conquers the sadness of the world… The presence of Jesus of Nazareth is like the lifeblood that from within–mysteriously yet surely–refreshes our drayness and makes the impossible possible.” How true this is! Pardon the littleness of my words, it is too great to express. A journalist came up and started taking a lot of pictures, saying, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” Fr Gius, thank you for what you have brought into the world, thank you for having made Jesus so close and familiar.
Teresa

Tampa
On Good Friday, the CL community of Tampa/St Petersburg met at 5 pm at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Ybor City to make our Way of the Cross. At first I thought, “Why bother?” We are so few (11), and the drive to Tampa for me is long. But we were consciously united with our friends in Brooklyn, realizing that we are making the same gesture all around the country for the same reason: to remind us of God's mercy and presence, and perhaps give hope to someone that we meet. And we did meet three people who joined us near the beginning. At the end, we talked with them: they were vacationing from Brooklyn. They told us how they have seen the NY group on the Bridge in previous years. This was a great moment for us, since it affirmed our unity once again.
Joe Poole

Chicago
It was the second year the Chicago community led the Way of the Cross at St Giles Parish in Oak Park. Last year, looking for a place our small community could do a simple Via Crucis, we had begged the pastor to let us lead the standard Friday night event at his parish. This year we were preoccupied with other things... work problems, visa problems, family problems... and forgot about the event until the parish came to us, inviting us to do it once again. We somewhat reluctantly agreed, although we were too busy, and not very interested. Nevertheless, we felt obliged. So on a frigid Friday evening, March 22nd, with Pergolesi's Stabat Mater playing quietly in the church, over 80 people gathered. Eighty people! We quickly ran out of booklets, having only anticipated the 30 or 40 we had last year. It didn't matter; everyone shared. After Sveta and Sarah sang Dulcis Christe in their sweet voices, Greg led us all around the perimeter of the church, stopping at each of the 14 stations gorgeously depicted in Florentine marble. Doug and Esmerelda read the meditations from Giussani and Péguy... those incredible meditations that gradually ripped away our inattention, our superficiality, putting us face to face with Him, ourselves, our lives. It is a long journey, the Via Crucis, even when it is just around the inside of a church. When we finished the 14th station, again at the front of the church, people slid back into the pews and we all sang What Wondrous Love Is This together. Afterward, people lingered about, quietly exclaiming about the beauty of the evening.
Terese

Evansville
The Evansville Community of Communion and Liberation gathered for the gesture of the Way of the Cross on Good Friday; it was the first time that this community has done this gesture. I didn’t know what to expect. When we planned this event, we decided to walk up Franklin Ave (a major east-west thoroughfare in Evansville) and end at Sacred Heart Church–the location for our weekly School of Community. But then I got sick. I had a chest infection and the flu. So I had not promoted this event very well. I didn’t plan this event very well. And it wasn’t like we had a history of doing this gesture, either. I was (ir)responsible! I arrived 30 minutes early and to my surprise, there were fifteen (maybe twenty) high school kids waiting. I knew a few of them as part of our newly formed GS high school group, but I didn’t know the majority. I started introducing myself, welcoming these high school kids, etc. But I was curious: where did they come from? Why were they here? How did they find out about this? “From our friends!” they told me. And so they came. Lots of high school kids who had heard about this event from a friend: Come and see. When the event started, the sky was a deep black with dark green–in the Tornado Alley of the United States, these are ominous signs of an impending storm. But they kept coming! There were well over 60 people who showed up, many from our CL community, to be sure, but the majority of those who attended came because of a friendship or an attraction. Friendship and attraction: these two things always amaze me… Why would reasonable, rational people brave a tornado to celebrate an ancient tradition that–on the surface–did not seem to correspond to their lives? But that is exactly what it is: an attraction to the Tradition (a working hypothesis for today) that manifests itself in a friendship. So we began as we always do: “In the name of Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit…” We had young people, married people, older people, seminarians, babies, and children: they were all there, remembering! We remembered. And we prayed. Fifteen minutes into the Way of the Cross–just as we passed the Gerst Haus–the warning sirens alerted us to a tornado. The procession walked to Sacred Heart Church and just as the last person walked through the doors, the skies opened up and rained. We finished the Way of the Cross in the church and we prayed a rosary for peace.
Mike