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Innocent Lives: A View from Across the River
Mourning the loss of American heroes

By Raymond Gawronki, SJ

It was the firemen that most got to me—they and the cops: “New York’s finest.” Hundreds of them had been running into the towering inferno to save lives.

My family is from New York, and I was on the phone to Brooklyn and Staten Island, the places the cops and firemen were from. These are the people who lived next door to us: Irish and Italian, white Catholic men. You’d see them hanging out at the firehouse.

For three generations, my family has lived in and around New York City. When I was a little boy we lived facing the UN building, across the East River from Brooklyn; then we skipped right over Manhattan, and I spent the next ten years looking across the Hudson at the Midtown, daily watching sun and moon rise over the whole sweep of the city from the Washington Bridge to the Verazzano Narrows. The most lovely cityscape in the world is the view from atop the New Jersey Palisades.

My best friend from high school was on a ferry crossing to the city that day, and then headed for the World Trade Center when it was attacked. Like so many, I spent the next day trying to call relatives in Brooklyn and Staten Island. The attack on my home city, with those buildings which had become a symbol of the city in the last quarter of the 20th century, was traumatic. And, perhaps like all of us, I felt shock, then rage, then a desire for some sort of justice.

“God Bless America”
I was moved by President Bush’s words that first evening: brief, dignified, serious.

But the sight of the Congress of the United States assembled on the steps of the Capitol, singing “God Bless America” provoked an entirely different sort of feeling in me, one which has sadly grown in the ensuing weeks. It made me feel odd, as if I were seeing some replay of an old movie which rang untrue, an anachronism.

Few people that I know doubt that George Bush is a decent, sincere, and God-fearing man. His invocation of God blessing America rang true to his character. But beyond the piety of individuals, how can our government invoke God? Have we not banished God from our classrooms, from our places of public life, from our public discourse? “God bless America”—I heard recordings of Kate Smith on the radio in those first few days, and my grief only deepened as I heard her sing. Kate Smith has been long gone, and no one has replaced her. Hand-made signs have gone up on lawns around Wisconsin, reading “One Nation Under God.” Yes, that is how it was. Is that what we have been becoming?

“One Nation Under God”—I am told it was President Eisenhower who inserted the phrase “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance. And it seems that at a Hollywood telethon after the recent attacks, the phrase was censored by one of our celluloid gods, back to “One nation, indivisible.” Ike and the nation he spoke for are a long way from today’s Hollywood.

My father loved this country. The son of immigrants, he joined the thousands of other immigrants’ children in fighting for America in the Pacific. Some 20 percent of the US soldiers who fought in World War II were Polish, like Sergeant Gawronski. At Mass on the Sunday after the bombings, I saw their names at the back of the church: those who had given their lives in the wars of the 20th century for this America that they loved—this decent country, where honest, hard working men could hope to marry, raise a family, find justice in the courts and a decent living with which to support their wives and children. Those soldiers were very much like the firemen and cops who gave their lives on September 11. And yet, after years of increasing moral darkness, their witness seems to have come from another time and place, another world. After the wholesale consumption of forbidden fruits during the past decades, a light has been turned on and we are suddenly naked and afraid.

I say “another world,” because in the past generation, the America that we have been creating is one in which those fallen heroes—predominantly white, Catholic, and male—have often been demonized. They have been stripped of their God-given role as fathers in the family. The most basic right, the right to life, has been denied many of their children and grandchildren. In its place, the right to take their children’s lives has been institutionalized for those who in earlier times would have been mothers. Mothers, the very heart of civilized life, are now seen as an often despised vestige of an earlier time, a category for the lower classes, “breeders.”

How strong are we?

Our shock after the September 11 attack was caused by the taking of innocent life, and we were right to be shocked. But a moment’s reflection forced me to ask: Where do we stand, as a nation, with respect to innocent life?

A statement attributed to Osama bin Laden taunts us in the newspaper. He says, “America is weak.” And something in me says: He is right. There is no doubt about the bombs, the riches, the buildings, the technology we have. If that is strength, then we are strong. But if strength is found in the fiber of a culture, in its marriages and families—if strength is found in the goodness and uprightness of a nations’ citizens—how strong are we?

There has long been a “culture war” in America. There are two Americas, and the America of the firemen and policemen has long been losing. Suddenly, under attack, there is a moment in which we would unite under the old standard: Kate Smith, and Dad gone off to war. But the cultured despisers of religion in Cambridge and New York and Hollywood have long banned religion from the public square in America. As a culture, and in large part as a nation, we have turned away from the most basic forms of public decency.

President Bush would have us see this attack as an attack against our freedom: but what has become of our freedom? Back in Jersey, the Christian Brothers taught us that freedom did not mean license. Have we not lost that responsibility which alone makes freedom real? What are the freedoms of our way of life? Are they the freedoms which the Founding Fathers had in mind? Freedom becomes license when it means the freedom to have sex with anyone one wants, or the freedom to make as much money as one wants with no regard to anyone else, or the freedom to impose our will on anyone else—whether on the highway or on the planet. Have we not been fleeing responsible freedom, for a freedom from “Nature and Nature’s God?” On September 11, 2001 we experienced a wake-up call, a sobering moment, rousing us from a slumber induced by wealth, in which we have been going ever further into a never-never land, removed from the consequences of our behavior.

The Biblical tradition, from start to finish, knows the lesson of Cain and Abel: immorality has physical consequences. The earth cries for revenge even when the witnesses are destroyed. Yet the God who guarantees justice is even more merciful to those who are open to repentance. Our enemies are not the Muslims, who believe that “Allah is merciful and quick to forgive.” No, our enemies are those forces which would destroy us by internal corruption—those forces which would banish the voice of Christ and his Church from the public consciousness, and surrender us to our basest desires in the name of a spurious freedom.
Are the many children of our many broken homes—often drugged, insulated from any real contact with the jagged edges of things—capable of fighting a sustained war? And then—and this is very painful—what is it we will be fighting for? Sooner or later we will have to ask: Can Christians in good conscience fight for a government which taxes them to kill unborn children? (Remember, at recent world conferences, it has been the Muslim nations that have rallied behind the moral leadership of the Vatican, united in a common stand against the America represented by Bill Clinton.)

I salute the heroes of the recent terror in New York. I salute New York’s finest. But I am sad to think that they may be an “endangered species.” In another generation of the America our social engineers have been forming, they will have disappeared. In a culture of resentment, there is no room for their heroism. They bore witness to that side of the culture which has been losing the culture wars. They are the sons of the “hardhats” of Lower Manhattan who caused the Establishment to sneer and sniffle.

Justice, yes, justice must be done in the matter of the terrorists. They are enemies of civilized life. But they cannot destroy us if we are truly strong, and that strength comes from a morally strong civilization alone.
We must return to a common polity in which a common sense of natural law forms the basis of our civilization. As Catholics we must take responsibility for making our voice—our tradition and more, our faith—heard in the public forum. Right now, the race is to the swift: we have been becoming a Nietzschean society of the survival of the fittest. There are some issues which Catholic Christians can never accept because they violate the most basic human rights, quite apart from any creed or tradition or even revelation: the right to life of innocent human beings is central. Until our nation turns away from its “abominable crime” of abortion and infanticide, until we rediscover a common law which unites us with civilized men and women of the past 2,500 years in the West, we will continue to do violence to Nature and Nature’s God. And he who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind.

Father Raymond Gawronski, SJ, teaches theology at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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