Remembering 9/11’s Catholic Heroes

September 11, 2001, is now history from a quarter century ago. But it can still reduce to tears those who lived through it. 

I was executive editor of the National Catholic Register in Connecticut then, having recently moved from Washington, D.C., to Hamden, Conn., near the commuter trainline to New York. For me, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were something I had to cover as a journalist, but something that happened to my neighbors, as well.

The Register had covered the Columbine school shooting in 1999, so I told my team to look for what we found there: Unexpected stories of hope. The coverage we provided was some of the best anywhere. 

Here are some of the Catholic heroes whose stories we shared.

Father Peter Philominraj was saying Mass that morning in Our Lady of Victory near the World Trade Center.

As that Mass was getting over around 8:45, the congregation heard the first impact. Someone came running in with debris on him already. After the second blast someone came inside and said there was someone dying just outside the church. Father Peter gave him last rites on the church steps as people ran by.

He stayed outside as people fled. Some ran over to make hurried confessions; others would say, “Just give me absolution, Father,” as they hurried to get away.

Later, the largely Italian and Irish Fire Department officials asked not just for first responders, but for priests to give general absolution to firefighters and last rites to victims.

Father Mychal Judge gave general absolution to firemen who were entering one of the towers, knowing that there was a high likelihood they would never return. Then he was struck and killed by something falling off the building.

Firefighters describe how all activity stopped as they carried Father Mychael’s body away. People stopped fleeing, and firemen stopped in their tracks and took their helmets off.

Father Chris Hynes was three blocks away from the towers when the attack started, and he was still there ministering when the first building went down. He remembers a policeman stumbling toward him, covered in ash. Father Chris ran into a drug store, grabbed bottled water and poured it on the policeman, who jokingly called the priest “The first New York looter.”

Father James Hayes worked closely with the fire department and got a call when the first plane hit.

He got in a taxi and while he was headed over the second plane hit. The driver let him out and fled as debris and glass showered down. He said as he was walking to the Trade Center he saw many, many shoes on the sidewalk. People abandoned their shoes as they ran way. 

Then, he was engulfed in a cloud of debris, and took cover under a car. He ministered as best he could to people that night and returned to Ground Zero to search for survivors the next day.

Father Geno Sylva came later and helped at Ground Zero. He said workers weren’t finding whole bodies so he and a rabbi would just bless whatever remains they brought up in a plastic bag.

Then, after that physically and emotionally exhausting work, he returned to his parish in New Jersey, which included many people who worked in the Trade Center and never came home. He began visiting families and at one, a 7-year-old girl to whom he had given first Communion, asked, “Father Geno, did you dig out my Daddy?”

“All I could do was keep hugging her,” he said.

Lay people were heroes too. 

Not only were many of the first responders Italian and Irish Catholics, many were Knights of Columbus. I’ll never forget the display the Knights of Columbus headquarters made of the Mass cards from their funeral Masses. It covered a wall.

Timothy Stackpole was a 42-year-old firefighter on his way home after his regular shift. When he heard the news he made a U-turn and headed back to the World Trade Center. He had barely survived a fire in 1998 and had to go through a recuperation process that he had only just finished. He was a father of five and a parish volunteer.

A priest and a firefighter were among the last people to see Stackpole alive on Sept. 11, as he went into one of the burning towers. “He went in,” said the firefighter, “but wouldn’t let me go in with him until I got a mask. Then the building came down.”

Police Officer Jerome Dominguez, 37, was helping people down from the 20th floor of the North Tower when his co-workers told him he had better get downstairs. But he headed up instead, to get more people out. He was never seen again.

“Thank God we have faith,” said his father. “That’s how we hold up.”

We later interviewed Olympic champion rower and Ground Zero rescue worker Jason Read, who said it was seeing a priest blessing body parts at Ground Zero — maybe Father Geno? — that sparked his conversion to the Catholic faith.

Judith Toppin wrote an account of Paul Carris’s sacrifice that “went viral” as a much-forwarded email. She couldn’t walk well, so he carried or supported her on her slow descent down 70 flights of steps. The two cleared the building just before it collapsed. Paul Carris was later ordained a deacon.

Regular Catholics showed the strength of our faith that day. Not only did they die for others — roughly 1 in 6 people who died at the Trade Center were only there to help — but they died succeeding in saving large numbers of people from certain death. 

“This event has been a great evil,” said Jean Palombo, a mother of 10 who lost her husband, Frank, a firefighter. But “God’s love has exceeded this evil.”

She credits Frank with her Catholic faith. “The Lord gave him to me; the Lord took him from me,” she said. “Blessed be the Lord.”