Fifteen years ago, Capt. Thomas Colucci led the men of his 31st Street firehouse into what would be the finest hour for New York City's fire, police and emergency responders: Ground Zero on Sept. 11.

After the South Tower collapsed, the Catholic fire captain and his firefighters began digging through the wreckage, searching for any hope of survivors and the firefighters who had gone into the tower to save them.

Then, at 10:28am, the sky opened up with a roar, and a collective scream of terror erupted from the ground — the North Tower and iconic spire begin to fall — and the men and women who donned the uniforms of New York's first responders would give the final sacrifice amid a hail of steel, concrete and debris.

As they escaped, Colucci saw some of his comrades struck down — he and a few of the firefighters found their only refuge sheltering behind a car. Enveloped in that cloud of darkness, the fireman's vocation became clear: He would become a priest, helping those in darkness see a great light.

Nearly 3,000 men, women and children perished in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. But the legacy of 9/11 is that more than 25,000 other lives were saved that day, because ordinary men and women put on their uniforms and ran to save others from death and danger.

On a Tuesday morning, 343 firefighters and emergency personnel, 23 New York Police Department and 37 Port Authority officers laid down their lives for others. Many more would give their lives — a payment deferred by cancer they gathered from the rescue work.

Colucci retired in 2004, and, this year, he became Father Colucci.

When people ask him — and many have — "Where was God that day?" Father Colucci says that he saw, firsthand, the Body of Christ in action.

"The best of humanity came out that day," he said.

His department's beloved chaplain, Father Mychal Judge, had given his life anointing and praying over the injured and dying, faithful to the end in his vocation.

For weeks on end, the firehouses became places to mourn, wake and bury the dead. Most of the fallen were Catholic, and the faith helped bind them together. But it reminded Colucci of the fragility of life and the need to keep the soul always united to God in the state of grace.

"We may die suddenly and meet Our Lord at any time … and then we start eternal life." Continue reading

Sources

• National Catholic Register, article by Peter Jesserer Smith, a Register staff reporter.
• Image: LuckyBogey's Blog

It didn't take long for countless handmade posters to appear on poles and walls around the city, urgently and tragically asking about the whereabouts of people who had suddenly gone missing. The unmistakable smell of burning hung in the air for weeks. It seemed like everyone, myself included, was in shock, and we were all mourning the dead.

But these were anxious times, too. I recall the sense of dismay I felt that morning when watching the first plane hit and how that morphed, when the second plane came less than twenty minutes later, into a gut-wrenching realization that this was no accident. If the terrorists turned out to be Muslim, I thought at the time, the future could become very difficult for Muslims in the United States.

Fifteen years later, the War on Terror continues with no end in sight and the question of whether Muslims should even be allowed to enter the United States is being vociferously debated. Some politicians have eveninvoked Japanese internment as a model to follow when dealing with Muslims in this country.

A registry of Muslims, already tried on non-immigrant males from 24 Muslim-majority countries (to disastrous effect), has also been proposed. Most polls put anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States at around 50% of the population.

And anti-Muslim violence remains high. According to a Georgetown University study, American Muslims were approximately 6 to 9 times more likely to be attacked in a bias crime in 2015 when compared to pre-9/11 numbers. Continue reading

• Moustafa Bayoumi is an award-winning writer, and associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.