The innocents
Elie, Paul
THE LAST WORD THE INNOCENTS Paul Elie The toxic fumes were heavy, the traffic funereally light. I rode my bicycle up New York's Tenth Avenue and cut in toward the church. In my backpack I...
...For that, all the evidence suggests, is what it was...
...Matthew's Gospel, thankfully, does not ascribe the massacre to any divine plan...
...The Catholic faith is oriented around the notion that death ultimately makes sense...
...Our group in New York has half-adozen members...
...Police had cordoned off the downtown neighborhood where I live, and the streets were quiet, expectant...
...No religious person, it seems to me, would presume to say that those deaths made sense or served any higher purpose...
...Death for the sake of another is the most complete selfsacrifice this life has to offer...
...We sing, recite, pray, and petition the Lord— though the expression seems awfully grand for our petitions, which we read from Xeroxed fliers now worn as soft as vellum...
...But the implication for our lives, it seems to me, is that only through a life like Christ's can such wrongs be righted, such senseless deaths set in counterpoint...
...The implication, theologically, is that only through a death like Christ's can such deaths be avenged, such wrongs set right...
...But what of the thousands of ordinary people who died in the explosions, the flames, the abrupt collapsings of the towers...
...Paul Elie, a frequent Commonweal contributor, is an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...The character of the "war on terrorism" will likely depend on how far our president is allowed to stretch the notions of "combatants" and "intention" and "collateral damage," indeed of "innocent" and "guilty," so as to avoid having to bear responsibility for the taking of innocent lives...
...Wednesday, September 12, it was my turn to preach...
...One of us reads a Bible text and gives a brief commentary on it...
...Rather, it places those deaths in a kind of counterpoint with Christ's death...
...We arrange folding chairs in a semicircle in the far corner of the church, beneath a spotlit mosaic of Christ proffering his Sacred Heart...
...One has only to imagine the pain of those firstborn male children as they were killed or the anguish their families felt to know that there is no way to say such deaths make sense...
...I explained why I had chosen it...
...In my backpack I had a Jerusalem Bible and a Kryptonite lock...
...So it is in this episode...
...Death is the way each of us shares the experience of God, the way God shared our experience in dying for us...
...Before long lawyers would be invoking the "act of God" clause in insurance policies and breached contracts...
...The community's story has already been told in these pages (see November 18,1994): its founding in Rome after the worldwide student uprisings of 1968...
...THE LAST WORD THE INNOCENTS Paul Elie The toxic fumes were heavy, the traffic funereally light...
...The firefighters, as they hastened toward the flames, were ready to give their lives for others...
...Around my neck I had a yellow T-shirt, pulled up over my nose and mouth as though I were a pirate, not a lay preacher trying to find a few hundred words for catastrophe...
...A powerful man ordered the deaths of thousands of innocent people to further his own ends, just as King Herod did after the Christ child was born...
...The mayor, fumbling for words of succor at a press conference, had suggested that God's will was somehow behind those who got out alive...
...Those deaths conformed to the Christian pattern of supreme selfsacrifice...
...Last month, the innocents were office workers in Manhattan...
...It seemed wise to avoid speaking too confidently about God just now...
...That seems to me to be a reason why the deaths of several hundred firefighters and police officers brought such an outpouring of emotion in the days after the catastrophe...
...Now, in the church, I read the biblical text I'd chosen: Matthew, chapter 2, verses one through eighteen—the Massacre of the Innocents...
...Will he, will we, be more like Christ, or more like Herod...
...On page two of the New Testament we encounter swift and pointless mass death...
...Better to speak of the Massacre of the Innocents...
...its nightly meetings in Santa Maria in Trastevere, which make the ancient Roman basilica seem like a neighborhood church again...
...Commonweal 31 October 12, 2001...
...No sooner is a child born than a thousand others are murdered...
...I was on the way to the weekly meeting of the Community of Sant'Egidio in a church on Manhattan's West Side...
...its mediation during civil wars in Africa...
...this month, they are people ruled by despots in Afghanistan and elsewhere...
...The day before, terrorists had struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the city was staggering...
...He, and we, will have to decide...
...Death is not the end of life...
...The airwaves were crowded with God-talk...
...The fate of the innocents, those still alive and those already dead, depends on it...
...The Gospels, biblical scholars say, communicate through the arrangement and juxtaposition of texts as much as through the texts themselves...
...The biblical Massacre of the Innocents now has a new set of references...
...its growth to thirty thousand members in Italy and another thirty thousand abroad...
...People on the street were comparing the Trade Center blast to Armageddon...
...Better to speak of the Massacre of the Innocents...
...At home, stunned like everybody else, I browsed in the Bible...
...The offices where I work had been closed...
Vol. 128 • October 2001 • No. 17
