Kamala Harris, Knights of Columbus and Anti-Catholicism

Absent probing and honest media interviews, no one knows whether Democratic Presidential Nominee Kamala Harris still stands by her anti-Catholic rhetoric of 2020.

August 28, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

When I was 18 years old and a newly returned Catholic in 1971, I was invited by my friend, Father Anthony Nuccio, to membership in the Knights of Columbus where Father Tony served as chaplain. Along with the Civil Rights movement, the Knights were largely responsible for fostering in me a sense of Catholic community, service, and a vocation to priesthood. I was, and remain, a member of Valladolid Council #70 on the North Shore of Massachussetts. At the time I entered religious life and seminary in 1974, the Knights of Columbus bestowed on me an honorary lifetime membership. Time and distance diminished my active presence somewhat, but today I consider the Knights of Columbus to be a powerful influence on my life and vocation.

For those unfamiliar, the Knights of Columbus is an international fraternal organization of more than 2 million Roman Catholic laymen. The organization was founded in 1882 by Father Michael J. McGivney to promote ideals of charity, community, fraternity, and patriotism among first and second generation Catholic immigrants. Father McGivney’s cause for canonization was opened in 1997. Pope Benedict XVI declared him Venerable in 2008 and Pope Francis beatified him on May 31, 2020.

More than 10,000 local councils of the Knights of Columbus are presently active throughout the United States, Canada, the Philippines and the Caribbean where the Knights conduct and sponsor volunteer programs for Roman Catholics in service to the communities in which they live. The organization also conducts extensive Catholic education and scholarship programs, promotes Catholic identity, and assists in the support of seminarians and Catholic schools. Our friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri cites Knights of Columbus-sponsored free correspondence courses in Catholic and Biblical Studies as pivotal factors in his 2010 Divine Mercy Catholic conversion.

So, as you can imagine, Pornchai and I both reacted with umbrage to the misinformed and slanderous remarks of Kamala Harris and other Democratic politicians while interviewing a judicial nominee in 2020 who happened to be a faithful Catholic and a member of the Knights of Columbus. There are over 73 million Catholics in the United States. That is 73 million potential votes that Ms. Harris does not deserve unless she recants or explains her views on Catholicism and those who practice it.

For the first time in my adult life, I am afraid for America. And not only for America. I fear for all of Western Culture as well. I feel little beyond dismal foreboding for the slide toward democratic socialism into which our democracy is in rapid descent. We cannot escape the truth of it. What was, in 2020, considered the “radical Left” in politics is now merely the Left. There is no irony or subtlety at all in what I am about to write. Our only hope is to halt this course and reclaim it.

This may seem a peculiar point of view from someone for whom democracy and its assurance of justice remains a dismal failure. The imprisoned place from where I write enjoys no distractions of the world in which you read these pages. I cannot escape into Netflix or some local bar to medicate my anxiety. I cannot escape at all. Just using that word in a sentence is risky.

My view of the outside world is limited to raw and sometimes hopeless coverage presented in the 24-hour news cycles. There is no place else to go. You may have heard similar words back in 2020 from Maximo Alvarez, a Cuban-American who fled to the United States forty-four years ago. He fled socialist Cuba for America because his father convinced him that there was no place else to go.

I may be the only person I know who sat through news coverage of both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions this year. I did so for the same reason that Maximo Alvarez articulated with such courage and clarity at the RNC in 2020 — because we are both afraid for America. We both know that there is no place else to go. I have not been so afraid for my country and culture since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 when I was nine years old at the brink of nuclear war. Those of a certain age may remember the drills as grade school children across America were told to hide under their classroom desks with all the shades drawn. The anxiety and fear of a possible nuclear attack from the Cuban Missile Crisis left an impact on the psyche of every child.

When Russia embraced socialism following a cultural revolution, it became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It malignantly spread its tentacles in a quest for global dominance. That included the establishment of a socialist state in Cuba followed in 1962 by the construction of a battery of nuclear missiles aimed at the United States. For anyone who listened to Maximo Alvarez at the RNC in 2020, his revulsion and fear of the growing socialism in America was gripping.

Imagine how he felt when Senator Bernie Sanders referred to Fidel Castro as a humanitarian. Imagine the chill in his spine when Senator Tim Scott warned of the forces in America seeking an American cultural revolution and the establishment of the United Socialist States of America. Senator Scott was not referring to anarchists on the margins of American culture. He was referring to the presidential and vice presidential nominees on the Democratic ballot at that time. Now, history repeats.

Are Faithful Catholics a Threat to Democracy?

Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights heads this nation’s largest advocacy group in defense of Religious Liberty. His work was the subject of our post, “Cultural Meltdown: Prophetic Wisdom for a Troubled Age.” Most recently, Dr. Donohue and the Catholic League have demanded from the U.S. Department of Justice an investigation and explanation for recent documents launched by the FBI to investigate Traditioned-minded Catholics who are merely attempting to exercise their Faith.

Believe it or not, I am not writing a political post. As a lifelong Democrat, now an Independent, I do not oppose any political party. But my conscience requires me to oppose an ideology that is not only a threat to democracy, but a threat to Religious Freedom and my fundamental right to practice and adhere to my Faith.

In late 2018, as then-Senator Kamala Harris was preparing a presidential run, she sat on the Senate Judiciary Committee where she screened federal judicial nominees put forward by then-President Donald Trump. Senator Harris asked a nominee about his Catholic faith, noting that he had been a member of the Knights of Columbus for over two decades. Her questions alluded to the K of C being some sort of politically suspect group. She demanded to know if his membership in such an “all male anti-choice organization” would cloud his judicial decisions. She referred to the Knights as an “extremist” group.

“Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?,” Senator Harris asked. The judicial nominee, Brian Buescher, was blindsided. It only got worse. Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii picked up on the line of questioning. “Do you intend to end your membership in this organization to avoid any appearance of bias?” The appearance of bias was already front and center, but it wasn’t on the part of the judicial nominee who was eventually confirmed. On January 5, 2019, I wrote this response to the story posted at The Wall Street Journal:

“The big question here is not what judicial nominee Brian Buescher believes, but whether Senators Kamala Harris and Mazie Hirono believe in anything at all that is worthy of belief. And the bigger question is whether such overt anti-Catholic suspicions render them unfit for public office. At best, they both need a refresher course in remedial Constitutional law. Their disregard for the Constitutional provision against any religious test for judicial confirmation is a serious flaw in their readiness to represent their constituents…”

What made this biased grilling of a Catholic nominee by Kamala Harris far more reprehensible was its déjà vu factor. Just six months earlier, the Judiciary Chair, Senator Dianne Feinstein, became the subject of public ridicule for openly applying the same unconstitutional religious test to President Trump’s nominee, Notre Dame Law Professor Amy Coney Barrett. Looking over her work as a law professor at a Catholic university, Senator Feinstein referred to her faith as a “cult” and said, “the dogma speaks loudly in you.” There was hell to pay.

But not so when Senators Harris and Hirona repeated the tactic just six months later. With the exception of Bill Donohue’s vigilant voice at the Catholic League, little was said to call attention to the newest anti-Catholic bias of Kamala Harris. When this bias was unmasked, Kamala Harris had defenders who argued that she could not be anti-Catholic because she was teamed up with Joe Biden “who carries a rosary everyplace he goes.” True. He carried it while promoting abortion without restrictions at every stage of development. He carried it while withdrawing his forty years of support for the Hyde Amendment that restricted taxpayer funds for the coverage of abortions.

He carried it when he vowed from his campaign headquarters to roll back religious exemptions in contraception coverage extended by the Supreme Court to the Little Sisters of the Poor. Mr. Biden responded to the Supreme Court decisions in favor of protecting Religious Liberty for the nuns and other conscientious objectors by restoring the mandate that both the nuns and the Supreme Court objected to. This would hit the Sisters with ruinous fines and a deeply felt conflict of conscience. The rosary in his pocket notwithstanding, Joe Biden’s threats to Religious Liberty were evidence of how much he was led and misled by the Left wing of his party, a position for which Kamala Harris has taken the reins and has now made it the mainstream of that party.

In just the six months between the anti-Catholic questioning of Notre Dame’s Amy Coney Barrett and that of judicial nominee Brian Buescher, a lot had changed. One distinctive change was the Senate Democrats’ assault on the character of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a devout Catholic.

Senator Kamala Harris reprised her role as a career prosecutor by grilling Brett Kavanaugh mercilessly on entirely uncorroborated rumors of drunkenness and sexual escapades in his high school years — rumors that not a single person could confirm.

It has also been lost in most of the news media coverage that before becoming the nominee for vice president on the Democratic ticket, Kamala Harris went on record to state that she also believes the sexual allegations against Joe Biden brought forward by Tara Reade in 2020. This is among the tough questions that most in our now-partisan news media will not ask.

Credits: Left, Addie Mena/Catholic News Agency; Right, Associated Press

Anesthesia for the Catholic Conscience

After publication of a controversial post, “Joe Biden, Cardinal McCarrick and the Betrayal of Life,” a priest whom I have known for some years “unsubscribed” from this blog in 2020. His reasoning was that any criticism of Joe Biden on moral grounds amounted to a tacit endorsement of President Trump. I do not endorse President Trump. What I endorse — and so should we all — is the lawful election that put him in office in 2016. I am among the many Americans who resent the notion that this “Basket of Deplorables” who cast their votes were too ignorant to be entrusted with the finer points of democracy.

From the moment the election results were announced in November, 2016, a relentless campaign was launched to nullify this lawful election by discrediting the elected President through any means possible. Most shameful of all for democracy, much of the news media abandoned its mission to report honestly on that partisan cause. One result of that betrayal was evident at The New York Times when young, progressive reporters in the news room revolted and brought about the resignation of a respected editor because he allowed “the opposition” to write an op-ed. “The opposition” in that case was the highly regarded Republican Senator Josh Hawley.

When New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan praised President Trump’s emphasis on Religious Liberty in a FOX News interview, two liberal groups of Catholic nuns sent letters of protest to the Cardinal asking him to retract his remarks. They cited Mr. Trump’s positions on climate change and capital punishment as evidence that he cannot be considered “pro-life.” The National Catholic Reporter published an editorial using the same reasoning.

In the Catholic conscience, some real moral gymnastics are required to measure a candidate’s concept of the value of life solely by a position on the death penalty. It entirely overlooks the moral apocalypse that resulted in the execution of 73 million human lives terminated in the womb at every level of development right up to birth. The awakening of the Catholic conscience to this is evident in my post, “The Last Full Measure of Devotion: Civil Rights and the Right to Life”

I am in sympathy with “Black Lives Matter” but there is much hypocrisy. African Americans constitute 12.5 percent of the U.S. population, but 30 percent of U.S. abortions. That is by design and not merely a quirk of sociology. Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger for the purpose of controlling the growth of the African American population. That fact is finally exposed in the public square. As monuments to historical figures are toppled across the land, no one has yet suggested that Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi surrender their Margaret Sanger awards for their support of “reproductive rights.”

Whatever Kamala Harris believes about the morality of unlimited abortion on demand, she is falling lockstep in line with the platform of her party. In 2020, Kristin Day, executive director of Democrats for Life of America, reported that a third of Democrats considered themselves to be pro-life, but “top Democrats have gone out of their way to make it clear that we are no longer welcome in the party.” The DNC ignored the group’s request to testify before its platform committee. A major percentage of these pro-life Democrats are people of faith, Ms Day said, “but the much-hyped group, ‘Believers for Biden’ is a flop. It had only 26 followers on Facebook a week after being created” in 2020. One year later, Vice President Kamala Harris addressed the platform stating, “The Declaration of Independence guarantees to every American the right to liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” By single-handedly eliminating the most basic of all human rights, the right to life, Kamala Harris set the Democrat Party on a road to hedonism.

As Joe Biden vowed to bankrupt the Little Sisters of the Poor with never-ending legislation and litigation, Kamala Harris did the same during her tenure as California Attorney General. In 2014, the Catholic Daughters of Charity Health System had six hospitals that were operating at an annual loss that could not be sustained. Prime Healthcare made a bid to assume their $300 million liability for worker pensions, but the United Healthcare Workers’ union opposed the deal.

Kamala Harris attached dozens of previously unheard of conditions to the deal such as requiring the Catholic hospitals to provide 24-hour nursing, surgery, anesthesia, radiology and pharmaceutical services for five years. This crippled the deal.

Prime Health sued Kamala Harris for violating its due process rights. The Catholic Daughters executives said that Ms. Harris blocked the deal at the behest of the union with “financially crippling conditions.” The lawsuit alleged that in return the union pledged $25 million in political financial support for Ms. Harris. The lawsuit ended in 2017 when a federal judge ruled that as Attorney General, Ms. Harris had “qualified immunity” from lawsuits. It is ironic that in 2020, Kamala Harris introduced a resolution in the Senate to abolish qualified immunity for police officers while retaining it for herself.

What are American Catholics left with? Back before the election of 2020, vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris was more likely than any nominee in history to assume the Office of President of the United States at some future point due to the age of Joe Biden at that time. And yet she dropped out of the Democratic process with only a pitiful percentage of votes in the primaries. She has declared the 2 million members of the Knights of Columbus to be a subversive organization and has joined the new Democrat Party in its march toward socialism and its inevitable suppression of religious liberty.

But another voice, that of Representative Tulsi Gabbard, caught onto all this duplicity early on during the presidential debates of 2020. Before ending her own bid for the White House, Ms. Gabbard courageously unloaded her views on the suitability of Kamala Harris for the highest public office in the land. Kamala Harris dropped out of the primaries after receiving only two percent of the Democrats’ votes in Iowa in 2020. I’m giving the last word to Tulsi Gabbard:

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Editor’s note: Please share this post. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

• The Unspoken Racist Arena of Roe v. Wade

• Cultural Meltdown: Prophetic Wisdom for a Troubled Age

• Don’t Defund Police. Defund Unions that Cover Up Corruption

• Wikileaks Found Catholics in the Basket of Deplorables

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

The Despair of Towers Falling, the Courage of Men Rising

The smoke of Satan billows still 20 years after September 11, 2001, but the courage of the men and women aboard Flight 93 is also an enduring legacy of that day.

September 15, 2021

“Are you guys ready? OK. Let's roll!” You may know these words but you may not know the name of the man who spoke them. Todd Beamer said these words to his fellow passengers, Jeremy Glick, Mark Bingham, and Tom Burnett aboard United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. All four were athletes who found themselves aboard this fateful flight. There is no indication that they had ever met before that day. They knew their plane had been taken over by hijackers, and like most they became resolved to let it all play out as was the case with most hijack flights during the 1970s.

But as they and other passengers around them made cellphone calls to family and others that morning, they quickly learned of the devastation unfolding in Manhattan and Washington at the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. The lights went on in their minds. This flight was now under the control of terrorists and was destined to crash into some as yet unknown building in Washington to kill everyone aboard and to maximize the loss of life in the nation’s capital. Its ultimate goal was to humiliate and crush the spirit of America.

The clock was ticking as most passengers were subdued by the terror. Knowing the inevitable fate of Flight 93, the four men, led by Todd Beamer made a decision to thwart the terrorist plan and retake control of their plane. None of them were pilots, but it seems in their noble defiance that they set that detail aside. Todd organized the others into a rudimentary plan to wage war against the terrorists who were armed with knives and what turned out to be a fake bomb while these heroic men were not armed at all. Todd prayed Psalm 23 aloud, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil for Thou art with me with Thy rod and Thy staff that give me courage.” “OK. Let’s roll,” he said. Over the next seven minutes, the flight recorder caught the sound of intense struggle as the four men fought the terrorists and crashed their way through the cockpit door. Flight 93, intended to be used as a weapon to kill everyone aboard and hundreds more in Washington was crashed into the ground in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

It took a few days for that day to be accurately pieced together. So this is posted on the twentieth anniversary of their heroism. Todd Beamer and his comrades set their survival aside to save the lives of unknown hundreds.

The following is an account of that day that I first wrote on its tenth anniversary. It is told from a most unusual perspective, and I have rewritten it on this twentieth anniversary of 9/11. Please share it in honor of Todd Beamer, Jeremy Glick, Mark Bingham, Tom Burnett and the passengers of Flight 93, the only flight to be denied its intended target that day.

In memory of Todd Beamer

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I was ten years old on November 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas. Fifty-eight years later, every detail of what I was doing as the news unfolded on that infamous day remains vividly engraved in my mind’s eye. That day and the days of infamy to follow play in my mind like videos I’ve seen a thousand times.

Every generation seems to have these “imprinted” events, some more catastrophic than others. The generation just behind mine remembers what they were doing when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Others a bit younger than me remember the great Northeast Blackout of 1965, and the 1968 assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King.

September 11, 2001 was like all of those days combined. Whenever I ask anyone about it, I get an account not only of the terror, but also of the normal activities of a day underway for those who witnessed it. It seems the closer to Ground Zero we were — emotionally or physically — the more vivid the imprinted memories of these events.

For me, the losses of that day were compounded by prison in ways difficult to explain. One of the most troubling events in the aftermath of what has become universally known simply as “9/11” came about six months later.

A weekly Catholic newspaper had published an article on prisons, and the folly of a system in which punishment alone prevails at the expense of rehabilitation. One letter to the editor in response was from the wife of a prison guard. She wanted to set the public straight that prisoners are a vile bunch and most defy rehabilitation. Her most vivid example was a claim that prisoners all over the country cheered for the terrorists on 9/11.

It was the sort of thing I hear often quoted by prison staff, especially at contract time. Prisons and prisoners are portrayed as inhuman and dangerous with most prison staff taking their lives in their hands every day they go to work. In twenty-seven years in prison, this has not been my experience with the vast majority of prisoners. And, the prison guard’s wife’s account notwithstanding, it certainly wasn’t my experience in prison on 9/11.

It is true that there are dangerous men in prison. Some are sociopaths; some are seriously mentally ill; some are just evil in their very core; but all combined they constitute a small minority of the one-size-fits-all prison environment. In my experience, twenty percent of prisoners should never leave prison if public safety is any consideration. Many of them don’t even want to leave. Their attitudes and behaviors are largely shaped by forces within them that allow no consideration for others.

Their sheer numbers and impact are dwarfed, however, by the eighty percent of prisoners who have but a singular goal: to atone for their mistakes, and to rejoin their families and communities as responsible and contributing members of society. Prisons are designed, built, and managed to contain the former group, however, and everyone else pays a price for that.

The biggest price prisoners had to pay in the wake of the terrorist attacks is having to live with the popular notion that most prisoners sided with the 9/11 terrorists, and would terrorize you themselves if given half a chance. Perhaps the best evidence against this notion was the true reaction of prisoners to the events of September 11, 2001.

Pearl Harbor in Manhattan

It was a Tuesday morning that began like any other. In this prison, every cell is at least “double bunked,” meaning that everyone has at least one roommate, and sometimes as many as seven. After nearly six years in an eight-man cell, I was moved just a year earlier to a prison unit with but two per cell. After years spent in the crucible of the prison’s “inner city,” it was like a move to the relative calm of the suburbs.

On September 11,2001, my roommate was Bob, a 37-year-old prisoner who is now long since a free man. With cups of instant coffee in hand that morning, Bob and I both stood for the day’s first prisoner count at 0730. After the count, Bob took his coffee to a table outside the cell while I prayed morning prayer from my breviary. Like most prison roomates forced to survive in a tiny space, Bob and I fell into a routine we could live with after a few months. Bob didn’t have a job in the prison — there are far more prisoners than available jobs — and I worked on the afternoon shift — back then in the prison programs office. So it became a sort of unspoken routine that Bob had some solitude every afternoon while I worked, and I had some space in the mornings to pray and write. Before either of us was moved to that cell, solitude was unheard of. Most people don’t really value solitude until they lose it.

After the count, I reached over to turn on the morning news on my small television. It was 8:48 AM. Both CNN and FOX had the same silent image on the screen: smoke pouring from a giant gash in the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Our TVs have no speakers so I reached for my headphones, then heard the fluttering voice of a commentator in a helicopter hovering nearby:

“We are just currently getting a look at the World Trade Center. Something has happened here . . . flames and an awful lot of smoke from one of the towers . . . This is easily three quarters of the way up . . . whatever has occurred has just occurred, within minutes . . . We’ll keep you posted.”

I tuned in just two minutes after some sort of plane struck the building. The camera cut to a more distant scene. “Wow, that’s a lot of smoke,” I thought. “Hey Bobby,” I called, “take a look at this.” Bob stepped back into the cell from reading his Stephen King book at a table just outside. “Look at this,” I said again, as I angled my small TV for Bob to see. Bob grew up in New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. The scene on my screen — minus the smoke and flames — was one he had seen a thousand times.

Bob stared at the screen, and asked me what happened. The news commentators were just then saying that a plane flew into the North Tower. Commercial passenger jets would never be in the air space above Manhattan, so we both assumed this was a small, private plane that veered badly off course. Then I saw a close-up of the gash in the building. It seemed awfully big for a small plane to have caused it.

The news would only slowly unfold, and when it did, it was devastating. At 7:59 AM, American Airlines Flight 11 took off from Logan International Airport in Boston, bound for Los Angeles. It had a two-man flight crew, nine flight attendants, and 81 passengers — five of whom were al Qaeda terrorists armed with pepper spray and box cutters.

No one outside that plane knew what was happening when at 8:14 AM an air traffic controller’s instruction to climb to 35,000 feet went unanswered. No one knew that Mohamed Atta and four other terrorists had already stabbed two flight attendants and a passenger, and used pepper spray and the threat of a ficticious on-board bomb to subdue the rest.

The plane turned due south. Twelve minutes later, it began a rapid descent toward South Manhattan. At 8:46 AM, it flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center killing all 92 passengers and crew on board, and many others inside that building.

Oblivious to all of this from my vantage point, fourteen minutes passed as the CNN commentators pondered what sort of plane it might have been. Bob and I were riveted to the screen, feeling rather than seeing the lights slowly go on in our awareness. This wasn’t an accident.

Then at exactly 9:02, I spotted another plane. From CNN’s camera angle, it seemed to drift casually into view. The CNN commentator seemed not to notice it as she droned on about the North Tower. What was clearly a commercial airlines jet swept into the scene. I pointed to it on the screen, and said loudly “This shouldn’t be there.” I heard Bob whisper, “I know” when the plane disappeared behind the South Tower followed by an immense fireball exploding through the other side. “It’s an attack,” I said. “It’s a terrorist attack!”

It took some time for the story to unfold. Just one minute before American Airlines Flight 11 took off from Boston, United Airlines Flight 175 also departed Logan Airport bound for Los Angeles on another runway. It carried nine crew members and 56 passengers, five of them al Qaeda terrorists about to hijack that plane. Both planes were Boeing 767s.

At 8:51 AM, United 175 deviated from its flight path and New York air traffic controllers learned they could not contact its crew. At 8:58, it veered toward Manhattan. Four minutes later, I and thousands of other viewers spotted it on CNN’s live TV feed. I remember a split second of denial — perhaps the last moment of ignorant bliss this nation has seen — as that plane disappeared behind the South Tower and out of view. Then at 9:02 its enormous fireball emerged from half way up the building, and brought reality back home again.

Within moments, my cell was filled with people. Silent men in forest green prison uniforms, young, middle aged, and old, all staring at me. They knew that I had just seen what they saw, and none of them wanted to see any more of it alone. Then there were several guards, and it dawned on me for the first time that prisoners have televisions while prison guards do not — at least not while they are at work. “What’s happening?” they wanted to know. In they squeezed to stare at my screen.

Everyone standing in my doorway and crowded into my cell hoped against hope to hear the same thing. That this was some bizarre accident that could likely never happen again. Instead, I looked up and said, “This is a terrorist attack, and it isn’t over. Hundreds of people have just been killed, and those buildings are filled with people. This is going to be the worst disaster our country has ever seen. The world we knew just changed.”

I felt a little as though I was in that long remembered scene from childhood as Walter Cronkite explained what just happened in Dallas that November 22nd when I was ten. On this September day, you could hear a pin drop as I recounted to others in my cell the events of that morning and repeated what was known up to that moment. It came as a shock to realize that less than thirty minutes had passed since I closed my breviary and reached for my TV’s ON button.

And it was true that there was more coming. It would be awhile before we learned that at 8:20 AM, American Airlines Flight 77 departed Washington’s Dulles Airport, also bound for Los Angeles. It was a Boeing 757 with six crew and 58 passengers. Five of them were al Qaeda terrorists. At 8:54 AM its transponder beacon was deactivated.

At 9:37 AM, exactly 35 minutes after the South Tower was struck in Lower Manhattan, American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the west side of the Pentagon between corridors four and five, piercing the E, D, and C Rings and entering the B Ring. All 64 people aboard the plane, and many inside the Pentagon itself, were killed instantly.

I suddenly became aware of a transformation among the people crowded into my small cell. There were no longer prisoners and prison guards. There were only men in the face of an alarming new enemy and a common resolve.

Just four minutes before that first Boeing 767 struck the North Tower in Manhattan, United Airlines Flight 93 bound for San Francisco departed Newark Airport. It carried seven flight crew and 37 passengers. Five of them were al Qaeda terrorists. Cell phone calls to family members of the passengers wove together a chilling account of how passengers became aware of the other attacks, and then confronted the terrorists aboard their own flight, now heading for a selected target in Washington, DC. In the ensuing, heroic struggle between the passengers and the terrorists, United Flight 93 slammed into the ground at 10:02 AM in a field in Shanksville, PA, 20 minutes out from Washington. We could only imagine ourselves aboard that plane, and, in fact, many prisoners wished they were.

Then in Manhattan, the Twin Towers collapsed. The knowledge that hundreds of police, fire fighters, EMTs and rescue workers, there to help only to be crushed to death, caused both prisoners and guards to turn from my television and place their faces in their hands. America was under siege, and we were men. We could see it only from a distance, and we were powerless to answer.

The mood in prison throughout that day and in the days to follow was eerily somber. It was one characterized first and foremost by shame — the shame of being in prison at a time when families needed the comfort of their fathers, their husbands, their brothers, their sons; the shame of being detained while their country was being attacked.

In the days, weeks, and months to follow, the prisoners I knew would have given anything to go to help sort through rubble at Ground Zero, to clear out debris from the Pentagon, or to kneel in prayer at Shanksville, PA. As the very notion of freedom and an open society were under attack, the least of the free longed for a chance, any chance, to serve, to protect, to make amends.

I, for one, took this very personally. I grew up in sight of Logan Airport in Boston from where some of these flights were hijacked. This began at home — my home, our home, while our backs were turned. As the news unfolded that this was the work not of a hostile government, or some organized crime cartel, but rather the actions of religious believers waging jihad — holy war — against us, we had no category for it; no terms of understanding with which to make sense of it.

And then within weeks of 9/11, for Catholics, at least, revelations of a jihad of another sort roared out of Boston and spread across the U.S. News of decades-old abuses — some of them unspeakable, but some of them also untrue — were repackaged by the news media for eyes already clouded with suspicion for the religious terrorists in our midst.

Two decades have passed, and we still struggle with trading civil liberties for security, due process rights for safety in a free society edging toward becoming less so. To our nation’s credit, we have declared our unwillingness to blame all of Islam for the crimes of its twisted and radical few. But while refusing to allow Islam to be reflected in the acts of its lunatic fringe, we’ve tolerated — even cultivated — a virulent anti-Catholicism that holds the Church in contempt for not acting in 1965 as it would in 2005.

If America truly believes that the answer to jihad is to abandon our own faith, and our fidelity as Catholics, then the war is over. The 9/11 terrorists have already won.

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