But he believes the U.S. lost its way in some respects after 9/11, rather than rising to the occasion. He is struck by the “failure of leadership in America,” on the part of politicians he says are “exploiting our differences for narrow political ends of getting re-elected,” and “not really talking to America and the world about very fundamental things.”
Harding also believes Americans gave in to fear after the attacks, placing their trust in morally questionable tactics in the interest of national security.
“I never thought, in my lifetime, that I would hear people on television debating whether, and what kind of torture, we should be using. Didn't we have the (Imperial Japanese) Bataan death march? What is going on here? This is crazy … It's fear. Where there is fear, there cannot be faith.”
For Harding, the most profound lesson of 9/11 is that people around the world “have to be humble, and accept that reality is ruled by a power greater than ourselves.”
Harding's pastor, Father Kevin Madigan, had just finished hearing confessions and offering Mass at St. Peter's on September 11, 2001, when his secretary told him a plane had hit one of the towers. Later that day, wounded and dying people were brought to his church en route to the hospital or morgue.
After the attacks, Fr. Madigan found that many New Yorkers needed “a deeper, more expansive vision of God, and a deeper relationship with God, that's able to be sustained even when things are not going my own personal way.”
Fr. Madigan recalled noticing other positive, but fleeting, changes in the city during the fall of 2001.
“In the weeks afterward, I saw a great change in people. Just the average person on the street would be much more compassionate, much more caring. People seemed to be more tuned in to what were the important things in life.”
“But I think one way of putting it, is that the alarm went off – and people hit the 'snooze' button soon afterwards. They went back to sleep.”
As the U.S. marks the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon as well as United Flight 93, Fr. Madigan also wonders whether American Christians are prepared to consider the event in light of their faith.
“We've been in a state of perpetual war for the past ten years – in Afghanistan, in Iraq, now in Libya. And is it going to be someplace else, maybe Yemen, next?”
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“As Christians,” Fr. Madigan wonders, “how do we begin to work toward the way of peace?”