The Tragedy, September 11, 2001

Reverend William O’Malley, SJ

Homily at Mass for Fordham Prep Students

A young woman knocked on my dorm room Tuesday night and asked the question we’ve probably all asked ourselves: "Why are people so evil?" I didn’t have a ready answer. Who could? So the rest of the evening and Wednesday morning I pondered that.

As Atticus Finch suggests in To Kill a Mockingbird, I tried to put myself into the skin of one of those pilots and see the world and life from inside him. He was probably a quite intelligent man, able to handle the enormous complexity of flying a transcontinental jet plane. Doubtlessly, as Muslim, he prayed five times a day—which is more often than most of us do—to the same God. He was utterly devoted to a cause, which was crystal clear to him—without any doubts or shadows or hesitations. He was, in a word, single-minded.

He was as single-minded as the crusaders who hacked their way to Jerusalem in the name of Jesus, as single-minded as the Inquisitors who perpetrated unutterable suffering in the name of the God who suffered for us all, as single-minded as the revolutionaries who rampaged through France decapitating any priest or nun or anyone with a claim to noble blood, as single-minded as the Nazis who obediently herded human beings as if they had no more value than cattle and gassed and incinerated them as even less valuable than cattle, as single-minded as Kamikaze pilots who dove their plane into American battleships.

As single-minded as Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who ruined countless human lives in order to root out members of the Communist Party. As single-minded as the Ku Klux Klan and Black Panthers. As single-minded as rebels who blow up busses of schoolchildren as a legitimate means to achieve what they totally believe is a righteous cause. As single-minded as the El Salvador government that sponsored a poster campaign: "Be a patriot. Kill a priest." As single-minded as the gangsta rappers who scream the answer is in killing police.

In every single one of those horrific situations, including what happened in America on Tuesday, every single person involved believed what he or she was engaged in was a righteous, justified, holy action. No doubts, no qualifications, no legitimate contrary arguments. All the problems of our lives are rooted in a single cause: it’s all the fault of the infidels, the Jews, the communists, the rich, the cops, the blacks, the whites, the Americans. They were utterly, unshakably—even in the face of death--certain,

My classroom is papered with slogans. One of them says, "The great sin is certitude, the great virtue is doubt." Another says: "The less you know, the more certain you can be." The people who perform human atrocities are not evil in themselves, the way cyanide is evil and cholera is evil. They are single-minded. Their inflexible convictions are incapable of seeing the complexities of human life. By their very single-mindedness, they were simple-minded. As George says to Lenny in Of Mice and Men, It ain’t wicked people that causes all the problems. It’s dumb people." Adolf Eichmann, who facilitated the transport of all the Jews in Europe to extermination camps, and Lt. William Calley, who led a platoon of soldiers to slaughter 360 helpless old men and women and infants at My Lai in Vietnam, weren’t evil. They were single-minded: that is, simple, gullible, stupid. It’s the age-old distinction between the sinner and the sin.

Already there are stories of people trashing American Arab mosques and businesses, just as they did German Jewish synagogues and business in the 30s. Plain, simple, stupid people.

They had never been led to get into other people’s skin and look around at life from their viewpoint. They were led to believe that the God who created life exults in death. They had never learned empathy—for the pain, the hopes, the bewilderment—of other human beings. Kill all compassion, all fellow-feeling with the infidel, the heretic, the kike, the kraut, the nigger, the honkey, the spick, the slope, the faggot, and chaos is inescapable. The beast in us is unleashed.

The reason for the existence of this school is not to get you into good colleges, to prepare you to be an attractive job candidate, to pave the yellow brick road to the American Dream. You’re here to learn how to think, how to reason, how to see and feel the complex evidence— even if it conflicts with your heartfelt beliefs, to learn how to put the evidence into a logical sequence so you can draw a balanced, personal conclusion and ask someone wiser to critique it. We’re here to invite you to ever more complex mind-challenges, to read novels and plays so you can get into other peoples’ skins and walk around in them awhile, live a thousand lives before you set out to live your own life. The most basic purpose of this institution is to train men and women who are not single-minded, not simple-minded fanatics, but people governed by the objective truth, by our common humanity, and—one hopes—by the selflessness of the cross.

Tuesday completely fissioned our American complacency. The same single-minded-ness governs our Monopoly capitalism and global popular culture: Profit justifies every-thing. The same single-mindedness roams our own streets: Violence will solve it all. Nothing will solve it all, not even universal literacy. We have to go beyond literacy, which is only a tool to understanding humanity, to seeing the complex truth in the midst of an even more complex background of self-interests and different agendas. We invite you to become fully human beings and, we hope, open-minded, open-hearted, open-handed Christians.

Toward the end of A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More’s jailer tries to excuse himself for having taken away More’s family. He’s just a nobody, following orders, he says, "You got to understand, sir. I’m just a plain simple man." And More sinks to his knees moaning, "Sweet Jesus! These plain, simple men!"