With five years behind them, some of the priests who were called to help people cope after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks have looked back on the role they played at the Pentagon, around the World Trade Center site and in Mason City, Iowa.

Whether in the thick of things in the damaged Pentagon building or hundreds of miles away in Iowa, this sampling of recollections from priests who found themselves called to unusual duty five years ago gives a perspective on how chaplains and parish priests found themselves responding.

Covered in darkness
Father Robert J. Romano, deputy chief of chaplains for the New York Police Department, was celebrating a funeral Mass at his parish, the Shrine Church of St. Bernadette in Brooklyn, on the morning of Sept. 11. By the time the funeral ended, word had come about two planes crashing into the World Trade Center as well as into the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.

In a recollection written about that day, Father Romano told of heading to two different Manhattan hospitals, expecting to minister to the injured, only to find no patients had been brought there from the trade center.

Instead he went to the site where the twin towers had stood just a few hours earlier.

"As we got closer, the dust in the air blocked out the sun," he wrote. "The sound was muffled because of all the material that was in the air. The sight and the lack of sound reminded me of the words of the Passion: 'Darkness covered the whole world.'"

He wrote about his experience that day at the request of Msgr. Edward Burns, who heads the Secretariat for Vocations and Priestly Formation at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Once at the site, Father Romano said, he soon learned that hundreds of police officers and firefighters were feared dead and that a fire department chaplain, Franciscan Father Mychal Judge, had been killed. He later learned that a seminary classmate, several former altar boys and his godson were among the dead.

Working in a family center set up at police headquarters, Father Romano spent the days to come ministering to families and police officers. He began celebrating Mass at headquarters every day. After starting with just a handful of families who waited for news in the building auditorium, he expanded, celebrating Mass each Sunday and holy day at ground zero.

"The numbers grew," he wrote. "Faith was on the rise. Mass was brief; it had to be to accommodate the rescue shift that was finishing and the one that was about to start. ... We started with a handful of cops and by the last day I had to say Mass outside on the corner of Murray Street and Greenwich Street. I never thought I'd celebrate Mass in the middle of the streets of lower Manhattan."

Ministering to families
Father LaVerne Schueller, then an Air Force colonel, was attending a meeting of command-level chaplains at the Pentagon Sept. 11, 2001.

Normally stationed at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Neb., Father Schueller was in a conference room within the Pentagon when American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the west side of the building. At first unaware of anything more than a thud sound, the group of chaplains and their executive officers was soon told to evacuate, Father Schueller told Catholic News Service in a phone interview.

Though the chaplains were told they should go home, or to their nearby hotels, instead they worked their way around to the medical triage area, where people who were injured were being treated until they could be shuttled to hospitals.

"They ran out of ambulances," he remembered. "They were loading people into the backs of vans."

He ended up spending much of the day ministering to people around the Pentagon and helping the medical personnel when possible. They were so busy it was sometime in the afternoon before he heard that the World Trade Center towers had collapsed midmorning. Finally around 4:30 p.m., "when there was nothing else we could do," he said that he went around to the damaged side of the Pentagon and saw where the plane had hit.

With most air traffic grounded for several more days, he and the other chaplains were unable to return to their homes. Instead, they staffed a crisis counseling center set up nearby by the Defense Department. Amid a group of similarly ranked chaplains, Father Schueller was placed in charge of the project by virtue of the date he attained the rank of colonel.

The chaplains and counselors found themselves aiding a steady stream of people, many of whose family members or friends were missing at the Pentagon. The experience at the counseling center "was just wrenching," he said.

"I think of some aspect of that day every day," Father Schueller said. "For a long while after it happened, normal parts of life just seemed like nonsense by comparison."

Father Schueller, a priest of the Archdiocese of Dubuque, Iowa, retired in January 2003 after 26 years in the Air Force. He now works part time as a chaplain in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

We cried, we prayed
Msgr. Joseph J. Slepicka drove to Mason City, Iowa, on the morning of Sept. 11 for an alumni breakfast at Holy Family School, where he had started kindergarten with Tom Burnett. The two had remained friends through high school and college and Msgr. Slepicka had joined the Burnett family through years of baptisms, marriages, family gatherings and hunting and fishing expeditions.

By the time he reached his own home 10 miles away, the message light on his answering machine was blinking, he said in a reminiscence he wrote at the request of Msgr. Burns.

"I had had a call from the Burnett family in Bloomington, Minn.," he wrote. "Call as soon as you get home," the message asked.

When he returned the call, one of Burnett's daughters, Mary Margaret, said to him, "Monsignor, Tommy's in trouble. He's on a hijacked airplane, United Flight 93, and we don't know what has happened to it yet, so please pray."

He learned that Burnett had made several calls to his wife from the airplane that ultimately crashed in southwestern Pennsylvania after passengers attempted to take control of the cockpit.

In his recollection, Msgr. Slepicka described watching the Burnett family cope with their loss and with the intense attention from the news media. "What strong and courageous persons they were," he wrote.

In April 2002, Msgr. Slepicka visited the crash site north of Shanksville, Pa., with the Burnett family.

"This was probably the most difficult moment I experienced," he said. A day earlier, the family had gone to New Jersey to listen to recordings from Flight 93's data recorder, and had heard Burnett shouting orders to others on the plane as they tried to take control from the hijackers.

"We met Tommy's family and together we cried, we prayed, we were silent in our thoughts," he said. "I offered Mass for Tommy and the other passengers on Flight 93 from the hill overlooking the crash site."

-- CNS