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PATRIOT'S DAY, 2006

FBI chaplain recalls unparalleled havoc

By John Lantigua

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Monday, September 11, 2006

NORTH PALM BEACH-- — On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, FBI Chaplain Paul Wierichs received a vague message.

Some sort of plane crash in Manhattan required his immediate presence. He assumed it was a small aircraft. He tried to call in, but couldn't get through. At his home on the east end of Long Island, he prepared a small bag.

"I thought I'd be back the next day and I packed for only one night," says Wierichs, 62, a member of the Passionist order of the Catholic Church. "I ended up spending the next two weeks at ground zero — 18 or 19 hours a day. I hardly ever left."

One month ago, Wierichs became director of Our Lady of Florida Spiritual Center, a retreat house his religious community runs in North Palm Beach. He had spent the previous three years as a pastor in Scranton, Pa.

But before that, Wierichs worked for 14 years as the Catholic chaplain to FBI agents in New York City. He bolstered them as they investigated the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, which killed six and injured more than 1,000. He offered them spiritual support as they scoured the grisly remains of TWA Flight 800, which crashed on Long Island in 1996, killing 230 people. He had counseled agents who had confronted countless violent crimes.

"But, of course, there had never been anything like this, neither for me or the agents," he says.

On his way to Manhattan that morning, Wierichs turned on the radio and learned the extent of the emergency.

"It was while I was driving toward the city that the twin towers fell," he recalls. " They had closed off the city and the Long Island Expressway was empty. I did 90 to 100 and got there in a little over an hour."

At FBI headquarters, about five blocks from the scene of the attack, he glanced in the direction of the towers.

"I saw gaping sky filled with billowing, angry smoke," he says.

In the FBI office, he found two agents who had run to the trade center after the first plane had hit.

"They were still shaking, " he says. "They had been there when the first tower fell and they had almost gotten killed."

Wierichs, in the company of a Lutheran FBI chaplain and another agent, headed into that smoke. They reached the blocks of flaming ruins left by the hijackers.

"I have been to hell and I have seen the face of evil," he says today.

During the following week, Wierichs recalls, 18 people were pulled alive from the wreckage, but hundreds and hundreds were brought out dead, day and night.

"The fire department guys always insisted on carrying their own," he says. "Everyone would stop and salute and I would step forward and anoint them."

He also discovered a makeshift morgue established nearby in a Brooks Brothers men's clothing store.

"They had no body bags yet, so they used Brooks Brothers apparel bags to hold the body parts," he says, with a shake of the head and, even now a look of disbelief.

One day he went to nearby St. Patrick Church, where more bodies had been taken. Lying right in front of the altar was a corpse covered by a blanket and a priest's stole draped over it. The stole is the narrow vestment a priest wears over his shoulders for certain ceremonies.

The body was that of the Rev. Mychal Judge, a fire department chaplain who had died with his men inside the World Trade Center.

Sunday, Wierichs, along with the Knights of Columbus, hosted an ecumenical Patriot Day Rally at his center, which included brief speeches by clergy from the Jewish, Hindu and Muslim faiths, as well as a Presbyterian minister.

"I didn't support the invasion of Iraq, but I certainly do support our troops who are there," he says.

Given what he saw at ground zero, which he seems to carry in his eyes even now, Wierichs says he would have trouble supporting just about any war.

"As far as I can see, violence leads to nothing but more violence," he says solemnly. "That's all."

Last Updated: July 31, 2008