by Reppy Duart, D.D.

Tim Russert: "Why would a God who's good let something so terrible happen to the United States?"

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick (archdiocese of Washington, D.C.): "The fact that these things happen to people, to good people, is really a sign of God's great love and respect for us. God allows us to have freedom of will, and freedom of will is a wonderful thing. It makes the difference between people and animals. We can choose one thing or another. And God has so much respect for us that he never interferes with that. And because he never interferes with that, we can have saints. People can do extraordinary things. You can have a Mother Teresa. You can have people who give their lives for others. You can have the firemen and the police in New York City at the World Trade Center, you can have the people at the Pentagon, who rushed madly into something just because they want to help somebody else. And God allows that because that's wonderful. That's beautiful. That's the crowning of the human personality. The other side of it is, you can choose not to do good things. You can choose bad things. And so, it's part of God's respect for us that he doesn't force us to be saints and allows us to not be saints."

Ah. So most of the 3,000 who died, and their anguished survivors, were being used. They were not exactly cannon fodder. They were more like saint fodder. The suffering and loss of 3,000 dead (plus survivors) provided an opportunity for a few of us to get to choose whether to do extraordinary, saintly things.

So much suffering to give the rest of us opportunities to be saintly. Or not.

Of course, the good Cardinal would say, all this suffering is not really OK. You just have to see it in the larger perspective of God’s plan for man: You want freedom of will? No prob. But you’re gonna have to pay a price. No free lunches in this universe.

What kind of thinking IS this?

Is it circular reasoning? Not really, because it is beginning-to-end constructed out of thin air, out of the most childish, primitive kind of wish fulfillment. Circular reasoning has some grounding somewhere in some kind of reality. What’s on display here is a pure mind-game. If you’ll just believe this fantasy and this one and this one then you come to this really quite beneficent conclusion:

Here we naked natives stand in the New Guinea jungle as we have stood for millennia, praying to our unseen gods. Sure enough, one day they answer us and appear as giant silver birds dropping packages of good and strange things from the sky.

Is it selective reasoning? This is reasoning that says: Let’s downplay the pain of the 3,000 people crushed as the towers fell and look only at the remarkable people who were running UP the stairs even as the buildings collapsed.

And where does that leave the passengers on the four planes? On three of the planes, the whole group gets a Sainthood Grade of F. There the terrorists were giving the passengers their big chance to rush the cockpits, sacrifice themselves, and save lower Manhattan and the Pentagon. Did they? Nope. "F" for the whole sorry lot.

But of course the guys over Pennsylvania rose to the occasion and at least some of them, in the Cardinal’s (and of course, God’s) book surely got a big fat A+.

So insulting is this approach to tragedy that even to try to talk about it reduces the true altruism of September 11 to gradebook heroism. Demeans, belittles, insults extraordinary behavior and implicitly trivializes the shock and fear of everybody involved.

3,000 people on September 11 died terrible deaths. A few people on that day, suddenly finding themselves at the gates of hell on earth, acted with remarkable valor which we will remember. Were I a surviving family member of one of the 3,000, I would take no comfort in, would in fact be insulted by, this whole-cloth theory that my loved one died unexpectedly and painfully so that a few other people could have a chance at sainthood.

Yet this theory, which of course is as old as organized religion, was uttered in calm reasoned tones by a prince of the Church in a TV studio (where by the way the two other panelists were Laura Bush and Rudy Giuliani) to an audience of millions, and no one screamed at the absurdity.

Not only did no one scream. One imagines that many, in the studio and elsewhere, nodded their heads and took comfort in the consolation of this spun-glass castle of faith.

Faith gives hope and strength, enough even to act lovingly in the face of great tragedy. But faith which speaks willy-nilly of that which it DOES NOT KNOW had best keep its mouth shut.