When terrorism struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon a year ago, Americans of all stripes were affected. Several teachers in archdiocesan schools, were swept up in the aftermath of the attacks.

Some, like Tracee Gonzalez—an 8th grade teacher at John Paul II Catholic School—put aside regular jobs to serve their country.

Gonzalez, a member of the 814th Military Police Company out of Arlington Heights, received orders to report to Fort Hood, Texas. She’s just returned from 10 months of providing “force protection” there and helping release other military units for overseas service.

“After watching the events of 9-11, I prepared myself for ‘that’ call to come,” Gonzalez said in late August after coming home—just in time for the new school year. “It was something I expected. I braced myself.”

During the days following 9-11, Gonzalez began preparing her students. “They didn’t want me to leave,” Gonzalez said. “My students now were in 8th grade. It would have been my fourth year teaching this group. They knew my background. We got them a substitute teacher who eventually was with them all year. It was kind of hard to accept.”

Gonzalez’ unit was mobilized and she reported for duty Oct. 12.

Her students did not forget her. They sent Gonzalez letters and birthday and Christmas cards. Some even communicated via e-mail.

“Periodically I was able to call the school and talk with the students through the loudspeaker,” she said. “Students would give me updates and vice versa. It helped me get through the time I was away.”

She surprised her class and school parents by coming home for graduation.

“I was so happy to have the time to come home for it,” Gonzalez said.

“They were as excited to see me as I was them.”

Gonzalez said students most frequently asked her, “why did they do this?” and “why do they hate us?”

“I tell them ‘they’ don’t agree with our freedoms,” she said.

“But I still don’t know what the right answer is. I say I believe in America and what we stand for.”

Gonzalez adds that although she did not serve abroad, her duties were stressful. “We are not used to protecting our own on our own soil,” she said. “We take the heightened security very seriously. I would do it again if I had to.”

Gonzalez returned home from active duty August 7. She met with her new students but plans to take some time off before returning to the classroom in November.

Gonzalez was not alone.

St. Ann School, Lansing, also lost one of its teachers to the military call up following 9-11.

Navy Reserve lawyer Pam Meyers gave up her dream of teaching to process wills for the Navy. After a six-week stint, she returned to St. Ann where continued teaching until this past February. Meyers has since been recalled and now serves in Virginia.

“Pam is great with the kids,” said Tim Hathhorn, St. Ann principal.

“She gave up teaching in the public schools to come here. Pam decided to supplement her Catholic school teacher income by staying in the reserves.”

Before Meyers left for duty again, the school held a prayer service for her.

“We gave her a medal,” said Hathhorn. “We keep in touch with her through e-mail and cards and letters. We lost a good teacher but she has a commitment to our country. It hits home a little closer when someone you know and respect has to leave and help protect us.”

Andre Portes, a music teacher at St. Barnabas and a member of the 85th Division Reserve Band, said he has not been called up yet but the possibility still exists.

“Seven members of my unit were called for duty,” said Portes who previously served four years on active duty with the U.S. Marine Corps. “With some units coming back after serving, the possibility is there I may be next.”

Portes, who has taught six years in archdiocesan schools, sees himself likely to be assigned to doing security duties.

“I joined the U.S. Army Reserve so that I could continue to serve my country,” he said. “I will do whatever asked to defend that which is so sacred to us all—freedom.”

Principal of Brother Rice High School, Brother Karl Walczak, said two of his teachers are involved in the military.

Dean of Students Marvin Mathews is on active duty with the Navy Reserve in New Orleans.

“Mathews’ absence puts a little pressure on the office but we want to do our part,” said Walczak.

Jean Searls, head of Brother Rice’s English department, also is in the Naval Reserve.

“We keep everyone called to defend us in our prayers,” said Walczak. “We ask God to help guide and protect them and return everyone home to us soon and safe and sound.”

— Hilary Anderson



Tears, then action

Rich Doyle is one of those red, white and blue Southsiders who grew up in St. Sabina Parish, and served his country in Vietnam. Today he is a Knight of Columbus in the Father Perez Council, a member of St. Cajetan Parish and works for the City of Chicago.

He was on the job Sept. 11 when his sister in California phoned that a plane had struck the WTC. A half-hour later his Mom called and confirmed it was a terrorist attack.

After work that evening, Doyle was at a neighborhood tavern where he helps out. As he watched the graphic TV coverage, “I got up and walked out … sat on the stoop and cried my eyes out, wondering how this could be happening to my country.”

He didn’t mourn long. “You spring into action. You’ve gotta do something!” he said. His K of C council immediately started taking up donations for the families of fallen New York City firefighters. They were able to raise $3,300 for each family’s immediate needs.

Doyle says he’s intensely patriotic and an early member of the city’s Windy City Veterans 20 years ago. The club reacted quickly when Army Sgt. Nate Chapman, a Green Beret, became the first serviceman killed in Afghanistan. The vets signed their names to a plaque in his honor and sent it to his family.

This year Doyle will go to work, observe a moment of silence at 9:46 a.m. and say a prayer for the victims and for our country.

— Dolores Madlener



Red, white and blue

Last year right after Sept. 11, so many people lined up at WGN Flag Company to buy flags that Gus Porter had to leave college for a week to help with the family business.

“Everybody [in line] got along: you can’t even get them to do that in a department store,” he said. “We were all Americans, not black, white or Hispanic.”

Although WGN doesn’t own a machine big enough to make Old Glory, it does make city flags and designed. Porter and a friend make the patterns on computers. Then seamstresses sew the different colored nylon pieces together. Beginners chain stitch warning flags. Veterans like Maria Salinas do applique work. The job Salinas likes least is sewing banners.

“They’re so heavy,” says this 17-year veteran flag maker. “You scratch your arms and your legs with the pins.”

WGN gets its American flags from a Philadelphia firm and local seamstresses sew on rod pieces to reinforce the flags.

“Right after 9-11, people wanted anything red, white or blue,” Porter said. “A lot didn’t care if it was made in the U.S. or Taiwan.”

What was most exasperating? Customers who didn’t know what they wanted. He recalls one who referred to the Stars and Stripes as “the Illinois flag.”

The extra orders only lasted a few months because the companies that never had flags thought theirs would last forever. However, since older business customers knew outdoor flags only last a few months “with all the pollutants in the air,” WGN was swamped, Porter said. But by early August all back orders had been filled.

At WGN the long-term effects of 9-11 are viewed differently. Salinas has noticed the increase in security, which she predicts will mean an increase in taxes. Porter stresses his confusion.

“Every time I look up and see a plane, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. “Every time I think some peace has been reached, there’s another bomb.”

WGN owner Carl Porter, a Catholic, offers a different take. Although stationed in Germany during the Vietnam War, he knows about body bags.

“There are a lot of things [our government] can and cannot do,” he said, “so I’ll assume it’s doing the best it can.” — Carmelita Banks



Power of prayer and care

Kathryn Tomlin believes in the power of prayer. She also believes in the power of caring. That’s why the St. Nicholas of Tolentine principal continues the relationship her school established after 9-11 with St. Columba, a New York City Catholic school located near the site of the World Trade Center disaster.

“We talked about what had happened in New York with the students,” said Tomlin. “They had a good concept of what was going on. They really wanted to help.”

The St. Nicholas school family began praying for the victims and their families. Tomlin erected a prayer board outside her office specifically for them, next to one already in use for friends and families of St. Nicholas’ students.

The children collected money to send to St. Columba.

Tomlin and faculty then helped students start a letter and card writing campaign for the approximately 300 St. Columba students.

“We had almost a one-on-one situation,” she said. “Every grade level at our school made cards or wrote letters for every student at St. Columba.”

Tomlin says the response was overwhelming.

“Especially striking were the thank you notes received from St. Columba’s kindergarteners. It was to the point that we had individual names to whom we could continue sending pictures and cards.”

Tomlin adds none of St. Columba’s students or their families were directly involved in being hurt or harmed by the World Trade Center implosion but they could see it all through the windows of their school.

“Now they look out their windows and see just vacant land,” she said.

But St. Nicholas’ students did not stop there.

First Grade teacher Jamie Schmid had a nephew who was in the military and sent to Afghanistan. They began another letter-writing campaign—sending notes and cards to him and his buddies stationed there.

This fall on the anniversary of 9-11, students will plant yellow tulips in a plot of ground outside their school.

“Yellow tulips are for remembrance,” said Tomlin.

“As regrettable as the event was, it stirred up a notion that we are responsible for each other. It seems as though everyone shied away from talking about patriotism but now teachers and parents alike seem to want to come together and discuss it. We also know the power of prayer was working because these people who were so directly affected couldn’t have come as far as they have without the Holy Spirit working within them. It is comforting. It also is something we don’t anticipate ever forgetting.”

— Hilary Anderson



Learning not to hate

In the days after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, some Chicago-area Muslims found themselves the target of misplaced anger, with hostile crowds marching towards mosques and scattered assaults on people with an Arabic appearance, leading to widespread calls from the religious and civic communities for tolerance and understanding.

For the most part, people listened.

“To the credit of the people of the Southwest Side and the police departments, there was no vandalism, no criminal action committed against our mosque,” said Omar Najib, a member of the Bridgeview Mosque Foundation, which was the apparent aim of one march. “Young people were really acting out of emotion.”

Najib participates in an interfaith dialog group with Protestants and Catholics that was formed nearly a year before the attacks, in response to a controversy spurred by plans to convert a Protestant church in Palos Heights into a mosque. The group met Sept. 12, and no one was afraid to attend, he said.

“Our Catholic and Protestant friends called us and said, ‘You are innocent,’” said Najib, a 28-year resident of the Palos area.

“Once someone is your friend, your first concern is for their safety,” explained Kathy McNicholas, a member of the group from St. Alexander Parish in Palos Heights.

Having an established group before the terror attacks helped churches in the area respond to people’s sudden desire for information, since they had already developed presentations on Catholicism, Protestantism and Islam to present at member congregations, McNicholas said.

Several new dialog groups also started, said Rita George, former assistant director of the archdiocese’s Office for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs. Perhaps most visibly, the archdiocese hosted an interfaith prayer service at Holy Name Cathedral Sept. 14, which included Muslims, Jews and several Christian denominations. From September to June, George visited more than 40 Catholic parishes and schools, often with a Muslim colleague, to discuss Islam, as two ongoing archdiocesan Catholic-Muslim dialog groups continued unabated.

McNicholas has been giving books about Islam to Catholic acquaintances who approach her because they know she’s part “of that Muslim thing.”

“I think people understand that their ignorant and they want to understand better,” she said.

Najib agreed.

“I think out of all the tragedies that have been coming our way, there is a lot of interest in knowing about Islam and understanding it,” he said. “But the real issue is not religion. It’s what causes people to act violently regardless of their faith. We’ve seen it with Christians in South America and Central America and Europe, most recently in Bosnia. I don’t believe that the actions of a few people or even al-Quaeda represent Islam.”

– Michelle Martin



A unique perspective

Call him “bishop” or “lieutenant colonel” or both, but Bishop Jerry Listecki finds that his military position gives him the ability to see the attacks of 9-11 from both a military and a faith perspective.

Bishop Listecki, who has served as an army chaplain for two decades, just returned from his summer duty at Fort McCoy, Wisc., trading the military’s “cammo” colors for bishop’s purple.

The events of 9-11 were emotional, he said. It caused us to take a look at ourselves,” he said, “and it caused us to solidify because [the attacks] touched the psyche, the identity, of who we are a people.”

Watching the World Trade Center erupt and then collapse is, he said, like the death of a parent of a child, or the events that each generation calls their own—Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, the space shuttle Challenger disaster—“we always recall the emotions of the moment.”

Bishop Listecki said the attacks glued us to the media, “made us one as a nation” and helped us understand that they “remind us of our identity and called us to respond as one, not as many.”

As a priest and a military chaplain, he said, the 9-11 events are a reminder of our vulnerability and our faith.

“People went to the church [after the attacks] … pounded on the doors of churches. This reminds us,” he said, “that our first priority if a relationship with God.”