by Deacon Christopher Heanue

Throughout my years in seminary, I have had the great opportunity to travel to the far ends of the earth. Two years ago, I was elected from my seminary, St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Philadelphia, to travel to China with the congregation of Maryknoll missionaries. A group of 12 men (seminarians, brothers and priests) from around the country were flown to Hong Kong where we would be “briefed” on what we were to expect when we entered Mainland China.

I spent a month in Asia and had the opportunity to travel within Hong Kong, Mainland China, as well as the Philippines. It was amazing to see the stark contrast between the faith in China and the vibrant faith in the Philippines. Whereas it was not easy and, at times, dangerous to practice one’s faith in Jesus in China, there were lines literally out of the doors of the church for the Sacrament of Reconciliation in the Philippines.

While in China, I had the opportunity to meet and speak with a bishop who was being persecuted by the Chinese government because he would not consent to their policies. He explained to me that he was not able to keep his own calendar and that a government official would normally supervise his meetings. While the freedom to practice the faith was limited, the faith was still there thanks to the work of the Maryknoll missionaries. Although the Chinese were limited in their freedom to practice their faith, their eyes were still fixed on the person of Jesus Christ.

In June, I was ordained to the transitional diaconate. Shortly after my ordination, I was sent to Madrid, Spain, for language studies. I was able to experience the Church in Spain. I assisted as a deacon at Mass daily, read the Gospel in Castilian Spanish, as well as baptized my first babies entirely in Spanish! On Sundays, even though it was an area outside of the Madrid city-center, the church was filled with families, young and old. The pastor was a remarkable man – innovative, proactive and very pastoral. Confession is offered all day on Sunday – especially during Mass. One Sunday, I remember looking down from the altar and seeing a line of at least 10 people waiting for the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Shockingly, eight of the 10 were under the age of 15.

These experiences are more than just homily material. They are more than just photo albums on Facebook. They are experiences that will remain with me forever. They are insights that will change the way I look at other cultures, people and cuisine – and, most importantly, they will assist me in dealing pastorally with those I am called to serve. In our great Diocese of Brooklyn, we have such a diversity of cultures. Mass is offered in 22 languages, and some parishes offer Mass in at least four different languages! It is the beauty of our faith that unites all our cultures together.

Faith has no language of its own. Whether we speak English, Spanish, Creole or countless more, we are still united in our faith. Each and every Sunday, we gather in our respective parishes to celebrate the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Our Lord. Regardless of our cultural diversities we remain focused on the person of Jesus Christ.

by Father Robert Lauder

Third and Last in Series
There are several reasons why, even though it was published more than 25 years ago, Richard Gilman’s “Faith, Sex, Mystery: A Memoir” still seems very relevant to me.
One reason is that in his memoir Gilman describes his outlook before he converted to Catholicism as that of a secular humanist.  My opinion is that secular humanism is the predominant philosophy among American intellectuals, at least the intellectuals who put out the newspapers and magazines, who create the films and plays, who write the bestsellers and who teach at many of our universities and colleges.
Some of the basic tenets of secular humanism are that there is no God or supernatural and no life beyond the grave, that we are the chance products of evolution and that we can construct an ethics without any reference to God.  I think that most secular humanists are either atheists or agnostics.
Another reason, which I have mentioned in an earlier column in this series, is that Gilman’s life reveals the power that literature can have in a person’s life. Gilman identifies Catholic novels as being very influential in moving him toward his eventual conversion to Catholicism. When I read about his interest and even excitement in reading some Catholic novels, I can relate very much to that experience though Gilman was reading them as someone wondering about Catholicism and I was reading them as a Catholic. I observed the same interest and excitement when I persuaded other Catholics to read some Catholic novels. Gilman writes:
“Of all the novels I read during those weeks the most affecting and important to me were Bernanos’s ‘Diary of a Country Priest,’ Mauriac’s ‘The Desert of Love,’ and Greene’s ‘The Heart of the Matter’ and ‘The End of the Affair.’ I’ve read them all again recently. The Bernanos, that grave, lovely tale of  the dying young curate, afflicted with a ‘deep, inexplicable incompetence, a supernatural clumsiness,’ who is devoted to God yet anguished by his impending loss of the world’s beauty, is the only one of them that isn’t concerned in some way with sexual desire and, though I don’t think it’s for that reason, the one that holds up most firmly as literary art… The first time I read these novels what took hold of me was the theme of human love, caught in the trap of religious belief, the idea of sexual hunger in fierce relation to the transcendent, the struggle between erotic desire and the imperious purity of the supernatural. Whereas now, in my nearly total state of unbelief, the religious elements strike me as somewhat forced, in a peculiar way almost irrelevant.”
I can understand Gilman’s initial enthusiastic response to the novels. I can even understand and sympathize with his experience of reading them after he had lost his Catholic faith. However, I cannot agree that the religious elements seem almost irrelevant.  If we take God and the supernatural out of the novels that Gilman mentions there is no story left. I think that the main character in Greene’s “The End of the Affair” and also in “The Power and the Glory” is God. Remove God and the entire meaning of the novel would change.
When “Faith, Sex, Mystery” was published it received a long review in the Sunday New York Times (Jan. 1, 1987).  A large excerpt from the book had appeared in The Times about a year before the book’s publication and in the excerpt Gilman made some of the main points that he would elaborate on in the book. I think the word “nearly” is important in Gilman’s description of his unbelief. I suggest that he was still some kind of believer or he could not have written so intelligently and insightfully about fiction that deals with the Transcendent.
In an interview that appeared around the time that the book was published, Gilman spoke with Ari Goldman of The Times, who points out that near the end of his book Gilman describes himself as “a lapsed Jewish-atheist-Catholic. Fallen from all three, a triple deserter!” Goldman writes the following: “Yet, when pressed about where he stands religiously, he falls back on his adopted faith. ‘I think if I were dying, I would want a priest.’”

by Father Robert Lauder

Second in a series
RE-READING Richard Gilman’s “Faith, Sex, Mystery: A Memoir”, I am remembering why I liked the book so much the first time I read it, which was probably right after it was published in 1987. Many of Gilman’s experiences in reading are similar to mine and I agree with much that he says about mystery.  His experience of being profoundly moved by literature provides evidence for me of the importance of reading.
In 1953, about a year after Gilman became convinced of the truth of Catholicism through reading Etienne Gilson’s “The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy,” he visited the parish library at St. Ignatius Loyola Church in Manhattan.  Having indicated to the priest he met in the library that he was interested in Catholicism, Gilman received from the Jesuit a novel by Francois Mauriac and a copy of Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory.”
Apparently the priest didn’t think highly of the writing of either Mauriac or Greene but, perhaps from talking with Gilman, somehow guessed that their writing would appeal to Gilman, who before reading Gilson’s book, would have described himself as an atheistic Jew. Recalling the meeting with the priest, Gilman writes the following:
“Remembering him, I pause for a moment to honor what he did, for it was a very bold thing. He had seen that I could never have been reached by conventionally pious Catholic literature of the sort he mainly dispensed; he knew that such writing, to the extent that I’d exposed myself to it, had in fact violently increased my doubts about the Church’s disposition toward intellect and imagination. I might have told him, or more likely he intuited it, that I needed something much harder, riskier,…So even though he accompanied the whole transaction with a mild warning about problematic theology and disturbing ‘pessimism,’ he readily gave me the books that were to prove decisive in the turning of my abstract conversion into a living one.”
In writing about Mauriac, Gilman refers to the remark by the existentialist atheist Jean-Paul Sartre that God was not a novelist and neither was Francois Mauriac. Apparently Sartre thought that Mauriac weakened the freedom of the characters in his novels by having the grace of God influence them. I suspect that Sartre was thinking of God as a physical cause forcing the actions of the characters by taking away their freedom. I think that Sartre did not realize that God is not a physical cause but a love cause and love causes freedom. When characters in a story respond to God’s grace they are more free than ever.
To Sartre’s criticism of Mauriac, Gilman responded: “Sartre, I’ve always thought was only half right: God isn’t a novelist but Francois Mauriac certainly was.”
Mauriac once commented that a chance meeting between people can have implications for eternity. I think the meeting between Gilman and the Jesuit priest was such a meeting.
Of course God is not a novelist but I do believe that each person’s life is an ongoing dialogue between God’s freedom and the person’s freedom. Divine Providence is very mysterious but God is always present, inviting a person into a love relationship. Whether the person responds with a “Yes” or a “No” to God’s invitation determines whether the person is or is not saved.
What especially interests me about Gilman’s recollection of the Jesuit priest is Gilman’s statement that the priest gave him books that helped turn his abstract conversion “into a living one.”
The books that the Jesuit gave Gilman were what I call “Catholic novels.” After reading the two novels that he received from the priest, Gilman went on to read other Catholic novels, some given to him by the priest, whose name was Father Walsh.
As I write this column, I am trying to imagine what the experience of reading this type of literature must have been for a person who only a short time before he engaged in this type of reading was an atheist. It must have been like entering a strange, new, wonderful world, a world of which he had been previously totally ignorant.
Though I have never been an atheist but rather a cradle Catholic, I think I know something of Gilman’s entrance into a new world. When in high school I was introduced to Catholic novels, I felt I was entering a “literary world” that I hadn’t known existed. I had never read literature that made both sin and grace so real, so important, so thrilling, had depicted religion and faith as so adventurous.
That literary journey, begun in Catholic high school and still continuing, I count as one of the great blessings in my life.

by Father Robert Lauder

First in a Series
I THINK IT was Elie Wiesel who said that God created human beings because He loves stories. Wiesel’s insight, I think, is profound. There are as many stories as there are human persons and none of the stories are unimportant or insignificant. There are no unimportant people.
I am not certain why particular books impress me more than others. An obvious reason might be the simple fact that some books are just better than others.  I suspect that the time in my life when I read a particular book can greatly influence my reaction to the book. What my interests and preoccupations are at the time that I am reading a book also plays a role in my experience of reading.
Wiesel’s comment has been on my mind because I recently pulled from my bookshelf a memoir that I read more than 25 years ago. When I first read it, I thought it a very interesting book. Looking through it now, I have not changed my opinion. If anything I am more convinced of its importance. The book is Richard Gilman’s “Faith, Sex, Mystery: A Memoir” (Simon & Schuster). Exceptionally well written, Gilman’s book interested me back then and still does now because it deals with several topics that I think are perhaps perennially relevant to anyone interested in literature and faith.
Brought up in a secular Jewish household, Richard Gilman in 1952 was a bored, depressed, 27-year-old atheistic Jew. One day something strange happened to him while he was visiting a library. He had gathered together some books that he wanted to take out when he felt strangely attracted to a book on the shelf. The book was Etienne’s Gilson’s “The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy.”
Gilson, a neo-scholastic philosopher, was well known in Catholic academic circles. I recall that when I was studying undergraduate philosophy in the seminary “The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy” was strongly recommended reading. Taking Gilson’s book down from the shelf, Gilman began to leaf through it and read some passages. He had been actually struggling to leave the room but felt he was in the grip of some unknown pressure. Gilman writes the following:
“The book was a big one, a real tome, and as I reluctantly leafed through it, turning the pages with an effort and forcing myself to read a few lines here and there, it struck me as dry, technical, full of alien language and ideas…as much as I could make out of those. In any case it was nothing in which I could conceivably have any interest, I told myself.
“So I put it back on the shelf, picked up the books I’d chosen before, turned around, found myself without any power to move, turned back again, took the Gilson book from the shelf once more, put it back, repeated the whole mad cycle three or four more times and then, besieged, light-headed as though I had a fever, nearly sick to my stomach, put the book with my others…”
This fascinating incident was the first step toward Gilman’s conversion to Catholicism. When he arrived home, Gilman reluctantly began to read Gilson’s book. He would put it down and pick it up again several times. Getting through the book was almost a physical struggle. Finally when he finished it, Gilman, alone in his room, said out loud to himself and to the air something like, “It’s true, all of it, it’s all true.”
Looking back on his experience of arriving at belief in Catholicism, he describes his experience as completely intellectual. The elements that won him over were entirely philosophical and intellectual. The experience that happened through reading Gilson was not accompanied by any moral conversion. Gilman was not especially preoccupied with any sins from his past life but only with the truth of Catholicism.
Judging from my experience as a priest with people who have converted to Catholicism, an intellectual conversion such as Gilman describes is relatively rare. Something like that may have happened to Jacques and Raissa Maritain or to Thomas Merton but it seems far from typical.
The fact that Gilman’s conversion began through reading philosophy probably is one of the reasons why his book appealed to me as a professor of philosophy. Also it probably appealed to me because as an academic I believe in the importance of books and reading. Books can be a strong force in someone’s life. I can think of several books that I have read which I can honestly say changed my life. Even as I write these words, titles of books that greatly influenced me are coming to mind. Certainly Gilson’s book changed Gilman’s life.

by Father Robert Lauder

AS A NEW YEAR’S gift Father Joe Kelly gave me small paperback book. Father Kelly is a New York Archdiocesan priest who is now assigned as a spiritual director for seminarians in  residence at Douglaston.
More than 35 years ago when he was a seminarian, he took some of my philosophy courses. When he gave me the gift I was grateful, though looking at its cover, I immediately thought this would never be a book that I would choose for myself. The book was Dion the Wanderer Talks Truth (stories, humor & music) (Cincinnati, Ohio: St. Anthony’s Messenger Press, 2011, pp. 146, $16.99). The book was written by Dion DiMucci and Mike Aquilina.
Though I knew Dion was a singer, I did not remember ever hearing him sing and I had absolutely no idea of his life. Though I am swamped by the amount of reading that I have to do for my philosophy courses at St. John’s University, I decided to read at least some of the book because it was a gift from Father Kelly.
What a great surprise the book turned out to be. Once I started reading I could hardly put it down. Dion captured my attention and interest early in his story and I became more interested the more I read. In his Introduction, Dion writes the following:
“The chapters are about a lot of things. They’re about being a singer, songwriter, and performer. They’re about growing up a sports fan in New York City in a certain time. They’re about being a husband, a dad, and a grandfather. They’re about being Italian-American and loving my heritage. They’re about having addictions and dealing with them. They’re about having very few virtues and lot of attitude – and not dealing so well with the latter!
To Live Is Christ
“They’re about a lot of things, but they’re really about one thing. They’re about Jesus Christ. In this respect at least, I’m like St. Paul: ‘For to me, to live is Christ’ (Philippians 1:21), so Jesus kind of figures in everything, from the music to the Yankees to the pasta.” (p. x11)
For me, the book was not only a kind of introduction to rock music but to the world of rock stars. It reminded a bit of Martin Scorsese’s HBO documentary film about Beatle George Harrison: “George Harrison: Living in a Material World.” Though there are probably many differences between Harrison and Dion, both eventually were interested in the spiritual dimension of human living.
There is one section in Dion’s book that especially interested me as a philosopher. Dion was attending a dinner at which many Italian-American celebrities were present. One artist gave a talk in which he warned the members of the audience to be wary of anyone who tells them that he or she has the truth.
The speaker encouraged his listeners to flee such a person because there is no objective truth and anyone who says that there is truth is a fanatic.
Dion correctly perceived that the speaker was contradicting himself. If there is no truth, then what the speaker was saying was not true. If the speaker thought that what he was saying was true, then he was contradicting himself in saying there is no truth. Of course for a person to think that he or she knows that there is no truth is the worst example of dogmatism and of relativism.
I was delighted that Dion picked up on the contradiction. Among students in my philosophy classes at St. John’s University, I run into relativism. My experience leads me to suspect that most college freshmen in our country are relativists. The good news is that if I can spend some time with students and help them to reflect on the nature of truth, their relativistic views seem to dissolve.
What is most inspiring in Dion’s story is his conversion, which eventually leads him back to his Catholic faith. With impressive honesty, Dion reveals his personal problems and also the problems of many who were close to him either through family or in the world of rock music. All conversions are mysterious and perhaps not even the person who experiences one can clearly articulate what happened.
I recall one occasion, after I had given a lecture, a woman, who was not Catholic, came up to me and asked why I had become a priest. I tried to explain that there was no way that I could clearly explain my vocation because it involved at least three mysteries: the mystery of God, the mystery of me and the mystery of my relationship with God. For me to explain clearly why I became a priest, I would have to understand completely those mysteries.
The woman soon lost interest in my attempted response to her question, but I don’t think readers will lose interest in Dion’s story.

Next week: A closer look at Christ’s Resurrection.

by Father Jean-Pierre Ruiz

I’m proud to be the son of Pedro Ruiz. I can tell you — with all due respect to my teachers — that I learned more from him about what it means to live as a person of authentic faith than I could learn from all the books that have ever been written.

My father was a man of deep and unshakeable trust in God, and that was the solid ground for his commitment to his sons. “That’s my son!” he beamed when I won first prize in the third-grade art show. Even though I have to admit that my prizewinning piece wasn’t especially memorable, except to him and my mother, all these years later I still remember how proud he was and how important that was to me. I never had the chance to discuss this Sunday’s readings with my own father, but my lasting memory of that phrase that day way back in third grade, “That’s my son!” gives me a pretty good idea of what he might have had to say.

In this Sunday’s Gospel, Mark’s account of the Transfiguration, Peter, James, and John follow Jesus up a high mountain, where they experience their friend and teacher as they never had before, with His clothes made “dazzling white, such as no fuller on earth could bleach them.” For that glorious but fleeting moment, they see Jesus as they had never seen Him before. They are astonished by what they see, and while Peter hardly knows what to say, the voice they hear from the cloud is loud and clear: “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him” (Mark 9:7).

This is the second time in Mark’s Gospel that Jesus is identified as God’s beloved Son. In the very first chapter of Mark’s Gospel, immediately after his baptism by John in the Jordan, it is Jesus himself — and Jesus alone — who hears a voice from the heavens saying, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11). On the mountain of the Transfiguration, as they hear the voice from heaven, Peter and James and John learn what we have known from the very beginning of Mark’s Gospel: everything that Jesus says and does from the beginning of His ministry until His last breath on the cross, He does as God’s beloved Son.
Faith Before Paternal Instinct

Speaking of fathers and sons, though, I’ll have to confess that I find this Sunday’s first reading uniquely challenging. That’s not because the text itself is confusing or because its grammar or vocabulary are especially complicated from my perspective as a biblical scholar. In fact, it is starkly straightforward, leaving precious little room for ambiguity. It is hard for me to understand because I am confident that my own father would have argued vigorously with God rather than obey without any objection what God asks Abraham to do: “Take your son Isaac, your only one, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah. There you shall offer him up as a holocaust on a height that I will point out to you” (Genesis 22:2). I know that my own father would have sacrificed anything, even his own life, rather than see any harm ever come to me or to my brothers.

Abraham was God’s friend — even God admits as much in the oracle of Isaiah 41:7 — and it was God who promised Abraham, “I will make you a great nation and I will bless you” (Genesis 12:2), and who begins to fulfill that promise when Sarah conceives and gives birth to Isaac (Genesis 21).

As this Sunday’s reading begins, the narrator tells us “God put Abraham to the test,” letting us in on something that Abraham doesn’t know. Was that any way to treat a friend? On top of that, just a few chapters earlier in Genesis, when God lets his friend Abraham in on the divine plan to destroy sinful Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham is confident enough about their relationship to take issue with God, arguing so persistently on behalf of people who aren’t even related to him, that God has a change of heart and spares the two cities (Genesis 18:16-33). Persistent, persuasive, and successful negotiation on Abraham’s part for the sake of complete strangers, and not a word on behalf of Isaac, whom God reminds him is “your only son, whom you love”?

Yet this is not the first time that Abraham did just as he was told without giving it a second thought. Just as in this week’s reading he is commanded to “Go forth to the land of Moriah,” in Genesis 12 he is told to do the unthinkable: “Go forth from your land, your relatives, and from your father’s house to a land that I will give you.” Just as he obeyed without hesitation when he was commanded to leave the security of the past behind — his land, his relatives, and his father’s house — and to entrust himself to the unknown, in Genesis 22 he is commanded to sacrifice his hope for the future.

Even as he goes through the motions of obeying, Abraham’s words betray both how troubled his heart is and the hope that his divine friend has something else in mind. In words that don’t make it into this Sunday’s reading, Abraham leaves his servants behind, ordering them to “Stay here with the donkey while the boy and I go over there,” and reassuring them, “we will worship and then come back to you” (Genesis 22:5). Is he misleading them, or does he suspect that God might have something unexpected in mind?

As he carries on his own back the fuel for his own undoing, Isaac speaks up to ask, “Father…Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?” Abraham answers in words freighted with the tension between fear of what might happen and hope in what seems all but impossible: “My son, God will provide the sheep for the burnt offering” (Genesis 22:7-8).

In the end, Abraham has enough faith to entrust his whole future to the providence of his divine friend — not some vague far-off future, but his very real future in the flesh, in the person of his beloved son. Thus the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, “By faith Abraham, when put to the test, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was ready to offer his only son, of whom it was said, ‘Through Isaac descendants shall bear your name’” (Hebrews 11:17-18).

Yes, friendships do get tested, and faithful friendships endure no matter what. The patriarch, our father in faith, put his future in God’s hands, and his divine friend does not disappoint.

by Marie Elena Giossi

Patrick Sullivan was killed in the terrorists attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

Within hours of the Twin Towers falling, Patrick and Mary Sullivan knew their youngest son probably didn’t make it out alive.
It was a harsh reality for the Breezy Point couple. They had just seen their son over the weekend. His car was still parked in their driveway. And on that Tuesday morning, as he did every morning, he called his parents’ home. He was running to a meeting and spoke briefly with his father, planning to catch up with his mom that afternoon.
Just minutes after his call, the Sullivans heard a radio report stating that a plane had crashed into the North Tower. Patrick, 32, worked on the 104th Floor at Cantor Fitzgerald.
They ran to their balcony, where they could see Lower Manhattan on that cloudless morning. “We saw the smoke and my wife said, ‘Those buildings are going to come down,’” Sullivan recalled.
While he tried to allay his wife’s fears, he took out his binoculars. “It looked like an explosion when the first building was coming down. Still, I thought Patrick had time to get out. …
“We don’t know how he died up there but it must have been terrible if people were jumping out windows,” said Sullivan, a retired NYPD officer.
After the buildings fell, telephone calls began. Their eldest son, Gregory, an NYPD officer assigned to the legal bureau, ran to the scene. The family heard survivors were taken to local hospitals. They called but there were no records of a Patrick Sullivan.
Gerald, their second son, ran from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Two weeks earlier, he had left his job at Cantor Fitzgerald, where he’d worked with his younger brother and their cousin, Peter Milano, a senior vice president.
“I knew if we didn’t hear from him in an hour or two that…” Sullivan said, his voice trailing off. “We never got any remains. There was nothing left.”
Patrick perished along with his cousin and 656 colleagues.
Because he had lost his brother, Gregory was temporarily assigned to work at Ground Zero with NYPD chaplain, Msgr. Robert Romano, a family friend.
The Sullivans lived in Bay Ridge when Msgr. Romano was assigned to St. Anselm’s parish. He’d known Patrick as a student at the parish school and was his Confirmation sponsor. He watched Patrick become a young man at Xaverian H.S., Bay Ridge, where he was track star. And he shared the family’s pride when Patrick’s academic and athletic pursuits led him to Georgetown University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics.
During those days after 9/11, and over the last decade, Gregory said Msgr. Romano was “pillar of strength for our family. He always calls my mom on Patrick’s birthday and Mother’s Day,” Gregory said.
Gregory admitted that never finding his brother’s remains “leaves you with an empty feeling.” But he’s never doubted his faith, he said, because “monsignor helped put things into perspective, that God has a plan for each of us.”
The family had a memorial Mass and later a funeral Mass at their church, St. Thomas More, Breezy Point. A lock of Patrick’s hair, which his mother had saved, was buried in a family grave along with any hopes for his future.
But ask Patrick’s family and friends and they’ll tell you that his love and loyalty, especially toward his family, continues to be felt.
Shortly before Sept. 11, Gregory and his wife had found their dream home in Westchester but they couldn’t afford the down payment. At the time, Gregory was an NYPD officer, attending law school and raising three small children.
“Patrick gave us the down payment a week before he died. We met by the World Trade Center,” Gregory recalled. He didn’t feel comfortable accepting money from his little brother, but “Patrick said, ‘You take this. It’s for your family.’ He had this big smile on his face.”
Today, Gregory has a law practice near that home, where he and his wife are now raising their four children. “It’s all because of him,” he said.
Though Patrick never saw the house, his smiling face is immortalized in a photo above the mantle so he is never forgotten.
As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approached, time had not dulled the family’s pain.
“This is a really tough time. Some people say they have good days and bad days. We have a struggle. Some times are tougher than others,” his father said.
On Sept. 11, the family attended the Ground Zero memorial service, where Gerald presented some of the names. That evening was spent in the warm embrace of neighbors and friends at the Breezy Point 9/11 Memorial.
When asked how his faith has been affected in the years following the tragedy, Patrick Sullivan said he didn’t know if losing his son made him more or less religious, though he and Mary continue to attend Mass daily. They spend their free time saving lives with the Breezy Point Volunteer Fire Dept.
“A friend asked if God had given us a deal to send us a beautiful person for 32 years and then take him back,” rather than not have had Patrick at all, “would we take the deal. We would,” Sullivan said.
“God gave us Patrick for 32 years and in those years, he never once disappointed us. I hope he’s in a good place now.”