A 75th memorial Mass for Father Dominic Ternan, O.F.M., was celebrated on June 19 at St. Francis of Assisi Church in Manhattan, which is where he had his first pastoral assignment as a newly ordained priest in the late 1930s. St. Francis of Assisi was also the site of Father Ternan’s funeral Mass.
For nearly a century, the 40-foot cross “has expressed the community’s grief at the loss of the young men who perished, its thanks for their sacrifice, and its dedication to the ideals for which they fought. It has become a prominent community landmark.”
In remembering the estimated 4,400 Allied troops who died storming the beaches of Normandy, France, 75 years ago on D-Day, Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio of the U.S. Archdiocese for the Military Services said that “Jesus Christ reminds us there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
Veterans Day, commemorated each year on Nov. 11, is the Day of the Armistice that put an end to the Great War a century ago this week. We often forget that World War II changed the name of the Great War into World War I. In that name – Great War – there was an implicit hope: that the horrors visited upon the world between 1914 and 1918 would never return. That hope was obliterated 21 years later, when Hitler and Stalin invaded Poland in September of 1939.
LIKE MOST denizens of Washington, I pay too little attention to the sites other Americans make sacrifices to visit. Earlier this month though, prompted by reading James Scott’s “Target Tokyo,” a comprehensive history of the famous Doolittle Raid of April 18, 1942, I strolled through Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Va., in search of three graves.
