22 years ago

This is a day when we remember the three thousand victims of the most senseless tragedy in human history. At least those who are teenagers and older will surely remember where they were when the events of September 11, 2001 unfolded. I personally was preparing and celebrating Mass at my church in Pleasant Valley, NY, and believe it or not, I heard about the attack on America from my mother. When I got to my room after Mass, I found a message on my phone, and as soon as I was retrieving the message, the phone rings, and it was my mother frantically screaming "Julian, are you all right ?" "yes, of course I'm all right" I answered, wondering why was she panicking. Then she told me to open the TV and relayed to me quickly what was happening. At first I thought that the TV was showing a Schwarzenegger movie, but quickly I realized that this was no science-fiction movie. We all know the rest of the story, and for the next month or so, I was in touch with the Klein family of Pleasant Valley who had lost their son Peter, in his twenties, and married only a year. Of course I had to do the funeral, with no body, but a large picture of Peter, lots of flowers and a nice quilt which his mother had coordinated with friends, showing the various talents Peter had, from being an altar-boy to a boy scout. Over the next 5 months I kept giving interviews to a local radio station in Malta, RTK, besides of course doing a lot of counselling to people who were disturbed and upset with this senseless tragedy.

22 years have passed since that day, and the pain for so many families is still there. The blemish that terrorism had inflicted on the USA and the rest of the world is still around us. We just hope and pray that similar horrific tragedies will never occur again. I took this photo in 1988, while on a school trip to the Statue of Liberty with our school children. Let us pray and remember.