Two decades after United Flight 93 crashed in a field near Shanksville, the passengers who fought back against the plane’s hijackers are almost universally regarded as heroes.

But, in the hours and days immediately following terrorist attacks, Father Joseph McCaffrey said, not everybody wanted to consider that.

McCaffrey, pastor of Holy Spirit Parish and an FBI chaplain, was dispatched to the crash site on Sept. 12, 2001, to provide prayer and comfort for victims’ families, as well as to first responders and investigators on the scene.

“Some family members were all about, yes, their loved one was a hero and they appreciated the recognition,” McCaffrey said. “Other family members didn’t want to hear any talk about heroes; they just wanted their loved one back, and they were very emotional about that.

“They didn’t even like hearing people talk about being a hero. Different people reacted differently to the whole situation.”

And it was a situation that stretched McCaffrey’s gifts in multiple ways for nearly two weeks.

The call

McCaffrey was the pastor at St. James the Apostle Church in New Bedford on Sept. 11, 2001, and it wasn’t long after he’d celebrated Mass there that morning that the FBI called and told him to report to Shanksville.

“I was called upon to help in an unusual way, because normally I would be there for the agents and support people and FBI personnel,” he said. “But I ended up getting involved with the families of the victims because it was such a unique situation.”

The first chaplain to arrive on the scene, McCaffrey consecrated the ground and prayed for all who died there, a process that is part of the Catholic faith. Later, he would end up meeting victims’ families at nearby Seven Springs resort and, escorted by state police, accompany them to the crash site. There he would pray with them and remain available while the FBI explained to them what was happening.

When there were no families to serve, he would make his way to an overlook above the crash site, where he could minister to first responders and FBI agents on break from working among the remains below.

In addition, McCaffrey held a Mass at Seven Springs, where he also dealt with personnel from United Airlines and assisted the Red Cross and other agencies in planning a prayer service at the crash site, in which he took part.

Delayed reaction

All those duties, McCaffrey said, served to keep him from being overcome by the magnitude of the tragedy himself.

“When I was there, I was kind of awe-struck,” he said. “I couldn’t believe that I was in here. It’s a surreal feeling that you’re part of something where, first of all, you can’t believe that we were attacked, then you can’t believe that you’re looking at a plane that was flown into the ground at such a high rate of speed and the ramifications of this whole event, historically.

“But like the other first responders, when you’re called upon to participate in something that you trained for, you just get into that role of what I’m here to do. So you focus on the task at hand, and it usually doesn’t hit us until afterward, like months later, when it all starts to hit you.”

And when it finally did?

“There were times when I would have visions of things, you could wake up from a dream of what you were exposed to,” he said. “There were times when I would just need some quiet.

“I was pastor at St. James in New Bedford at the time, and right before 9/11, I had just had the funeral of a young man who had committed suicide, and his mother and his sister found him. Then 9/11 hit and I went out to Shanksville and dealt with everything out there for 10, 14 days. Then I got called home because we had a 2-year-old in the parish who had drowned in the family pool. So after all of that, I was pretty exhausted.”

He also was changed.

“After that experience,” he said, “I just had very little tolerance for pettiness; the pettiness of everyday life and the pettiness that often goes on in families and communities and parishes. It’s just so repulsive in the face of life’s real tragedies and real concerns.”

Seven months later, McCaffrey experienced another haunting moment when he was invited to join families in listening to the tapes from Flight 93’s cockpit voice recorder at a hotel in Princeton, New Jersey.

“In many ways, it just made it all so real,” he said, noting that each person was given a headset through which to listen while a transcript was projected onto a large screen at the front of the room.

“I can remember family members with their hands crushing their headset against their ears, straining to see if they could hear their loved one’s voice,” McCaffrey said. “Actually, you could only hear what the microphone picked up in the cockpit area. You could hear people talking, you could hear what sounded like the galley cart smashing against the cockpit door.

“You could hear what sounded like one of the terrorists actually killing someone. That was a very gruesome thing to hear. That’s very much planted in my mind.”

Hope and tribute

Surrounded by so much pain in the days immediately following 9/11, McCaffrey looked for a way to bring hope to the grieving families who attended the prayer service at the crash site. He mined it from his belief that God can bring good out of evil.

“I think you saw that, even on the occasion,” he said, “because here we had a very small, small group of individuals who wreaked such terrible havoc and loss of life, and yet there were thousands of others who were trying to preserve life. There was far more outpouring of good on 9/11 than there was of evil.

“St. Paul says that ‘sin abounds, but grace abounds all the more,’ and I think that’s where a person of faith has to see that in the midst of all the evil that our world can spew out, there is still much more good and far more people who want to preserve life, to serve their fellow man and woman than those who want to destroy. That’s what we have to always be encouraged by and find hope in.”

He also encouraged his listeners to be a living memorial to those who perished.

“In my part of the prayer service, I said that someone would be wanting to do a memorial there, but the only true memorial is the difference it makes in the way we live,” McCaffrey said. “That’s how we honor people who have died. The memorial’s fine for future generations not to forget; how many young people even today weren’t alive when it happened? So it’s an important thing.

“But even more important is, did it make us better people or not? I’m concerned that as a nation we really need to turn around in our attitude and behavior because we’re not acting like people who have had such brave blood shed for us.”