NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, September 17, 2001

All Over the City, Healing Support Through Prayer

Church leaders refuse to let terrorists prevail

By JAY MAEDER

And so the city prayed.

At downtown's historic Trinity Church, blanketed by the ashes of Ground Zero not far away, spiritual leaders moved Sunday evening services to another location. No terrorist attack, they resolved, was going to interrupt their work.

At a Mass of Supplication at St. Patrick's Cathedral, Edward Cardinal Egan vowed that New Yorkers would "rebuild the scarred sectors of our city with enthusiasm and wholesale New York-style pride."

"What we've come to call Ground Zero I call Ground Hero," the cardinal said to thunderous applause from an overflow crowd, as bomb-sniffing dogs and their officer partners walked Fifth Ave.

And on State St. in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, FDNY Engine Co. 226 became a place of worship as the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, pastor of the House of the Lord Pentecostal Church around the corner, positioned himself in the doorway and delivered a neighborhood sermon via megaphone to a crowd of several hundred gathered in the street.

"Many of us ask, 'Where is God? Where is God now?'" Daughtry said. "Just because we don't always understand life doesn't mean we don't go on with life."

Four men were missing from Engine 226. It wasn't entirely clear what had become of Lt. Bob Wallace and Firefighters David DeRubbio, Stan Smaggala and Brian McAleese. "We had reports they went up the first building," said Capt. Billy Carew.

Daughtry's service was a "rescue and survival" service, Carew insisted. "We don't feel that we've lost them yet. That's why we came together with the neighborhood."

Many Lives Touched

"I just want Dave to come home," said his weeping wife, Lorraine DeRubbio, as firefighters and neighbors hugged and consoled her. "I just want to see his big, stupid face walk in the door."

"God is where God has always been," Daughtry said into his megaphone. "Some of us are standing here today because a firefighter saved our lives, and we didn't know him, had never heard of him ..."

"I don't know another event that has touched souls like this," the Rev. John Scott was saying from the pulpit of St. John Baptist Church on W. 152nd St. in Harlem.

"To love thy enemy, that's going to be a job," murmured parishioner Willie Willis.

Indeed, it was a time of testing faith. In some houses of worship, there were pleadings for forbearance.

"God's love and our hatred cannot coexist in our hearts," said the Rev. Charles Kullman of the Church of St. Paul the Apostle on the upper West Side. "Jesus came to save all sinners, even terrorists."

Paying Respects

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in upper Manhattan houses a firefighters memorial to honor 12 men who died in an October 1966 blaze at Broadway and 23rd St. - until last Tuesday, the Fire Department's worst single disaster.

Yesterday, it was piled high with fresh flowers and ringed by burning candles and U.S. flags, and now men from Ladder 26 had come to cross themselves before it.

"We lost one of our lieutenants," one said quietly. "I just came to pay my respects and say a prayer."

Inside the cathedral, in a service attended by an overflow crowd of 1,500 and sporadically silenced by the wailings of a man who, it was said, had lost his wife in the attack, the names of the known missing were recited one by one.

"We thought about canceling this service. But to cancel it would be to give victory to the terrorists," said the Right Rev. Mark Sisk, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York.

On the Brooklyn Promenade as evening fell, with smoke from lower Manhattan still rising in plumes into the sky, some 2,000 Muslims, Christians and Jews came together in an interfaith ceremony to plead against violence against Afghanistan.

"The victims will be women and children," said an Afghani woman, Sunita Mehta. "We are for peace. We are humans praying."