9/11 Anniversary

9/11 Experiences Pointed Three Men to Priestly Vocation

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At about midnight on Sept. 12, 2001, an exhausted Lieutenant Thomas Colucci, FDNY Engine 3, found himself sitting on top of a colossal pile of smoldering rubble that had been, until about 14 hours earlier, one of the two twin towers of the World Trade Center.

“It was a surreal moment,” recounted former Lieutenant Colucci, now Brother Thomas Colucci, a Benedictine monk studying for the priesthood at St. Vincent Archabbey and Seminary in Latrobe, Pa. “I had gotten there right after the towers came down. I was off-duty and was on my way home when I heard. I turned around and got right down there.”

At about 8:45 on Sept. 11, Vincent Druding, a recent arrival in New York City from Indiana, on his way to his first full day of work as an intern at a city agency, emerged from the City Hall subway station mere moments after the first plane hit the north tower. “I was looking at the other tower when the plane went in,” now-Father Vincent Druding, parochial vicar at Assumption Parish in Peekskill, told CNY. “I saw the explosion. I saw people jumping to their deaths.”

A little earlier and a little further uptown, Brian Graebe, just beginning his senior year at New York University, was having a cup of coffee and a bagel waiting for his morning classes to begin when he heard a very low flying jet overhead. A few seconds later “someone came in and said the World Trade Center had been hit,” recalled now-Father Graebe, who was ordained May 14 and assigned to Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha parish in LaGrangeville. “I went out and saw the inferno. It was a larger-than-life experience.”

For all three men, eyewitnesses to what soon entered into the popular lexicon as “9/11” had a crystallizing effect. Each of them had spiritual yearnings before. But 9/11 removed all hesitation. Each moved inexorably toward their vocations.

Brother Thomas spent most of his waking hours over the next several months, either working feverishly at what came to be known as Ground Zero or attending funerals and memorial services, grieving for lost colleagues.

Father Graebe could not help but see the missing persons fliers that sprouted on walls and lampposts all over town with pictures of smiling people who simply went to work one sunny morning and never came home. Always attracted to the priesthood, he decided then that not only did he want to be a priest; he wanted to be a priest in New York.

Father Druding would work as a civilian volunteer at Ground Zero, driving himself almost to the point of physical and mental exhaustion over the days that immediately followed.

“I was depressed, exhausted, having nightmares, my hair was falling out,” he recalled. But a pair of chance encounters with two priests brought him back from the brink. One was a priest he saw in the middle of the night blessing the remains of a firefighter. The other was priest who gave him the Eucharist on a Sunday morning. After receiving Communion, he lay down and took a two-hour nap, the first real sleep he’d had in a week. When he awoke he felt at peace. “It was the hand of God,” he said. “I encountered Christ two or three times in that hellish place.”

The horrors of 9/11 and those chance encounters with the priesthood got him thinking seriously about his own life, and vocation. “I was a different person. I wanted to find out what my purpose in life was. I felt a real core desire to live for something greater,” he explained. He entered the St. John Neumann Residence at St. Joseph Seminary and began his formal studies for the priesthood in 2005. He was ordained in 2009.

For Brother Thomas, the grief was personal.

“Five guys from my firehouse were killed that day and I knew many others firefighters who died that day as well,” he recalled “After the first few days we knew we weren’t going to find anything. But we had a job to do. Mostly we just helped each other. I went to dozens of funerals, sometimes two or three a day. It was just grief.” Brother Thomas, who had been involved in campus ministry while in college, became a kind of surrogate minister to his fellow firefighters at Ground Zero.

“They would ask me, ‘Why did this happen? Where is God?” he recalled. “I would tell them, ‘Christ is here. He’s here in the volunteers, the workers.’ ”

In 2002 Brother Thomas was promoted to captain and assigned to Ladder 21 on West 38th Street. But a year later, while battling a fierce fire in midtown he was thrown against a wall by the force of an explosion, and injured so seriously he received the Anointing of the Sick. The head injury he sustained required brain surgery.

Up until then he had been thinking of a vocation as a diocesan priest after his retirement. But when he did retire in 2004 after two years of desk duty, he decided instead to enter Mount Saviour Monastery in upstate New York.

“I was thinking of a nice, quiet contemplative monastery,” he said. “I cooked for the community, mowed lawns, tended the sheep and did the gardening.” He made his solemn profession on Pentecost Sunday 2009. But shortly thereafter the community voted to send him to study for the priesthood, rekindling his desire to be a diocesan priest. Now 55, he is currently in first-year theology but hopes to be able to transfer to St. Joseph Seminary at Dunwoodie in 2012.

“I’m kind of missing New York,” he explained. “I think now I want a more active priesthood. I like bringing people to Christ. I’ve got good people skills. I’ve been around; I’ve lived life. I think I have a lot to contribute.”

As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches all three men find their thoughts increasingly turning to that sunny Tuesday morning when death pierced an azure sky.

“It was the most normal morning possible,” recalled Father Graebe, who entered St. John Neumann Seminary College in 2006. “Death can come at any time. So we can’t get caught up in the minutia of life, we’ve got to consider what’s important. Experiencing 9/11 threw that into high relief for me.”

Father Druding acknowledges his experience on 9/11 has given his ministry a degree of urgency.

“9/11 put right in front of me my own death,” he said. “I don’t know how many times I’ve preached that death can happen at any time. The most important thing in life is to live prepared to die at any moment, to reconcile with God, to put away grudges and disrespect, to love with reckless abandon. That is true freedom.”

Brother Thomas intends on being at the 9/11 memorial on the 10th anniversary. He has his FDNY dress uniform neatly pressed and ready.

“I brought my dress uniform out of the closet,” he said proudly. “That was my old life. I have new life now as a monk and I’m going to be a priest.”