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With Christmas approaching, Cardinal Dolan once again sought to salve a city raw with anger and division when he delivered his homily at St. Patrick’s Cathedral Sunday morning, Dec. 21.
Less than 24 hours after Ismaaiyl Brinsley shot and killed two New York City police officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, as they sat in their patrol car in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, the Cardinal asked Police Commissioner William Bratton and Chief of Department James O’Neill, seated in the front pew along with Mayor Bill de Blasio, to tell their officers, “that God’s people gathered at St. Patrick’s Cathedral this morning thundered with prayers for and with them, and that we love them, we mourn with them, we need them, we respect them, we are proud of them, we thank them.”
The Cardinal’s request was met with resounding applause throughout the Cathedral. “We are in solidarity with you,” Cardinal Dolan told the city officials attending the 10:15 a.m. Mass in a full cathedral on the fourth Sunday of Advent.
Officer Ramos was a deeply religious 40-year-old married father of two. Officer Liu was 32 and had only recently been married.
In his homily the Cardinal acknowledged that it was difficult to talk about the good news that the birth of Christ represents in light of the senseless act of violence that had roiled a city already on edge. The assassinations came at a time when police and community tensions were high and relations between the police and City Hall were strained following weeks of protest over a Staten Island grand jury decision not to indict an NYPD officer for the chokehold death of Eric Garner in July.
Brinsley, a 28-year-old drifter with a long criminal record and an apparent grudge against the police, had used the Garner death and the killing of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Mo., as a pretext for his own actions stating in an Instagram post, “I’m putting wings on pigs today.” After shooting the officers, he later turned his gun on himself and ended his own life.
The Cardinal said he had first learned of the killings while arriving for Mass at St. Simon Stock Parish in the Bronx the afternoon before.
“There, as usual were police officers assigned to cover the event,” the Cardinal recalled. “However, instead of their characteristically buoyant greeting, I found them somber and downcast. Then they told me the chilling news of their two brothers.”
St. Simon Stock Church is across from 46th precinct headquarters so the Cardinal asked the officers to take him to the precinct house where he met with and consoled some 30 officers on duty there, embracing each and praying with them. Later, during Mass he said he could see two officers out of the corner of his eye, their caps removed, praying in the chapel off the main altar. “As you observed so well yesterday, Mayor de Blasio, it was for them a death in the family.”
It was the second time in a matter of days that the Cardinal had sought to bring succor to a hurting city. On Dec. 15 he had penned an op-ed in the New York Daily News calling for unity and civility in the city in light of comments by some protest leaders caricaturing the police as bigots and some police union officials calling the mayor and other political leaders enemies of the police.
“Each year I find myself more and more grateful for the character of this city,” he wrote. “Yes, its clamor and vitality but more than that I’m talking about its solidarity, its sense of togetherness...helping one another, coming through in times of distress (think of 9/11and Sandy) a sense of welcome and inclusion and working together for the common good.” The Cardinal appealed for that spirit to heal the city’s current divisions.
And he returned to that theme Sunday at St. Patrick’s affirming that light would indeed overcome darkness, even the darkness of the longest night of the year, as it did more than 2,000 years ago in Bethlehem.
“I’ve learned in my six years here that, yes, New York, this huge throbbing metropolis, can indeed be a place of hurt, darkness, fear and fracture, that our celebrated grit and in-your-face realism can at times turn brash,” he said. “But I’ve also learned that New York can be that little town of Bethlehem, from which comes, not darkness, division and death, but light, unity and life. That’s New York! That’s Bethlehem! That’s Christmas!”
