As it has for many people, the news of Osama bin Laden’s death has stirred up a lot of old memories for me: Sitting in front of my television, wiping sleep out of my eyes, seeing a tower with smoke billowing out the side. Seeing the horror-stricken look on a woman’s face as she looked up from a New York street and cried, “Oh no, no! They’re jumping!” Looking at the block of windows where my husband used to work in the South Tower, watching them crumple when it fell, wondering if his old coworkers were okay.
At the time I was an atheist, so the terrible event, as sickening as it was, didn’t trigger a moral conundrum for me. Bad things happen, there’s not much you can do about it, and that’s how it is, the thinking went. It wasn’t until I came to believe in God and started learning about Catholic teaching that I would look back on that awful day and have my mind reel as I tried to absorb one of the most difficult moral truths I’d ever heard: That God not only could, but wants to forgive Osama bin Laden. That even someone who was responsible for a terror attack that slaughtered thousands could ask for God’s forgiveness, and receive it.
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