By Malin Jordan
The B.C. Catholic

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg failed. His attempt to ban clergy from the 10th anniversary ceremonies for 9/11 revealed more about his personal ideology than his care for victims of the tragedy and their families.

He repeated that the day was to be about victims and their families only, as if chiding everyone for thinking that religion even plays a part in life.

His excuses ran from the contradictory to the unintelligible. In one breath he said, "There is a separation of church and state in our constitution." Then he contradicted himself in the next saying, "Which clergy do you want? Your religion, my religion, her religion; let's start to get to the practical aspects."

So now there just wasn't enough room?

"It's not that it's not worth the time," he added. "There is a place for prayer. When you hear the names of your loved ones, I think most people probably say a prayer. When they walk on and see the names of their loved ones, and look down on the reflecting pools, they will say prayers."

Then the unintelligible, "A lot of people don't want to participate in a ceremony where other people's religion; they feel very strongly it's theirs (sic).

"We don't have room for rescue workers, we don't have enough room for all the families - we'll be able to squeeze them in - but this is the day for the families. You can't have everybody and we've made a decision ... this is for the families; Day 2 is for everybody else."

In Bloomberg's ideological thrust against faith, he distorted reality. His notion that the ceremony was to be about "families and the victims" perverted the meaning of faith. Why support the notion of faith in a God, when he could push his Bloombergian ideal of a supreme faith being in each other?

At the ceremonies, the families of victims invoked God innumerable times. They also had the faith to say they'd see their loved ones again. You need faith for that, and certainly not faith in other victims or their families.

But most interestingly, and probably to Bloomberg's utter and tragic amazement, not one family member mourning the loss of a loved one appealed to his Bloombergian ideal of faith in comrades.

Bloomberg pushed his own idealized form of what faith is and he failed miserably. When he finally got his chance to speak at the end of the ceremony he revealed more of the unintelligible, and dare I say incompetence.

He began, "Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we're the only witnesses that they have."

Huh?

He continued, "The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."

What does that even mean?

If he's trying to rip off John McCrae's "if ye break faith with us who die" line, then he's failed again in his cheap poetics. Humans break faith with one another daily. If that were the faith we have to cling to, it would be a bleak world. Bloomberg's assertion means humans would drown daily in his fancifully "engulfing sea."

His claim that religion should play no part because of a separation of church and state is delusional. It was his own belief, his Bloombergian faith, which spawned his own religious mantra: "if we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."

In the end, Bloomberg was shown up by former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the mayor who guided New York through the horror of the attack and its aftermath.
When it was Giuliani's turn to speak, and perhaps because of Bloomberg's ban on clergy, he brought God into the ceremony.

Giuliani said, in part, "The perspective we need, and have needed, is best expressed by the words of God as inscribed in the book of Ecclesiastes. 'To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die....'"

And so on throughout the words of Ecclesiastes 3 until the end, '"...a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to be silent, and a time to speak. A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. God bless every soul that we lost, God bless the family members who have to endure that loss, and God guide us to our reunion in heaven.'"

Bloomberg's attempt to beat the Good Book for words of wisdom was an exercise in futility. So was his attempt to ban God from his so-called secular ceremony.