Imagine trying to make your way down more than 70 floors of a burning skyscraper while supporting the weight of a woman you barely know. For Paul Carris, that was the reality he faced on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
Carris worked for the Port Authority, and his office was on the 71st floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. That morning, before going to work, he had attended 8 a.m. Mass at a small chapel near Battery Park.
Shortly afterward, he was sitting at his desk overlooking Manhattan when he heard the roar of a jet engine. Before he could process what was happening, there was an enormous impact. Flames and debris began falling outside his window.
“The building tilted, and it tilted so much, books fell off my bookshelf, and for a split second, I thought it was gonna keep going over,” Carris told me in a recent interview. As people ran for the stairs, he noticed a woman in distress. Her name was Judith Toppin. She suffered from sarcoidosis and had a defibrillator in her chest. She was struggling physically.
At that moment, Carris made a split-second decision that would define the rest of their lives. Supporting her on one side, while she clung to the banister on the other, he began the long, slow descent with her — 70 stories, one step at a time.
Toppin was moving slowly and Carris knew they had a long way to go. Yet what is striking is how calm they said the people on the stairwell remained.
‘The Lord is my shepherd’
In 2001, there were relatively few cellphones and no social media.
People watching news coverage of the attacks on television in Australia knew more about what was happening than those inside the towers.
Carris and Toppin did not know that a passenger jet had deliberately struck the building. They did not know another plane had hit the South Tower. And they had no idea that the building they were in was about to collapse.
Then, partway down, something incredible happened.
“Judith was really struggling, and suddenly she started to pray out loud, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.’ And when she started doing that, I said, ‘I better start praying, too.’”
Eventually they emerged from the tower and stepped onto the street.
“When we got out, it was like the Twilight Zone. There was complete chaos.”
As they moved away, Carris began to realize that among the surrounding debris were the bodies of people who had fallen or jumped from the towers.
He told Toppin not to look at the ground, just to look ahead and muster up the last bit of energy she had to get away. Then, when they were barely a block away, the North Tower, from which they had just escaped, came crashing down.
Toppin would later write an essay called “Angels Walk Among Us,” describing Carris as the man who saved her life. But as he would eventually tell me, he soon realized that it was actually Toppin who saved him.
Recently I traveled through New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington making an EWTN News documentary to mark the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11. I wanted to remember what happened that day, but also to ask a more difficult question: Where was God in the midst of such evil?
The stories I would go on to hear from priests and religious who responded on that day, and how faith helped survivors and family members of victims cope, provided a lot of inspiration. In midtown Manhattan, not far from where the Twin Towers once stood, I sat down with Franciscan Father Brian Jordan, who ministered for months at Ground Zero after the attacks.
He remembered seeing the very best and the very worst of humanity side by side.
“We saw goodness at its best. We also saw evil at its worst,” he told me. “But good always triumphs over evil.”
He watched firefighters, police officers, construction workers, and volunteers work together in the ruins. When human remains were found, work would stop, and prayers would be said.
But there’s one image that stayed with him the most. Days after the attacks, a construction worker approached him and said, “Hey, Father, you wanna see God’s house?” He led Jordan into the wreckage, where there were two steel beams, one standing vertically, the other horizontally. “Oh my God, it was the shape of a cross,” Jordan remembered. “God meant this for a reason. Now I know why you call this God’s house.”
Jordan remembers that for everyone at Ground Zero that steel-beamed cross became a powerful sign that faith had not disappeared beneath the rubble and that God was with them.
Shanksville’s sacred stillness
In contrast to the rumble and noise of lower Manhattan, Shanksville, Pennsylvania, is quiet and tranquil. As I stood overlooking the crash site of United Airlines Flight 93, I looked at the trees, rolling fields, and an enormous expanse of sky. There is an almost sacred stillness to the place. It is difficult to imagine an airliner hurtling toward this peaceful patch of Pennsylvania before smashing into the ground.
But in the minutes before that impact, something extraordinary happened aboard the aircraft. Through telephone calls, passengers knew their plane was part of a terrorist attack and decided to fight back.
Todd Beamer asked a telephone operator to pray the Lord’s Prayer with him before he attempted with other passengers to storm the cockpit and try to overthrow the hijackers. And because of their brave efforts, rather than the plane hitting the White House or Capitol Hill, killing hundreds if not thousands more, the plane crashed at 500 miles an hour, completely upside down, here into this field.
Father Joseph McCaffrey, a Catholic priest and FBI chaplain, arrived at the crash site the following morning.
“When I first arrived the trees were still smoking. And the first thing I did when I came was I prayed, and I consecrated the ground. I prayed the prayers of interment for all who perished here,” he tells me there at the site. And as grieving families began arriving, McCaffrey was there to meet them.
“My approach was to listen, and then based on what I heard, I would offer a word of the hope of eternal life, of God’s ultimate compassion and mercy, and that they’re not alone, that God enters into their suffering.”
From Shanksville, my journey took me back toward Washington and the Pentagon. The Pentagon Memorial feels more intimate. Beside the enormous military headquarters are 184 individual memorial units, one for each person killed there and aboard American Airlines Flight 77.
Each consists of a cantilevered bench above a shallow pool of flowing water, arranged according to the ages of the victims.
The benches are pointed toward the direction in which the plane flew that morning.
Newly ordained
Father Stephen McGraw was a newly ordained priest when he was stuck in traffic near the Pentagon that morning. He sat in his car as the plane flew so low overhead that it struck a lamppost. Moments later, he watched it smash into the Pentagon. He immediately ran toward the Pentagon.
Sitting with me on one of the memorial benches, he said, “I had the sense that God had placed me there. This is what I’ve signed up for. I want to give the sacraments. But it was beyond anything that I had done. It was just that God had placed me there as an instrument, a humble, weak servant priest at his disposal to be a witness of his closeness and his presence, to say that God was here.”
For those on board the plane, or in the direct area of impact, there was no hope of survival, but other victims ran from the building onto the Pentagon lawn, many with horrific burns. They lay down in the grass in agony, and while paramedics ran around from person to person, McGraw knelt beside them. “I was telling them, ‘Jesus is with you.’ And I repeated that to them several times, and more than once, there was actually a positive response.”
He remembered kneeling beside one badly burned man as medics worked to save him. “I said to him, with more conviction, with more vigor, I said, ‘I tell you, Jesus is with you now.’ And I remember he said, ‘Yes, I know.’”
Back in New York, Paul Carris, the Port Authority worker who escaped the North Tower with Judith Toppin, told me that for years after 9/11, the trauma of that day affected him deeply. But something else troubled him too. Toppin kept portraying him as an angel, as the man who had done everything right. It forced Carris to look at the way he had been living his own life.
“I had to face up to the fact that I had not always lived my life like the Catholic that I was being portrayed as. I separated my faith from the secular world. It has caused some issues in my marriage over the years, and so on. And Judith wrote this piece that described me as an angel.”
Carris began therapy with a priest and later attended a spiritual retreat. This had a profound effect on him, and in time his faith deepened and he entered formation for the permanent diaconate for the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey. Judith, who died in 2021, was there when he was ordained.
“She said to me, ‘You saved me,’ and I replied, ‘No, you saved me. In fact, God saved both of us that day.’”
This story was first published by the National Catholic Register, the sister partner of EWTN News, and has been adapted by EWTN News.
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