By Mark Zimmermann
CATHOLIC STANDARD
After being appointed in 1991 as the founding pastor of Our Lady of the Visitation Parish in Darnestown, Father Raymond Fecteau had the added blessing in joining parishioners at a special Mass 10 years later, as Washington Cardinal Theodore McCarrick dedicated the parish's new church.
As a parish priest, Father Fecteau's work, day in and day out, involves being there for his people - celebrating Masses, baptizing babies, presiding at weddings, anointing the dying, and teaching the faith.
Last year was a challenging year for the priesthood, as the abuse scandal in Boston and other dioceses across the country led the nation's bishops to adopt a stringent policy aimed at protecting children. A similar policy has been in effect in the Washington area since 1986.
At the height of the scandal, Father Fecteau was in a place hit by a tragedy of another sort just six months earlier - offering a ministry of presence to recovery workers at the site of the collapsed WorldTradeCenter, which had been destroyed in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.
Father Fecteau, a longtime chaplain to police serving in Montgomery County, Md., had been invited to help lead a retreat for police serving in the New York area. At the March 2002 retreat, he would join his friend, Father Joseph D'Angelo, a priest of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, N.Y., and a chaplain to the Port Authority Police whose headquarters had been in the WorldTradeCenter.
Arriving in New York City a couple of days early to prepare for the retreat, Father Fecteau said he was moved by the special respect police showed him immediately when they learned he was a priest and a police chaplain. Leaving the train station, he told some police who he was, and he was driven to a nearby police station and then to the WorldTradeCenter site.
The Washington priest was taken to an area for families, and soon a Port Authority policeman took him to their command post. He said the chaplain's badge he wore gave him access, and his Roman collar gave him credibility, and the officers treated him as if he were their own chaplain. "They trusted me," he said.
Father Fecteau was invited to return to the site the next morning for a Sunday Mass for recovery workers. He was staying in a Marriott Hotel just south of the site that had reopened. It was raining that night. Moved by the devastation he saw and reflecting on the lives lost, the priest said he "walked back (to the hotel) crying from the site."
His priest friend, Father D'Angelo the Port Authority chaplain, had ministered to rescue workers and survivors in the terrible hours after the terrorist attacks. Father Fecteau thought about how, two to three years earlier, he had gone with the chaplain on a ski trip with 50 New York City police officers and firefighters, and he wondered if some of the men he met then had given their lives on Sept. 11.
Father Fecteau awakened that Sunday morning early at his hotel - it happened to be St. Patrick's Day - and he headed back to the site, wearing a jacket and boots that he wore as a MontgomeryCounty police chaplain, and he brought a chaplain's badge given to him by Chief Charles Moose. The Mass he had been invited to had occurred slightly earlier than he had been told it would be, but he joined officers for breakfast. Then a siren sounded, a sign that another body had been found at the site, that of a fallen New York City police officer. A policeman invited Father Fecteau to be part of the honor guard as the body was brought up. "He handed me a hard hat and working gloves," recalled the priest.
Workers at the site did not call it "Ground Zero," but referred to it as "the pit" or "the WorldTradeCenter," the priest said. Father Fecteau jumped into a truck and was brought to a ramp leading out of the pit. "The next thing I knew, I'm standing with officers as the body was brought up, and I'm saluting the body. A Franciscan priest was blessing the body," he said.
Joined by a Port Authority chaplain working that morning - Father Dave Baratelli, a Newark priest - Father Fecteau was then invited by an officer to go down with them to the pit. "I hopped on a pickup truck and went down the ramp to the recovery area. I'm standing there, overwhelmed," the priest said.
About a half dozen Port Authority Police officers were carefully sifting through the rubble, and people spoke only in whispers. "You're overwhelmed with the sense this is a holy place...(that) you're on sacred ground," said Father Fecteau.
Little sunlight filtered into that cold, damp, muddy area several stories below street level. Suddenly, the officers wearing their recovery gear learned a priest was in their presence, and they stopped their work.
"One by one, almost like coming to Communion, each teaks their face mask and gloves off and shook my hand, one-by-one," said Father Fecteau. "They looked me in the face and said, 'Thank you, Father.'"
That morning, headlines in New York and Boston newspapers had told of the scandal in the Catholic Church. One of the officers in the pit told Father Fecteau, "Father, don't let the press get to you... Just ignore them."
The priest had come regarding them as heroes, but they in turn were treating him with reverence. When leaving the recovery site, a group of firefighters hopped in the same truck. When they learned he was a priest, they too took off their helmets, bowed and said, "Thank you, Father."
When he left the site that morning and paused to rinse off his shoes, a Port Authority Police officer came up, put his arms around the priest and said, "Father, now you've been down to the pit. Now you're one of us," and he helped the priest clean his shoes."
After joining the other chaplain for a Mass at the NewarkAirport, Father Fecteau returned to the WorldTradeCenter site for lunch. At the Port Authority command post, he saw workers "so tired they would fall asleep eating (their lunch.)"
The priest was able to talk with and listen to family members of missing officers who had come to the command post.
After lunch, an officer handed him Port Authority jumpsuit equipment and invited the visiting priest to be part of a recovery team. New York State Troopers working at the site quietly confided to him how they hadn't seen their families much since the rescue and recovery effort began there.
When Father Fecteau was walking in a precarious area - to one side was jagged metal, to the other was a drop of four or five stories - a Port Authority officer said, "Father, I'll help you." When a group of young firefighters working nearby heard that he was a priest, they lifted him up and carried him over the dangerous passageway. He then met a retired battalion fire chief whose son, also a firefighter, was missing. The priest spoke with the older man, and said he would pray and offer a Mass for his son. Later, another firefighter thanked Father Fecteau, saying, "Father, that is the first time I've seen that man speak in six months." For months, the man had been keeping a silent vigil at the site, hoping his son's body would be found.
Then word came that another body - that of a firefighter - had been found in the SouthTower area, but it was not the man's son. Recovery workers covered the man's body with a flag, and Father Fecteau was again part of the honor guard, saluting the fallen hero and offering a quiet prayer in his memory.
That evening, almost 12 hours after arriving at the TradeCenter site, Father Fecteau returned to his hotel room, carrying the workgloves the officers had given him. He then called his mother - it was her birthday. And for the first time that day, he cried.
The exhausted priest then went to bed and didn't wake up until late the next day.
The experience, he said, "changed my life... the police officers and firefighters I met were practicing Catholics, and had (such) a reverence and respect for the priesthood. I saw their faith."
Later that year, Father Fecteau would offer another special ministry of priestly presence, this time close to home, as the sniper crisis turned life in MontgomeryCounty upside-down that fall.
The priest wasn't sure at first how he could help, but he heard Chief Moose say he wished he could visit the police throughout the county during those difficult days. So the priest quietly went and visited different police stations, offering his support to officers, including those working the phone lines taking tips from the worried community.
Father Fecteau also was given special access to the JointOperationsCenter, where federal and local law enforcement authorities were working together to solve the case. Just as he had in New York City, the priest said the officers treated him with great respect and thanked him for being there. He heard some Confessions, and early one day, he offered special prayers for undercover officers before they went out in search of the sniper suspects.
"That's where I was needed," he said, adding that, as a chaplain, "I was their pastor in the field... We're someone they'll cry with, share their fears and their problems with."
He said the officers he spoke with voiced similar concerns as the New York officers had, saying they missed their families. As in New York, many were Catholic, and they told him what parish they were from. "They all spoke very highly of their priests." And he assured the police that the people in his parish were praying for them.
On the night the sniper suspects were finally captured, Father Fecteau taught an early evening religious education class to high school students at his parish, standing outside to greet them as they arrived. After the class, he again visited officers at the JointOperationsCenter, and then sensed something was about to happen, when a mood of tired frustration there gradually changed to one of elation.
Father Fecteau, who has been a priest in the archdiocese for 30 years, said his work as a police chaplain "has really strengthened my priesthood... I've gotten as much from them as they've gotten from me.
"They allow me to see into their souls. They're good people. I don't think you could do what they do and not be holy, not have faith."