Given at the Requiem Mass commemorating the 10th anniversary of the London Bombings on 8 July 2015 at Westminster Cathedral.
7 July 2005 is one of those days when you remember exactly what you were doing when you heard the devastating news. I was with Cardinal Cormac in Rome when someone said, ‘You need to see this.’
The Cardinal had only just arrived. As soon as he saw the bulletin, he said, ‘I need to get back.’
His distress at what we saw unfolding on our screens moved me. I heard his emotion translated into words a few days later, in a touching prayer which he offered for those who’d suffered; and which I think still expresses something of what we may wish to pray about that atrocity ten years on:
‘Lord, we bring before you
Those who have been killed and wounded by acts of terror,
Those scarred in mind and body, those who live with loss, or with the memory of fear.
'Be with them in their suffering. Stand beside these victims with your gentle arm around them to support them and give them hope.
'Bless those who mourn, especially those who grieve for their children and loved ones; and comfort them in this darkest hour.
'Renew our resolve that goodness will prevail, and our determination to preserve all that we hold precious.
'Turn the minds of those who seek their aims through terror to grasp that all life is sacred.'
The fragility of life, the sacredness of life, the courage of those who went to hold the dying and injured – all of this has been underlined these last few days of sad remembrance.
Recalling that day has brought home to us just how many victims there were that day: first and foremost, the fifty-two who lost their lives; but also countless others: people who experienced life-changing injuries, who lost relatives and friends – some of the dearest people in their lives; and all who were traumatised through their involvement that day.
I was deeply touched to hear a man speak last weekend of how he found himself on a train where there was an explosion. He heard a terrible bang; then a faint message on a tannoy asking if those with First Aid experience could go to the back of the train. When he got there, he found carnage. He saw a man who was half in and half out of the carriage floor.
‘I held him till he died. Then I closed his eyes and laid him down.’ He went on to say, ‘To this day, I thank God that I could be there for that man - because I don’t believe anyone should die alone; no one should die alone.’
He says they had a long wait in the darkness. It was after one and a half hours that a faint light approached them along the tunnel. He spent the time holding others in their distress – like the woman who was desperately injured but whose head he kept turned away from seeing all the injuries around her.
‘I know God had a use for me there that day,’ he concluded. ‘He used me.’I was deeply touched by the simplicity of his testimony; his sense that God used him to help that day.
As I listened to him, words of St Teresa came forcibly to mind, when she says:
‘Now that Christ has returned to the Father, he has no body on this earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours.
'Yours are the eyes with which he looks with compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world.
'Christ has no body now on earth but yours.’
Christ knows. He was virtually alone when he died. He came into the world that he might suffer with us. He came that we might not die alone; he chose to die a violent death too. In the end, he had only the three Marys and John alongside him when he gave up his spirit. He suffered with us.
And, as we are reminded by the testimony of this good man on the train, he, the Lord, comes to help us in holy men and women whom he uses to hold us in our pain.