[Blog] 9/9 and 9/11

9/9 (the 9th of September), the feast-day of Father Laval (our Père-Laval the missionary of the oppressed), is a day of pilgrimage. It reminds us of all those hundreds of places in the world, on all continents and islands, where men and women go on pilgrimage.

Year after year, they go in search of God and God’s grace. Millions go to the Ganges for purification-here to Ganga Talao- others go to Mount Abu or Velankani. Every year millions of Muslims travel the world to reach Mecca for the Hajj.

Others go to Lourdes/Fatima/Lisieux to pray to the Virgin Mary. Pilgrims go to birthplaces, especially to Bethlehem at Christmas or to Lumbini, the birthplace Siddhartha Gautam the Buddha. Others go to pray at the Wailing Wall.

Some pilgrimages such as the one to Santiago de Compostela are achieved by walking over 500 km, in stages, from France across the mountains, ending in the lovely church of Santiago in Spain.

9/11 (the 11th of September 2001) the day the twin towers in New-York were the destroyed, represents all that is evil and wrong in the world! 3,000 innocent men and women at work early one morning on the 11th of September 2002 were sacrificed to the evil tenets of extremism. It reminds us of the bombing and killing of innocents, one at a time (such as the murder of Mahatma Gandhi by an extremist, or the gunning down of JFK, of Benazir Bhutto of Anwar Sadat) to the daily bomb blast in Ukraine, to the murder in Gaza of over 60,000 people by Israel (20,000 of the dead were children), famine and destruction in Sudan, remembering the 6 million Jews, Roma and others deliberately eliminated by Hitler. Why? What for?

The deliberate fire-bombing in 1945 of Dresden in Germany (a city I know well, having the nineties directed one of the world’s first environmental training courses there). And the only use of atomic bombs against people as was the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 by the USA. All which killings of humans are in the same league as the destruction of the twin-towers.

9/11 represents human thinking gone very wrong. From those mistakenly linking a religion, for example Islam, to deliberate acts of terrorism, to the erroneous view that some races may be superior to others and to the totally undemocratic view that if someone is an opponent with whom one disagrees that person or persons is to be eliminated, as Stalin did to several millions of his countrymen. Gangsters from Chicago to Mexico do that! Is the world so full of such gangsters (or of gangsters camouflaged as politicians?) that in the last century, the 20th, almost 100 million people were massacred in 55 wars, including 2 of them World Wars?

Let us conclude on the positive and the sacred. As Chaucer said in his Canterbury Tales, at some time of the year “folks yearn to go on pilgrimage”. For whatever personal reason (purification, seeking guidance in life, cure either physical or mental) let us favour pilgrimages over any form of violence.

As this banner of my youth stated, when we walked the streets of London, together with Bertrand Russell, in 1962, in protest against the Atom bomb : Make Love, not War!

If you can, pay a visit to Ste Croix to the Crypt of Père-Laval and pray for peace on Earth and love for one another.

Dr Michael ATCHIA

6th September 2025.