You are looking at what some people
believe is a miracle.
Two days after the disaster, a construction
worker found several perfectly formed crosses planted upright in a
pit in the rubble of the heavily damaged 6 World Trade
Center.
The large, cross-shaped metal beams just
happened to fall that way when one of the towers collapsed. An FBI
chaplain who has spent days at ground zero says he has
not seen anything like it on the vast site.
As word of the find has spread at ground
zero, exhausted and emotionally overwhelmed rescue workers have
been flocking to the site to pray and meditate.
"People have a very emotional reaction
when they see it," says the Rev. Carl Bassett, an FBI chaplain. "They
are amazed to see something like that in all the
disarray. There's no symmetry to anything down there, except
those crosses."
Chaplain Ray Giunta of Sacramento, Calif.,
has been to the crosses to pray with rescue workers.
"One of the firefighters pointed to them
last night and told me, ‘There's my angel,'" Giunta said.
The angel protecting the pit where the
crosses were found is the Brooklyn-born hardhat who found them: a
gentle giant named Frank Silecchia.
Silecchia, 47, who now lives in Little
Ferry, N.J., found the crosses on the Thursday morning immediately
following the collapse of the towers. He marked the
site by spray-painting on a nearby wall the words
"God's House," and a directional arrow.
"The crosses are just shards of steel
that came from the Tower 1 [the north tower], and went right through
the roof of Building 6 and destroyed the entire center
of it," he explained.
"When I first saw it, it took my heart,
and made me cry for about 20 minutes," he says. "It helped me heal
the burden of my despair, and gave me closure on the
whole catastrophe."
In subsequent days, Silecchia, a born-again
Christian, led his fellow rescue workers and others - many of
whom were grieving the loss of loved ones - to the crosses.
A veteran firefighter who had been digging
through the twisted metal for his lost firefighter son. An angry
cop who lost someone in the collapse. A Vatican representative,
who photographed the crosses for the
pope. And ABC's Barbara Walters.
He says they all left in peace.
"Barbara Walters' niece lost her son in the building," he said. "Barbara told me she wanted
people to see
the House of God, so people who needed healing could find it."
