My Orthodox flashback to 9/11: When will St. Nicholas truly return to Ground Zero?

On one of my first visits to New York City to teach journalism — I spent 8-10 weeks a year in lower Manhattan — I went to the window of my room high in a long-stay hotel.

I was looking straight down on the construction project to rebuild St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, the tiny sanctuary that was crushed by the 9/11 collapse of the south tower of the World Trade Center. It hit me at that moment that, at some point, my “neighborhood” Orthodox parish would be the shrine at Ground Zero.

I walked past that construction project for five years, including several years in which the work was stalled by a complex mix of mismanagement, exploding costs and, some would say, fraud. The sanctuary still isn’t finished, but it’s getting closer.

Let me stress — I was not in New York City on 9/11. I was, however, in West Palm Beach, surrounded by New Yorkers in the heart of the Seinfeldian “sixth borough” of South Florida. My family attended an Orthodox parish in which 80% of the members were Arab Christians of various kinds. My Palm Beach Atlantic University office was next to the Trump Plaza towers, the mini-World Trade Center used as a symbolic target during the training flights of Mohamed Atta and other 9/11 terrorists who spent time in South Florida.

My first 9/11-related national column was about the destruction of St. Nicholas Orthodox parish, build on an interview with its priest, Father John Romas. As an Orthodox believer, I was immediately struck by these details:

The members of St. Nicholas do not think that any parishioners died when the towers, a mere 250 feet away, fell onto their small sanctuary in an avalanche of concrete, glass, steel and fire.
Nevertheless, the Orthodox believers want to search in the two-story mound of debris for the remains of three loved ones who died long ago — the relics of St. Nicholas, St. Katherine and St. Sava. Small pieces of their skeletons were kept in a gold-plated box marked with an image of Christ. This ossuary was stored in a 700-pound, fireproof safe.

I have followed the acidic soap operas (timeline here) surrounding Jeffrey Epstein for more than a decade. That may sound strange, but there’s a logical reason — I lived in West Palm Beach from 2001-2005 and taught at Palm Beach Atlantic University, right next to the mini-towers of Trump Plaza.

Yes, that was a long time ago, back when Donald Trump was embracing his good buddies Bill and Hillary Clinton and acting like a rather mainstream Democrat, in terms of moral and social issues. And it was impossible to read the news in the Sixth Borough of New York without bumping into the kingdom of Trump. That included, from time to time, the people being courted — socially speaking — by Epstein and Co.

Life behind the scenes? That, of course, is where everyone who cares about the details of this sordid affair has to dig into the essential “Perversion of Justice” series by Julie Brown of The Miami Herald. Download it into an iPad program of some kind, because you’ll have to read it in painful chunks.

So why bring this up here at GetReligion? To be blunt: I am waiting for some kind of religion shoe to drop, some angle linked to twisted religion or anti-religious convictions. In my experience, great evil almost always involves twisted religion or blunt, demonic rejection of what is good, beautiful and true.

In one recent story, I was struck by an Epstein statement — when he was a young prep-school teacher — that mentioned his use of “spiritual” activities with his students. Hold that thought.

Meanwhile, everyone is waiting to see the long lists of people who socialized with Epstein, did “business” with him or both. Some of those names — such as Bill Clinton and Donald Trump — are already known.

Will the list contain hypocrites as well as libertines? Of course it will. We live in a sinful and fallen world.

A new Vanity Fair piece on this scandal notes that it’s hard to talk about the mysteries of Epstein’s fortune without getting into the moral dynamics inside his entourage and clients:

In the absence of much other information, the reigning theory on Wall Street currently is that Epstein’s activities with women and girls were central to the building of his fortune, and his relations with some of his investors essentially amounted to blackmail.