DEATH IN TERRE HAUTE : The execution of Timothy McVeigh.

A retarded man on a bicycle, the only visible resident of Terre Haute, Indiana, early on Trinity Sunday morning, June 10, 2001, directed me to Saint Benedict's Church, where there would be an 8 a.m. Mass. The Wabash Valley was steamy that morning, and I sought the darkest, coolest place in the cruciform interior. During the homily, I noticed that each of the four cardinal virtues was represented by its own clerestory window and that the comfortable pew seat I had chosen faced the most beclouded of them, justice.

No specific mention of Timothy McVeigh's execution the next day was made in our formal prayer. We prayed for all victims of terrorism and that all who faced capital punishment be moved to repent and know the forgiveness of God. An announcement after Mass reminded us that volunteers were needed for the snow cone booth at Saint Benedict's community fun fest next month.

Leaving Mass, we could hear strains of martial music from a civic liturgy beginning at the Vigo County Courthouse on Third Street a few blocks away. I found a parking place in front of the Army recruiting office directly across the street from the courthouse and next to a large yellow Ryder truck, a reminder of the Oklahoma City bombing and conspicuous as a tasteless joke.

A bronze statue of Corporal Charles G. Abrell, a Terre Haute native and Korean War hero, was being unveiled on the southeast corner of the courthouse lawn. Killed in action fifty years ago that morning, Abrell, despite serious wounds, had stormed a heavily fortified North Korean position, removed the pin from a hand grenade, and held it while diving into an enemy bunker, killing himself and the bunker's gun crew. A suicide bomber and courageous Marine, Abrell was clearly well loved by his hometown. A large civilian crowd joined a hundred members of the Terre Haute Marine Corps League to listen to the regimental band, admire the color guard, and marvel at the thunderous flyover of F-16 fighters. A young father in the crowd gave me directions to the federal penitentiary while his son swayed on the man's shifting shoulders. The little boy's eyes were merry but wide open in the deafening wake of the passing jets, and his hands stayed clamped over his ears.

At the penitentiary entrance, police, media, onlookers, and passing drivers enacted rituals normally associated with college football games, state fairs, presidential visits, and rock concerts. A generator-powered electronic sign flashed alternating messages in huge green letters to the heavy traffic which was being shooed past by officious Indiana State troopers: "Pro demonstrators use Vorhees Park. Anti demonstrators use Fairbanks Park." Where ticket scalpers might ordinarily post themselves, a man wearing an orange T-shirt and a baseball cap sat in a lawn chair brandishing a crudely lettered sign which read, "Our Jesus forgives Tim, even if we don't." Another man bore a huge wooden cross, like Jesus making the stations, toward the tent city for media people and their equipment which had grown on the east side of Indiana 63, and barkers offered parking spots for $20 an hour. Soft drinks, ice, sandwiches, and sati babi were for sale at stands along the road. Satellite dishes, radio antennae, and less identifiable electronic apparatus poked up everywhere. An immaculately coifed CNN correspondent struck poses before a camera crew. In the shade of a sycamore grove, bikers sat cross-legged on idled Harleys, heckling the gapers and high-fiving each other. The sky was aswarm with helicopters.

The two municipal parks from which Bureau of Prisons (BOP) buses shuttled demonstrators to and from the penitentiary were far more serene. In Vorhees Park, four death-penalty advocates had assembled by sundown, somewhat abashed by the score of impatient media people surrounding them. A nursing student held up a sign inscribed "Thou Shalt Not Kill...and Live" and told anyone who would listen--everyone present, as it turned out--that she believed McVeigh should be put to death because "I was raised a Catholic." The church teaches that two wrongs don't make a right, she explained, which means that 168 wrongs certainly don't. About Pope John Paul II's recent appeal for clemency, she said only that the Holy Father was entitled to his opinion and she was entitled to hers. Asked about the low turnout, one of her comrades, a thinly bearded young man who looked remarkably like Timothy McVeigh, said "Terre Haute's a shy little Midwestern town, but we think most people support us." In Fairbanks Park, Indian students from nearby Indiana State University played a game of cricket, and bored journalists began to interview each other.

Of the fifteen hundred print, radio, and television reporters in Terre Haute on Trinity Sunday evening, the most story-starved made their way to Saint Margaret Mary Church, where they awkwardly outnumbered participants in an evening prayer service. One of McVeigh's attorneys, Robert Nigh, prayed with us for the bombing victims, for McVeigh, and for Juan Garza, another federal prisoner whose execution was scheduled for June 19. McVeigh and Garza, like the other Catholic inmates of the federal penitentiary, were members of Saint Margaret Mary Parish, and McVeigh had asked Father Ron Ashmore, the pastor, that we read the familiar verses from Ecclesiastes ("For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal..."); from Psalm 103 ("the Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love....He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor requite us according to our iniquities..."); and from the less familiar and far less memorable words of Charley Reese, a cranky Orlando Sentinel columnist, on the futility of violence.

A few hours later, early Monday morning on the penitentiary grounds, some 150 of us did the very little we could do, keeping silence for 168 minutes preceding the death of Timothy McVeigh. We prayed for each of the men, women, and children he murdered. We prayed for McVeigh. We prayed for the BOP personnel who would kill him, and for the men and women who would watch him die. At 7 a.m., as the poison was administered a thousand yards away, many of us faced the death chamber and made the sign of the cross, praying that this unamiable man, with all the rest of us--perpetrators, heroes, victims, and distracted passersby--might be subsumed in its immolation. He was dead fourteen minutes later.

Michael O. Garvey, a frequent contributor to Commonweal, is the author of Finding Fault.