On January 15th, 2019, a horrible scene unfolded in the popular DusitD2 hotel and commercial complex in Nairobi, Kenya. Muslim terrorists detonated a suicide explosive vest in a packed cafe and began 20 hour siege, killing anyone they came across. The first one to respond to the carnage was a British special forces soldier and devout Catholic was a man named Chris Craighead. Before Craighead entered the complex, before the rifle was raised and before he crossed into the corridors where terrorists were hunting innocent people, he paused to pray: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you…”

To some, those words might seem almost impossibly small beside what awaited him. Yet the Catholic knows that Heaven has never despised small things. A few words, sincerely spoken, can contain an entire theology of human dependence upon God. Craighead was about to enter a place where his training could tell him what to do, but could not promise him that he would survive doing it. So he prayed.

And there is something profoundly Catholic about that sequence: prayer, then action; surrender, then courage. The Hail Mary is, among other things, a prayer for the hour of death. Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Those words are usually said in the ordinary rhythm of Christian life. But imagine hearing them inwardly when death is no longer an abstraction, when the possibility of meeting it has become immediate. Now. And at the hour of our death.

The Rosary teaches the Catholic to live precisely in that tension. Its mysteries repeatedly lead the soul into places where fear, suffering, sacrifice and redemption meet. The Joyful Mysteries lead us to the Incarnation; the Sorrowful Mysteries to Gethsemane, the scourging, the Cross; the Glorious Mysteries beyond death to Resurrection and triumph.

The Catholic Church calls fortitude a cardinal virtue because courage is not merely a temperament. Fortitude is the strength to endure hardship and to persevere in the pursuit of what is good, even when doing so involves danger, suffering, or death. Craighead knew what a rifle could do. He knew what grenades could do. He knew that the people inside the complex were not abstractions but vulnerable human beings. His training did not make the danger unreal. It made him more conscious of it. Yet he went in. This is where Catholic charity enters the story.

Charity, in the Christian sense, is not simply kindness or affection. It is love of God above all things and love of one's neighbor for God's sake. It seeks the good of the other, even at a cost to oneself. There is therefore something deeply Christian in the willingness to enter danger for people one does not know. The civilians inside the complex had no claim upon Craighead's personal affection. They were strangers. He did not enter because they belonged to his family.

He entered because they were human beings. And Christianity has always insisted upon the astonishing dignity contained in those words. Each of us bears the image of God. The stranger behind the door is not merely someone else. He is a person for whom Christ died. 

That harrowing day of death, long planned by those cowardly terrorists, was thwarted by a faithful son of the Catholic Church, who knew where to turn in his hour of need. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you…”  He charged right in out of love. Christian love of the highest order. That day, he would save over 700 hundred lives.