Cardinal and Kin Mourn Lockerbie Crash Victims

A month after 270 people were killed in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, Cardinal John O'Connor yesterday offered a sermon of remembrance for more than 600 family members and friends at St. Patrick's Cathedral.

O'Connor was joined at the Sunday morning mass by Bishop Maurice Taylor, head of Scotland's Galloway Diocese, where Lockerbie is located, and by many Pan Am flight attendants, pilots and officials.

On Dec. 21, 259 passengers and crew aboard the New York-bound 747 were killed when the plane exploded, and 11 people on the ground died when the wreckage slammed into the village of Lockerbie. A bomb that had been placed in the jet's forward luggage compartment has been blamed for Britain's worst air disaster.

"It seems that God has forgotten us in this senseless tragedy," O'Connor said. "Our hopes have been shattered in midair, blown up terroristically. Why did God let it happen? . . . All of us must understand that with the gift of love, God offers us this terrible, purifying gift of suffering . . . Christ was killed by terrorists. "May I ask you now to recognize that this dreadful experience can teach the world that which must be learned about the horrors of terrorism: that there's nothing glamorous about it; that it's not a highly sophisticated spy story. Real people who did nothing are dead. Your hearts are torn."

With his voice rising in anger, O'Connor said, "Whether the terrorists are Irish, from the Middle East or from anywhere else in the world, terrorism must be denounced. The end does not justify the means when the means are evil." Taylor told the assemblage that his presence in the cathedral "some way symbolizes the bond forged between you and us in Scotland. We consider the territory of our diocese to be in a special way sacred because of what happened."

After the mass, hundreds of friends and family of the deceased lined up to speak with O'Connor. He told them there were rooms set up in the rear of the cathedral where they could meet and share their grief.

Bonnie O'Connor, 28, whose 25-year-old brother, John Ahern, was killed, called the service "beautiful." "The cardinal said everything I was feeling," said O'Connor, of Rockville Centre, L.I. "I don't know how he knew. The way he spoke made everything a lot easier - but I don't think my family will ever be the same."

Marie Ohlsson, a Pan Am flight attendant, said the ceremony gave people a chance to say goodbye to their loved ones. "The cardinal made some kind of sense out of it," she said. "He helped put it in perspective, somehow." Invitations to attend the mass had been sent out to more than 100 families in the metropolitan area who had a relative on the flight. More than 50 of those families attended the mass, according to a spokesman for the cardinal.