[Excerpt]
The Flight 93 Memorial Chapel in Stonycreek Township is a tiny white building resembling an old country church or one-room school sitting at a crossroads.
Directly across from the front entrance to the church and Stutzmantown Road is a field filled with thigh-high corn.
A well-tended cemetery lies across from Coleman Station Road and the blue sky is broken with a few puffy cumulus clouds skipping across the horizon.
“There was a feeling in the air, the weather, that reminds me of today,” the Rev. Alphonse Mascherino said while sitting on a folding chair inside the chapel.
“These are the details that are indelibly imprinted on memory,” he said of Sept. 11, 2001, when United Flight 93 crashed a few miles away from the chapel near Shanksville.
All 40 passengers and crew members onboard died after attempting to retake control of the plane from terrorists.
At the time Mascherino was a priest with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown and the chapel had gone from being the Mizpah Lutheran Church to an unused seed warehouse.
Father Al — as he is commonly known — decided that the site would be the perfect location for a nondenominational church dedicated to those who died, their families and others who wished to worship or attend services while visiting the crash site.
He purchased the property in early 2002 with his personal savings and a loan.
Read more here: http://www.dailyamerican.com/da-ot-mascherino-overcoming-odds-cancer-to-reali...
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