Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Bishop Robert Boxie III sat down with Catholic News Service in Rome on Sept. 7 and answered a question that American Catholics have spent decades tiptoeing around: why does the Church in the United States have so few Black bishops?

“The short answer is racism,” he said. “People may not want to hear that. People may not agree with that. But the short answer is racism.”

The clip went up on X early Thursday morning, and by Saturday it had passed 2.4 million views. Most of those views did not come from people who wanted to hear the rest of the interview.

Some biography first, because the men attacking him have skipped it.

Boxie grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana. After Vanderbilt and Harvard Law School he practiced law in Washington, until he left the firm for the seminary; Cardinal Donald Wuerl ordained him a priest in 2016, and he spent the last several years as the Catholic chaplain at Howard University.

Pope Leo XIV named him an auxiliary bishop of Washington on May 1. He was ordained at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on July 7, the first African American bishop ordained in this country in nearly a decade, and in his mid-forties he is the youngest bishop in the United States.

I met him years ago in Washington, not long after his ordination, and I can vouch for him. He is careful and prayerful, and, for the readers who will assume otherwise, no progressive; what he does is describe the thing in front of him.

The thing in front of him in seminary was a Confederate flag in the room next door.

“I was totally taken aback by that,” he told CNS. “I would never go in his room. We would talk outside in the hall. I wouldn’t go in his room as long as he had that flag up.”

Seven years later, during the summer of 2020, the former seminarian (by then teaching at a Catholic school full of Black and Hispanic students) wrote to apologize. “I accepted his apology,” Boxie said. “We had a real honest conversation about race, the Church, and how we can be healers.”

Here is how Catholic Twitter received that story.

Calvin Robinson, the British broadcaster and cleric who has cycled through four church bodies in three years and had his priestly license revoked twice in 2025 (by the Anglican Catholic Church, after a Nazi-style salute at the National Pro-Life Summit, and by a Reformed Episcopal bishop nine days after granting it), called Boxie “a victim merchant” and told him to “stop with the critical race theory.”

John Daniel Davidson of The Federalist explained that conservatives had wanted an African pope at the last conclave “because we know the African bishops don’t traffic in this gay bullshit.”

The anonymous accounts did the rest. “Nauseating to see a bishop speak like this,” wrote one, to 1,200 likes. Another called him a “race-baiter” who needed to be “put in his place with a single withering stare.” The blogger behind Mahound’s Paradise labeled him “a race grifter” and said he had “the vapors” over the flag.

The flag itself found defenders.

In the comments under Catholic World Report’s write-up, a reader dismissed it as “nothing but a local cultural relic” and accused Boxie of having “read racism into a situation which didn’t exist.”

Catholic Atlanta, an account that spent two days answering these people, summarized its mentions on Thursday night: “Bishop Boxie is lying about the confederate flag incident. Wow! The confederate flag is not racist. Also, wow!”

I am a Tennessean.

I grew up around that flag, and I can tell you what it means, because the men who first carried it told us. It was raised for the Confederacy, and the Confederacy existed to keep human beings in chains; the heritage talk came a century later, as a way of avoiding that sentence. Boxie’s neighbor eventually understood that, and said so. His defenders on X have not caught up.

Now consider the man they are calling a grifter, in his own words.

On Jan. 18, 2019, then-Father Boxie preached the homily at the Archdiocese of Washington’s Youth Rally and Mass for Life at Capital One Arena, in front of some 20,000 young people (his count) gathered for the March for Life.

He opened with a confession. As a deacon, on Ash Wednesday, he had brushed past an elderly woman asking for coffee money, and when he turned around to make it right she was gone.

“I truly believe I had an encounter with Jesus Christ hidden behind the face of that elderly woman,” he said.

Then he turned to the unborn, and to everyone else the culture prefers not to see:

“The womb is that sacred place where God first encountered us. God encounters us in the womb, and he seeks to encounter us and show his face to us every moment of our lives until the very last breath we take.”

“It’s really a symptom of a sickness that afflicts our country, a symptom of a larger problem that we face as a nation, and it is our failure to encounter one another and to see the image of the living God and the face of Christ in our brothers and sisters. Simply put, it’s our failure to love.”

“Marching today for these innocent hidden unborn lives, because we are pro-life, means that we march and stand up for every single human life, inside the womb and outside the womb, and most especially for those in our communities who are poor, forgotten, marginalized, and neglected, those whose lives are devalued because of the sin of racism and discrimination of any kind, the immigrant and the refugee.”

Seven years separate that homily from the CNS interview, and the man has not changed his mind.

Neither, on paper, have the bishops of the United States.

In November 2018, two months before that homily, they approved Open Wide Our Hearts, a pastoral letter against racism, and wrote: “As bishops, we unequivocally state that racism is a life issue.” Boxie has never said anything the conference did not put in writing first.

He also has company in his seminary story, and the company should give his critics pause.

Clarence Thomas, a Black Catholic, no one’s mistake for a liberal, and the longest-serving justice on the Supreme Court, walked away from his Missouri seminary in 1968 after a fellow seminarian, hearing that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot, said, “I hope the son of a bitch dies.”

Thomas tells the story himself in his memoir, My Grandfather’s Son. Nobody on the right calls him a race grifter for it.

Pope Leo XIV knew exactly whom he was appointing. In Magnifica Humanitas, the pope apologized for the Church’s own role in the slave trade, an admission Boxie called “really earth-shattering” in the same interview.

Leo has spent the summer telling young people to tear down “walls built by prejudice” and defending, on the eve of America’s 250th birthday, the diversity of the American experiment. A bishop who names racism in the American Church is carrying out the program of the pope who consecrated him.

Gloria Purvis, whose EWTN radio show was canceled in 2020 after she discussed police brutality on air, put it plainly on Friday: “All these hit dogs hollering confirm there is a problem.”

Nothing aimed at Bishop Boxie this week rose to the level of an argument. He named a sin, and the people screaming at him have spent three days proving it exists.

We stand with Bishop Boxie.

Watch the full conversation and judge the man for yourself.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Bishop Robert Boxie and the millions of American Catholics, along with countless others of goodwill, who believe that every human life carries the image of God and that a bishop who names the sin of racism deserves better than a mob.

In an era poisoned by cruelty and cynicism, we remain rooted in a faith that refuses to flinch before injustice or bow to the idols of fear and contempt.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than rage and propaganda. They are looking for courage, and for a love made visible in action, and right now, as the loudest voices in American Catholicism turn on one of Pope Leo XIV’s first Black bishops, that hunger has never been more urgent.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the people who mock it — I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid subscribers receive the full biographical series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, the Epstein-Bannon investigation, and the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series.

Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Dear friends,

I apologize for adding one more 9/11 story after closing the series last night.

Over five days I wrote about the end of my childhood, Welles Crowther, Mayor Mamdani’s invitation to St. Patrick’s, Father Mychal Judge, the memorial Mass that Trump and Vance skipped, George W. Bush at the Islamic Center, Father Robert Prevost’s homily ten days after the attacks, the jumpers, and finally the 9/12 generation.

I meant that last one as the end, but one anecdote should not be withheld from you, my loyal readers — it explains how the last pontificate began and why this one looks the way it does.

I first heard it recounted by Cardinal Edward Egan, the retired archbishop of New York, in the hours after Jorge Mario Bergoglio stepped onto the loggia of St. Peter’s as Pope Francis on March 13, 2013.

Egan had received his red hat alongside Bergoglio in February 2001, and the man he described that day was a cardinal he had met twelve years earlier, during the worst month of his own life. Rocco Palmo later wrote the definitive account at Whispers in the Loggia, and much of what follows draws on his reporting.

A year before the attacks, John Paul II had named Egan relator general of the Tenth Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, scheduled for Sept. 30 to Oct. 27, 2001, on the theme “The Bishop: Servant of the Gospel of Jesus Christ for the Hope of the World.” The relator general opens the assembly with a report in Latin, and after every bishop has spoken he hands them the synthesis they will vote on; few jobs in the hall carry more weight.

Then the planes hit.

Egan spent the morning of Sept. 11 in scrubs at St. Vincent’s Hospital, ministering to the wounded and the first responders. Before the month was out he flew to Rome anyway and read his opening report on Oct. 1, and New Yorkers, still pulling bodies from the pile, wanted to know why their archbishop was in Italy.

The questioning of his loyalty to the city was, he told the Associated Press in 2011, “the worst thing that ever happened to me in my life.”

On Oct. 4, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, Cardinal Jan Schotte, the synod’s general secretary, rose in the hall with an announcement. The Vatican’s own bulletin records it. The thirtieth day after the attacks fell on Oct. 11, and Egan was “eagerly expected by his people for this thirtieth day celebration in his cathedral.”

He would go home.

Schotte then read the second half of the communication: “so that our work can continue without any changes, the Holy Father, after having consulted the presidency of our assembly, appointed a Deputy General Relator in the person of H. Em. Card. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, S.J., Archbishop of Buenos Aires. I now invite H. Em. Card. Bergoglio to take his place at the table of the presidency.”

Bergoglio was 64 and had worn a red hat for seven months. He had never studied or worked in Rome (Palmo notes that he avoided the place unless summoned), and now he had eight days to absorb the interventions of more than 230 bishops and produce, in Latin, the Relatio post disceptationem that would steer the assembly’s final weeks. Gerard O’Connell of America puts it plainly: Egan had given the keynote, and Bergoglio “had to do everything else with the help of a team of theologians.”

The bishops rendered their verdict at the election of the twelve members of the post-synodal council: his brother bishops, the Vatican journalist Sandro Magister reported, chose him “with the highest vote possible.”

Elisabetta Piqué, the Argentine journalist who became his biographer, told the National Catholic Reporter that he “worked so well as relator, replacing Egan, that he started being known and noticed in Rome as someone papabile.”

When his name was floated for a Vatican post, he answered, according to Magister, “Please, I would die in the Curia.”

Egan told the story himself in a television interview with Richard French five days after the election, and his version carries details no bulletin records.

“When I arrived in Rome I gave the opening address, and I think anyone could look at me and see that I was not at the top of my game,” he said.

“And a man whom I had never met, Jorge Bergoglio, a cardinal who had become a cardinal with me, rolled up his sleeves” and “just became part of our team. We worked from morning to night.”

The work was brutal.

“There were six different language sections, and by 7:30 at night you had to have a résumé of all six ready for the next morning,” Egan recalled.

“I could handle everything but German, and Cardinal Bergoglio found a bishop to come in and give us a hand, and we became a team.”

The Argentine, he said, behaved like “someone that I had met on the street, just out of the goodness of his heart, because he, I think, looked at me and saw that my hands were filled.”

“Right from that time,” Egan said, “I would have to say I had immense admiration and even affection for this man.” He told Catholic New York after the election that Bergoglio “responded generously, kindly and very competently. He was simply wonderful.”

The rest you know in outline.

When John Paul II died in April 2005, Bergoglio entered the conclave as the main challenger to Joseph Ratzinger; an anonymous cardinal’s diary, reported by John Allen, had him at 40 votes on the third ballot before Ratzinger crossed the two-thirds line. He went home to Buenos Aires, turned 75, and submitted his resignation as archbishop.

Then Benedict XVI announced on Feb. 11, 2013, that he would resign at the end of the month, the first pope to walk away from the office in nearly six centuries, and the papal biographer Austen Ivereigh describes what happened next: “the Europeans and Latin Americans who knew him suggested Bergoglio to the rest of the college of cardinals who had barely any knowledge of him.”

The men who knew him had learned his name in October 2001.

Palmo, writing on the twelfth anniversary of the attacks, argued that a Bergoglio who never sat in that chair would have been a non-starter in 2005, and that his election in 2013 “simply never would’ve happened” without the earlier showing.

The chair taught him something too.

Asked about collegiality at his first press conference as relator, with Schotte seated beside him, he answered that a proper discussion of it “exceeds the specific limits of this synod.”

Piqué says he came away convinced that those meetings were “already pre-fabricated.”

Thirteen years later, as pope, he told La Nación: “I was the rapporteur of the 2001 synod, and there was a cardinal who told us what should be discussed and what should not. That will not happen now.”

It did not.

Synodality became the hallmark project of the Francis pontificate. He opened a worldwide consultation in October 2021, presided over two Roman assemblies (the second closed on Oct. 26, 2024), and then adopted the final document as his own teaching rather than writing an exhortation of his own.

On May 8, 2025, standing on the same loggia where Francis had first appeared, Pope Leo XIV told the world, “we want to be a synodal Church, a Church that moves forward.”

He has kept that promise. He put listening and the laity at the center of his consistories, and from June 23 to 25 of this year he sat down with the heads of the synod’s continental bodies to plan the road to the 2027 assemblies and an ecclesial assembly in Rome in October 2028.

When synodal teams gathered in Rome on Oct. 24, 2025, he told them that among hesitant clergy “the resistances come out of fear and the lack of knowledge.”

So the grief of one city rearranged the Church for a generation or more.

An archbishop who could not bear to be away from his people gave up the chair he had waited a year to fill, and the Jesuit who sat down in it on the feast of St. Francis had spent his career avoiding Rome.

Egan died on March 5, 2015. On Sept. 25 of that year, Pope Francis stood at the 9/11 Memorial and prayed for the dead of the morning that had, in ways nobody in that synod hall could have imagined, set him on the road to Peter’s chair.

At Letters from Leo, we believe the Church is built out of moments like that one: a pastor choosing his grieving flock over a post in Rome, and the stranger who then did the unglamorous work well.

This week we remembered the priests, firefighters, office workers, and bond traders who did the same in the stairwells of the World Trade Center, and a Church that walks together (which is all the word synodality means) is what those people were on the morning of September 11, 2001.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country, and it exists for people who want a faith that takes both memory and mission seriously. If you believe that kind of Church is worth building, and that Catholics and people of goodwill have a role to play in building it, I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid members receive the full biographical series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, including the story of his friendship with Francis, along with the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series and our investigations into the people trying to break this pope.

Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Dear friends,

I have written to you a great deal this week. I apologize for the crowded inbox, and I want to tell you why I did it.

Since Sunday I have sent you Father Mychal Judge, Welles Crowther and his red bandana, George W. Bush inside a Washington mosque, a young Augustinian named Robert Prevost preaching against revenge ten days after the towers fell, and, this evening, the people who jumped.

That is a lot of one subject for one week, even from me.

Here is the reason.

If you want to understand the country we live in, the wars we fought, the border we built, the way our politics now runs on an enemy, I think you have to start with that Tuesday morning, with how it felt, and with how we reacted to it then and are reacting to it still, twenty-five years later, mostly without noticing that we are.

I must confess that it is also personal.

Anyone who knows me knows I have carried a particular fascination with September 11, one that has grown rather than faded in recent years.

I said on Sunday that 9/11 was the end of my childhood, and in many ways that is true. The days after it, though, were some of the most moving and invigorating days of my life, and I have never quite admitted that in print.

I struggle with being vulnerable, but I hope you saw a little more of my heart this week: what I believe in, what gets me up in the morning, and the worries that keep me up at night, which turn out to be mostly the same things.

As much as a human being can love an institution, I love the Catholic Church and the United States, and September 11 is where those two loves run together.

As I told Mayor Mamdani this week, as many as nine in ten of the first responders who died that morning are believed to have been Catholic. They were our brothers and sisters in the faith of the apostles, and I am here to honor their sacrifice and to be inspired by their memory. That is why we wrote about them this week.

Mamdani’s answer, which I posted on X on Thursday night, has been viewed more than twelve million times since, and as far as I can tell, it was the most viewed post in the world today. I take that as a sign that the American people want to be united.

I am writing this from a bench overlooking lower Manhattan as dusk gives way to night, trying to gain some vista of everything I have seen and felt this week. Lady Liberty is out there in all her glory, and the new World Trade Center is lighting up the skyline. I have never heard New York this quiet. It is almost like sitting in a pew at Sunday Mass, and the words Peter blurted out on the mountain keep coming to mind: “Lord, it is good that we are here.”

For the younger people who read this newsletter (and there are many of you; one in ten American adults today was born after that morning), no one will ever be able to describe to you the degree to which this nation came together. For a season the words Democrat and Republican lost their meaning. Partisanship ended, and we became one people.

Robert Kagan’s Of Paradise and Power, written in the shadow of those months, makes the point in its own way, as far as I can tell, that nothing binds a people together like a clearly defined enemy. His subject was the Atlantic alliance and what became of it once the Soviet Union was gone, but the lesson travels, and Americans of my age learned it in our bones before we could have named it.

From a Christian vista, that is precisely the weakness. Unity purchased with an enemy makes you blind. Ours blinded us to the catastrophes we would endure, and inflict, in Afghanistan and Iraq; in the Patriot Act and the surveillance state it built, which we mostly kept; at Guantánamo; in what we did to migrants and to Muslims; and in a politics of the American right that learned the lesson of those months too well — if you can name the enemy, the people will follow you anywhere.

Ten days after the attacks, on Sept. 21, 2001, the future pope stood in a Roman church and said out loud what almost no American wanted to hear. “While many seek revenge,” Prevost preached, “Augustinians must bear witness to the Gospel and its values of unity, dialogue, peace and reconciliation.” He was right, and it took most of us a quarter century to admit it.

So when I say we need to be a 9/12 people, I am talking about tomorrow, September 12, 2026, and every day after it.

As I wrote on Sunday, it is time, in many ways, to move on, and that goes for me personally before it goes for anyone else.

Shortly after his resurrection, Jesus meets Mary Magdalene at the tomb, and after he calls her by name, the first instruction he gives the first witness of Easter is “Do not cling to me.” What wonderful advice that is. We must not cling to the past, and the vista of 9/11, however sacred, is the past.

The best way of facing trauma, as far as I can tell, is to come slowly to the realization that the thing cannot hurt you anymore.

September 11 has been the defining feature of the last twenty-five years of American life. It can no longer hurt us.

From this bench, I can see the two beams of the Tribute in Light climbing out of the ground to remind us what happened that day, and the light looks a bit more faded tonight. Thank God for that. Moving on is now within our power, and so is making sure that morning does not define the next twenty-five years.

Being in Manhattan during these ceremonies has reminded me of something else. The leaders of this generation are, in many ways, post-9/11 people.

Nearly three in ten Americans are now too young to remember the day at all, and so many of the people running our cities, our parishes, and our movements were in grade school that morning, or not yet born.

We castigate them for it (I do it too), as though a memory were a virtue. God reminds us that we are not to be held hostage by what happened to us: “Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”

It is time for a post-post-9/11 generation, which is to say a 9/12/26 generation.

The details of that generation are not clear to me yet, sitting on this bench with the harbor gone dark in front of me.

A few things do come to mind, though. The first mark of such a generation is unity, and close behind it comes a forward-looking habit of mind, the refusal to spend a whole life turning around. Its members would trust one another again, which sounds small until you try it.

Innovation belongs on the list as well, because the people who built this city did not do it by staring at the ground, and so does a squarely, unmistakably dedicated commitment to justice — the kind Prevost was preaching about in Rome while the rest of us were choosing sides.

Before I close the laptop, one more look at the harbor.

She is still there, shining in all her glory, a beacon to all those seeking the blessings of liberty.

I think of my ancestors and of yours, and of everyone who passed through this harbor, went by this lady, and looked up at her torch, which will light tonight and every night in their honor.

It is up to you and me to make sure that light shines for our posterity, so it is time to get to work.

Let us rise and be on our way.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with the young Augustinian who preached unity, dialogue, peace and reconciliation while a wounded nation reached for revenge, and with the millions of Americans, Catholic and otherwise, who are ready to stop being governed by the worst morning of their lives.

In an era that runs on fear and on the constant manufacture of enemies, we remain rooted in a faith whose founder told the first witness of Easter not to cling to him, and whose God keeps insisting that he is doing a new thing.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something better than a politics built on an enemy.

They are hungry for courage and for the nerve to trust one another again, and on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day that taught this country fear, that hunger has rarely been more urgent.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill who want to be a 9/12 people — I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid subscribers receive the full biographical series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, including where Robert Prevost was when the towers fell, along with the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series and every exclusive investigation we publish.

Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Twenty-five years ago this morning, at fifteen seconds past 9:41, an Associated Press photographer named Richard Drew pointed his lens at the north tower of the World Trade Center and followed a man down.

The man is upright in the frame, head first, one knee bent, the two towers rising behind him like a pair of gray columns. Tom Junod opened his Esquire essay on the photograph, first published in 2003, with a line I have never been able to shake: “In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow.”

The New York Times ran the picture on page seven the next morning. In most American newspapers, Junod reported, it ran “once and never again,” pulled after readers called it ghoulish.

Of everything photographed that day, he wrote, the pictures of people jumping “were the only images that became, by consensus, taboo — the only images from which Americans were proud to avert their eyes.”

I was twelve years old and in Tennessee. The adults in my life, understandably, did their best to sanitize what had happened, and the news media did the same. By the time I reached high school, the jumpers had all but vanished from the story of Sept. 11, and the public memory of the day had found no room for them.

Junod’s essay changed that for a lot of people, me included. So did YouTube. I came of age in the first years of a technology with no editors and no guardrails, and I went looking: the footage the networks had put away, the firefighters’ oral histories, the accounts of what the people on the upper floors of the north tower actually faced, which was a burning stairwell on one side and a quarter mile of open air on the other.

I do not recommend that path to everyone. For me it was necessary. A sanitized Sept. 11 was a story I could not build my life and vocation on, and I have come to believe that only by walking into the heart of that darkness, the evil of the thing exactly as it was, could I find the redeeming power of God waiting on the far side of it.

They jumped

USA Today estimated in 2002 that at least 200 people jumped from the towers that morning, nearly all of them from the north tower, where the plane had cut off every stairwell above the impact. Federal engineers at NIST later logged 101 falls from the north tower alone and conceded their count was not complete.

The New York City medical examiner has never counted them, because the office refuses to concede they exist.

“A ‘jumper’ is somebody who goes to the office in the morning knowing that they will commit suicide,” its spokeswoman, Ellen Borakove, told USA Today. “These people were forced out by the smoke and flames or blown out.”

Every death that day was ruled a homicide, and when Junod called to ask for an estimate, he received what he called an admonition instead: “We don’t like to say they jumped. They didn’t jump. Nobody jumped.”

I understand the mercy in that answer, and I still think it is misleading. For one, jumping in this circumstance is nowhere near suicide.

A firefighter named Maureen McArdle-Schulman watched from below and later told the department’s investigators, “I felt like I was intruding on a sacrament. They were choosing to die, and I was watching them and shouldn’t have been, so me and another guy turned away and looked at the wall and we could still hear them hit.” She saw a choice.

To insist those men and women merely fell is to take from them the last free act of their lives.

Today, I read essay by the British journalist David James Smith, first published in the Sunday Times a decade after the attacks, called “Into the Arms of God.”

Smith interviewed Gwendolyn Briley, whose brother Jonathan, a sound engineer at Windows on the World, is the man many believe Drew photographed. She knew, Smith writes, that some people called the act of jumping suicide, an unforgivable sin before God, and she did not believe her God showed his love that way.

“They were falling into the arms of God,” she told him, “they really were.”

They did not sin

The fear Gwendolyn Briley was answering is one every Catholic knows, and I want to answer it as a Catholic.

When Peter Cheney of the Globe and Mail wrongly identified the Falling Man as Norberto Hernandez, a pastry chef at Windows on the World, his widow and daughters recoiled, because to a devout family a jump meant suicide, and suicide meant damnation. Strangers online told the girls their father was in hell.

“Please clear my husband’s name,” Eulogia Hernandez begged Junod. I reflect on that tragedy often: a widow who believed her husband’s salvation turned on whether he died in fire or by jumping.

To be clear, the Church does not teach what she feared. The Catechism defines suicide as the disposal of a life that is not ours to dispose of, an act “contrary to love for the living God.” Nobody at those windows was disposing of anything. Murderers had already taken their lives from them, and what remained to choose was the manner of dying.

Choosing the air over the fire takes nothing from life, since the life was already gone. Catholic moral theology has always distinguished a death one intends from a death one accepts.

David Cruz-Uribe, a Catholic mathematician writing at Vox Nova in 2015, made the case that the jumpers belong with the soldier who falls on a grenade, whose death is foreseen but never the intent.

Even a reader who denies that distinction runs into the Catechism’s flat refusal to condemn.

“Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide,” it says, and a floor of burning jet fuel is the plainest definition of torture I know. The paragraph after it adds:

“We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance.” The fall lasted ten seconds, and ten seconds is time enough for abounding love of God.

So I will say it plainly. They jumped, and they did not sin. Their leap was the one Christ made from the cross when he commended his spirit into his Father’s hands; they let go of a world that had already been taken from them and fell toward the only one who could catch them.

Moses told Israel, “The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.”

On Sept. 11, 2001, underneath was a plaza, and beneath the plaza were those arms.

The whole cross

Christians are strange people.

We hang an instrument of execution over the altar and make our children look at it.

Nobody sanitizes the crucifixion in a Catholic Church, and we say the whole truth of God and salvation is found there, in the worst thing that has ever happened in human history.

As I wrote this Lent, the crucifixion is not ancient history sealed behind stained glass; Pope Leo XIV asked us on Palm Sunday to set our gaze on the crucified and to see in his wounds “the hurts of so many women and men today.”

A faith built on that image has no business flinching from a photograph.

Our parents were right to shield us in 2001.

The years since are a different matter. The jumpers are the clearest witnesses that day has, proof that the evil was exactly as bad as it was and that even there a man could depart this earth like an arrow and land in the hands of God.

Junod wrote that the picture went around the world and then disappeared “as if we willed it away,” and that “one of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave.”

I want to mark it.

The photograph now sits at the top of this essay, and below is a short film from Time about the man who took it. Despite the viewer discretion label, there isn’t any violence portrayed in the movie. It’s simply different angles of this man and others who faced the impossible choice in their final moments.

If you’d like to, look and then pray for him and for the two hundred like him. Nobody fell that morning. Two hundred people went home.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with the two hundred, and with every family that has suffered in their absence. We believe the dignity of a human being does not end at a window ledge, and we believe a Church that hangs the crucifixion over its altars can look at anything, because the truth shall set us free.

This week I have written about Father Mychal Judge, Welles Crowther, George W. Bush’s defense of Islam after the attacks, the warning against revenge a future American pope gave ten days after 9/11, and the 9/11 memorial Mass Archbishop Hicks celebrated yesterday at St. Patrick’s, because remembering that day ensures the lessons of it are passed down to our posterity.

It also ensures that we are no longer unjustly imprisoned by it.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that tells the truth, even about the worst morning in American memory, and finds God there anyway.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for the dignity of every human life, including the lives that ended in the air over Vesey Street — I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid subscribers receive the biographical series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, the Epstein-Bannon investigation, and the Sunday Scripture reflections, alongside everything I report from Rome and New York.

Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

When the first plane hit the North Tower at 8:46 on the morning of September 11, 2001, it was 2:46 in the afternoon in Rome, and Father Robert Prevost was sitting in a general chapter of the Order of St. Augustine.

He was 45 years old. Two years earlier he had come home from a decade in northern Peru (Chulucanas first, then the seminary in Trujillo) to lead the Augustinians’ Chicago province, a term that began on March 8, 1999.

Now the friars had called their 180th general chapter to Rome, and Pope John Paul II had received the delegates four days earlier, on Friday, September 7, sending them off with a line from Luke’s Gospel: “Put out into the deep!”

Then the deep came to them.

The Augustinian curia sits on the Via Paolo VI, a few hundred yards from the colonnade of St. Peter’s, and that afternoon its television carried what every television on earth carried.

John Paul II wired George W. Bush that he was “shocked by the unspeakable horror of today’s inhuman terrorist attacks against innocent people.”

L’Osservatore Romano ran a headline across the page: “Orrore, sgomento, angoscia in tutto il mondo.” Horror, dismay, anguish across the whole world.

The chapter kept meeting. On Friday, September 14, the delegates elected Prevost prior general of the order. It was the 46th birthday of a priest from the South Side of Chicago.

Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal put it plainly: he was elected “while people in the city and around the globe watched with horror the scenes unfolding in New York, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania.”

What he did after the vote tells you who he was. He went to Genazzano, 30 miles east of Rome, to pray at the Augustinian shrine of Our Lady of Good Counsel.

The pope spoke of that visit himself on May 10, 2025, two days after the conclave, when he returned to Genazzano and recalled (in L’Osservatore Romano’s account) “the visit made after his election as prior general of the Order of St. Augustine, in September 2001.”

On Monday he was at Genazzano again for the Nativity of Mary, and he told the pilgrims: “Let us imagine peace.”

The Vatican’s documentary Leone a Roma, released by Vatican Media on July 1, walks through that week the way the Vatican itself lived it.

A friar pulls a Vatican Radio tape labeled “2001 — Settembre” from the archive shelf; the newscast reports “horror and dismay in the world over the insane terrorist attack”; the camera pans across the page carrying John Paul II’s telegram, then across a second page, dated September 14, with a short item: “Eletto il nuovo Priore Generale dell’Ordine di sant’Agostino.”

Father Joseph Farrell, who holds the job today, says the rest in one breath: “It was Robert Prevost as prior general who decided to build these offices, and he carried out his service as prior general from 2001 until 2013.”

Ten days after the attacks, on Friday, September 21, the new prior general presided at the chapter’s closing Mass at Santa Maria del Popolo, the Augustinian church on the piazza of the same name, and preached to the chapter as its new head. Vatican News published the Italian text on Friday morning; the translation is mine.

“We cannot fail to remember the tragic events that shook the United States on September 11,” Prevost said.

“The violence that the world witnessed last week in the United States is a tragic expression of a series of problems that are becoming increasingly acute everywhere. Hatred and violence will continue to grow as long as so many people are forced to live in extreme poverty and are oppressed by so many forms of injustice.”

Then he gave his brothers a number: 24,000 people die of hunger every day.

His conclusion belongs in every American parish this weekend. “While many seek revenge,” he said, “Augustinians must bear witness to the Gospel and its values of unity, dialogue, peace and reconciliation.”

Consider the calendar he was preaching against.

On the day of his election, Congress had authorized the use of military force by a combined vote of 518 to 1, and the president had stood in Washington National Cathedral and promised to “rid the world of evil.”

The night before the homily, Bush delivered his ultimatum to the Taliban before a joint session of Congress; the bombing of Afghanistan would begin sixteen days later.

Prevost mentioned none of it. He told a church full of friars that the seed of the violence was injustice, which is Catholic social teaching in its plainest form, the teaching Paul VI compressed into a single sentence in Populorum Progressio in 1967: development is the new name for peace.

Prevost had spent ten years watching that principle play out in Peru, where hyperinflation and the Shining Path made the link between misery and violence a daily fact rather than a thesis.

The Vatican Publishing House collected the homily this spring in Free under Grace, a volume of his writings as prior general, and at its launch on May 6 Cardinal Pietro Parolin named the attack on the Twin Towers first among the events that marked those twelve years.

The same stretch of the documentary shows what those years produced. Farrell describes a general who spent his term “always visiting the friars where they are, to take a moment to live with them, to listen to them, to share life with them.” Father Pietro Bellini, the sacristan of the shrine of St. Rita in Cascia, adds that because Prevost “had worked in a poor environment in Latin America, always with the poorest people,” he had “learned not to feel like someone superior to others.”

Twenty-five years on, the Vatican marked the anniversary on Friday with a Vatican News retrospective by Isabella Piro that set Prevost’s homily beside John Paul II’s telegram, Benedict XVI’s prayer at Ground Zero in 2008, and Francis’s visit in 2015, and with a report from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where Archbishop Ronald Hicks told New York, “We are never abandoned. We are never alone.”

Archbishop Paul Coakley, the president of the U.S. bishops, built his anniversary statement around a line from the pope: “Peace is more than just a goal, it is a presence and a journey.”

The friar who stood in Santa Maria del Popolo ten days after the towers fell and refused to preach vengeance now sits in the chair of Peter, and the plea he made to Americans while flying home from Beirut last December, that we be “a little less fearful,” was already there in that homily.

The United States spent a quarter century and trillions of dollars answering September 11 with force. A Chicago priest gave a different answer on the tenth day, and the Church, twenty-four years later, chose him.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with the friar who told his brothers, ten days after the towers fell, that hatred grows in the soil of hunger and injustice, and with the millions of American Catholics and people of goodwill who believe that a country is measured by how it answers its worst day.

This week I have told you about Mychal Judge walking into the North Tower and Welles Crowther climbing the stairs of the South Tower.

The witness of Robert Prevost belongs beside theirs: a Chicago priest in Rome who, while a nation reached for its weapons, asked his order to reach for the Gospel instead.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than fear. They want a faith that names the poor when everyone else is naming enemies, and a pope who has been saying the same thing since September 2001.

If you believe this movement matters, a community of Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against vengeance and fear, I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid subscribers receive the full series on Pope Leo’s Life & Formation, including the Peru years that shaped the homily above, along with the Epstein-Bannon Investigation and the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series.

Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

On Monday, Sept. 17, 2001, George W. Bush walked into the Islamic Center of Washington. The fires at Ground Zero were still burning. Six days earlier, nineteen men had murdered 2,977 people in the name of a God they claimed to serve, and the president chose that week to stand beside a group of Muslim leaders and tell the country what the attacks were not.

“The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” he said. “That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.” He named the Muslims of America as doctors, lawyers, soldiers, shopkeepers, “moms and dads,” and then he added one more line: “Women who cover their heads in this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes.”

Three nights later, before a joint session of Congress, he said it again. “The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them.”

On Wednesday night in Dallas, sitting with Condoleezza Rice at his presidential center, Bush explained why he went. He had been hearing “stories of women in coverings being harassed at shopping centers, particularly in Michigan,” and he understood that a country fighting for the freedom to worship could not surrender it at home. “I also made it clear that Islam was a religion of peace, not a religion of war,” he said, “and that these people subverted their religion.”

I have spent this week writing about the Catholics of 9/11 — about Welles Crowther and Father Mychal Judge, and about the twelve-year-old I was that morning. This week the country marks twenty-five years, and the anniversary is arriving with the very poison Bush spent September 2001 trying to keep out of the bloodstream.

On Sunday, an AI-generated cartoon of New York’s Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, circulated with the caption “where’s my box cutter?”

Demonstrators at a Tuesday protest carried a flyer with the mayor’s eyes blotted out: “In 2001 they needed planes. Today the DSA hands them a platform.” Sen. Tommy Tuberville had set the tone back in March, reposting Mamdani’s face beside a photograph of the 9/11 attacks over the words “the enemy is inside the gates.” Mamdani, for his part, was at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Thursday evening for the 9/11 memorial Mass, as Archbishop Hicks’s guest.

That invitation had been under attack for a month.

Bill Donohue of the Catholic League sent the mayor an open letter in early August calling him “unsuitable to preside over the ceremony honoring these innocent Americans,” and this week he joined a group of victims’ families in demanding that Mamdani skip Friday’s memorial at Ground Zero. Hicks did not withdraw it (the White House, for its part, declined its own invitation, and Trump went to the Pentagon instead).

As I reported last night, the first Muslim mayor of New York sat in the cathedral with Joe Biden, Kathy Hochul, George Pataki, and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch while the archbishop preached that healing “does not just happen” and has to be worked for, “conversation after conversation, relationship after relationship.” When I asked Mamdani what he wanted to say to Catholic New York, he answered: “We can never say thank you enough to the Catholic community.”

Nineteen men killed 2,977 people on Sept. 11, 2001. They were disciples of an ideology of hatred that lives on the margins of a faith practiced by nearly two billion people, and the faith itself killed no one that morning.

Among the dead were an estimated sixty or more Muslims, including Mohammad Salman Hamdani, a 23-year-old NYPD cadet and EMT who ran toward the towers to help.

The New York Post asked whether he was “Missing or Hiding?” and federal agents questioned his family; his remains were eventually recovered from the North Tower rubble, his medical bag beside them.

Catholics have less excuse than anyone for confusing the nineteen with the two billion, because our popes have been explaining the difference for sixty years.

Pope Leo XIV did it most recently on Dec. 2, 2025, on the flight home from Beirut. Mikaël Corre of La Croix asked whether the European Catholics who see Islam as a threat to the Christian identity of the West were right.

Leo answered that the fears he sees in Europe are “oftentimes generated by people who are against immigration and trying to keep out people who may be from another country, another religion, another race.” He pointed to Lebanon, “a land where Islam and Christianity are both present and are respected, and that there is a possibility to live together, to be friends.”

Then he turned toward this side of the Atlantic. “I think those are the lessons that would be important also to be heard in Europe or North America,” he said. “That we should perhaps be a little less fearful and look for ways of promoting authentic dialogue and respect.”

I wrote about those remarks at the time, and the pope has kept at it since. He had stood inside Istanbul’s Blue Mosque three days before that press conference, and in April he became the first pope in history to visit Algeria, leaving it with the observation that the country’s Christians “offer a profound witness of how to live in peace with their Muslim brothers and sisters.”

He was not improvising. Pope Francis, flying home from Kraków on July 31, 2016, told reporters that “it is not right to identify Islam with violence. It is not right and it is not true,” and in Evangelii Gaudium he wrote that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”

Benedict XVI, whose Regensburg lecture in 2006 provoked real anger across the Muslim world, said within five days that he was “deeply sorry” — and by the end of November he stood in that same Blue Mosque in silent prayer; a year earlier in Cologne he had called dialogue between Christians and Muslims “a vital necessity, on which in large measure our future depends.”

John Paul II told a stadium of young Muslims in Casablanca in 1985, “We believe in the same God, the one God, the living God,” and in 2001 he became the first pope to enter a mosque. Behind all four of them stands the Second Vatican Council, which declared in Nostra Aetate that “the Church regards with esteem also the Moslems.”

None of this requires pretending. Islam has extreme elements, and they are dangerous and ungodly; the hijackers carried written instructions to pray before they boarded. Our own tradition carries its extremists too. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, asked on CNN in March 2015 whether ISIS represented Islam, recalled Catholic connections to the Irish Republican Army.

“The IRA claimed to be Catholic. They were baptized. They had a Catholic identity,” he said, and “what they were doing was a perversion of everything the church stood for.” Nobody in the 1970s asked the Archdiocese of New York to answer for a car bomb in Belfast.

Remember, too, how the Ground Zero mosque fight went in 2010, when Newt Gingrich compared an Islamic community center two blocks from the site to “the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor,” and Dolan, then archbishop, offered to broker a compromise on the address. Catholics were divided that summer.

A Church whose Ursuline convent outside Boston was burned by a mob in 1834, and whose candidate for president was smeared as an agent of the pope in 1928, spent those months arguing over a street corner while its Muslim neighbors were being called a fifth column.

That is the failure to avoid this week. A Methodist president from Texas managed, in the same week the towers fell, to tell the country that the faith of a billion people was not its enemy. Catholics have four popes and an ecumenical council on the record, along with a long memory of being the feared religion in America ourselves. We have no reason to say less than he did.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and with every American, Catholic or not, who refuses to let nineteen murderers define nearly two billion of their neighbors. The Gospel we profess was preached by a man who made a Samaritan the hero of his best-known parable, and it leaves no room for a faith that hides behind fear.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than the suspicion being sold to them this week. They want a Church that will say out loud, on the anniversary, what its own Council said sixty years ago (and what a Republican president said six days after the attacks).

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for the dignity of every neighbor, including the ones who pray toward Mecca — I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid subscribers receive the biographical series on Pope Leo’s life and formation and the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series, along with every investigation we publish, including the Epstein-Bannon files.

Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

I was honored to be inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Thursday evening for the Memorial Mass marking twenty-five years since September 11, which Archbishop Ronald Hicks celebrated for the families of the dead, the uniformed services, and the civic leaders of the city.

The Mass was invitation-only and closed to the press (the archdiocese carried it on a livestream), so I was there as the guest of a 9/11 victim’s family member who reads Letters from Leo. What follows is what I saw from a pew in Midtown.

Before Mass I caught up with Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who came at the archbishop’s personal invitation, and asked him what he wanted to say to Catholic New York on this anniversary.

He answered with a message for Catholics here and across the country: “We can never say thank you enough to the Catholic community that … in this city’s darkest ever day, showed so much of the light that kept New Yorkers moving forward.”

Bill Donohue of the Catholic League spent the past month demanding that the mayor stay home, and I wrote yesterday about the $671,000 he was paid in 2024 to write press releases like those. The archbishop’s invitation stood, the mayor walked through the bronze doors, and the protest changed nothing.

Then Joe Biden walked in. When the former president made his surprise appearance, the congregation broke into loud applause, a sound you rarely hear inside that building. He took his place beside Governor Kathy Hochul and the mayor, and the three of them looked at home together, trading words before the procession and again at the sign of peace.

The most endearing scene of the night came at Communion, when the three knelt side by side; the governor and the former president flanking the thirty-four-year-old mayor looked for all the world like a mom and dad with their boy in his First Communion suit.

Their presence made a pair of absences conspicuous. Through my own reporting, I have confirmed that Archbishop Hicks invited both President Trump and Vice President Vance, and that the White House declined.

Trump is skipping New York this year for the Pentagon, because the National September 11 Memorial has barred politicians from speaking at Ground Zero since 2012, which would have left him standing in silence while the families read the names. (He called the report that this was the reason “FAKE NEWS,” then said he “would love not to speak.”)

Vance spent Thursday night in Dallas, delivering the keynote on the second and final night of the Republican midterm convention, in an arena a Newsweek photographer put at roughly two-thirds full during Trump’s own speech the night before.

“Hope is not optimism”

The archbishop preached on hope. He opened with what New York built after the towers fell: the human-service organizations, the rebuilt Trade Center, the museum, the foundations, the prayer that crossed every religious line.

He turned next to what has never healed. A tragedy of this magnitude never completely disappears, he said; there are still tears and unanswered questions, and there are families who carry the physical and emotional effects of that day a quarter century later. “Healing takes time,” he told them, “but hope is eternal.”

He was careful with the word. “Hope is not optimism,” he said. Optimism promises that tomorrow will be a better day, and Hicks allowed that optimism is a fine thing, but hope in his telling is about today, the knowledge that God is walking with us in good times and bad, and that God will not leave. That hope, he said, is the one that leads to eternal life.

The ask followed. Since arriving in New York, Hicks said, he has been struck by who fills this cathedral whenever the city gathers here: rabbis, imams, Protestant ministers, people of every faith and every walk of life, who “stand together, pray together, listen together, and seek the common good together.”

One of the lessons of September 11, he said, is that “we need each other,” and he called on the faithful to see one another first as brothers and sisters made in the image and likeness of God, across every line of religion and nationality. Bridge-building is never finished, he added; it takes intention and humility, and it belongs to the healing itself.

He pointed the congregation to the back of the cathedral, where Adam Cvijanovic’s mural “What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding,” unveiled last September, rises over the doors in gold leaf: immigrants past and present on its outer panels, saints and civic leaders on another, and, beneath an angel, the first responders. People who find a face they know on that wall stop in front of it, he said, and those faces still give the city hope.

He sent them out with this: God, who has carried us through the past twenty-five years, continues to walk with us — today, tomorrow, and always.

“We miss you, Mr. President!”

As the Mass ended, the choir took up the Salve Regina, and I am proud to report that President Biden knows every Latin word of it by heart. After the final blessing, Archbishop Hicks came down from the sanctuary and greeted the president, the governor, and the mayor in turn at the front of the cathedral.

Biden stayed nearly an hour after Mass. He worked his way through the congregation, family by family, and when he reached the cathedral choir, still in their green cassocks and white surplices, one woman called out, “We miss you, Mr. President!”

I had a moment with him. He told me his health is doing well, that he was honored to be at Mass, and that he was leaving the cathedral for one of his granddaughters’ birthday parties. I promised him the prayers of this entire community.

The invitations were the homily

Hicks’s most impressive move on Thursday came before a word of the homily was spoken.

He invited a Muslim mayor whom a Catholic pressure group wanted barred from the building, a Catholic former president, a Catholic governor, and the Republican president and vice president, and he put no conditions on any of them.

When he arrived in New York, he told this city that the Church is “not a country club,” and on St. Patrick’s Day he showed what that meant for immigrants. The guest list on Thursday extended the same welcome to politicians, including the two who said no.

It’s disappointing, but not surprising, that the White House turned him down for this opportunity to show a unified country.

Sitting in that pew, watching the mayor, the governor, and a former president bow their heads under the same roof as the widows of firefighters, I was thankful for the three who came. It was a deeply moving evening, and I will not soon forget it.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Archbishop Hicks and with every Catholic who believes the doors of the cathedral open outward, wide enough for a Muslim mayor, a rabbi and an imam in the pews, and a family still carrying the weight of that September morning twenty-five years on.

In an era in which a well-paid pressure group can spend a month telling a mayor to stay away from a Mass for the dead, we remain rooted in a faith that refuses to treat God’s house as anyone’s private property.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for the hope the archbishop described on Thursday, which rests on who is walking beside us today rather than on a promise about tomorrow.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the politics of exclusion — I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid subscribers receive our full biographical series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, our exclusive investigations, and the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series, along with this week’s remembrances of Father Mychal Judge and Welles Crowther.

Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Twenty-five years ago this morning, on September 10, 2001, Father Mychal Judge stood inside the quarters of Engine 73 and Ladder 42 in the Bronx and celebrated Mass for the rededication of the firehouse.

In the homily, the FDNY chaplain told the men what their vocation amounted to: “You do what God has called you to do. You show up. You put one foot in front of another. You get on the rig and you go out and you do the job — which is a mystery.”

Less than twenty-four hours later, he showed up.

Father Mychal Judge was the first recorded death at Ground Zero on September 11, 2001. He may yet become something else: the first known gay saint in the history of the Catholic Church. His life and death reveal what authentic American patriotism and humble Christian service look like, and he died as he lived, ministering to the suffering as a firefighter, patriot, priest, and saint.

When the first plane struck the North Tower, Mychal rushed downtown with the firefighters. At the scene, he ran past New York’s Mayor, who put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Mychal, please pray for us.”

The priest turned, smiled, and answered, “I always do.” Then he kept running with the firefighters into the building.

Invited to join city officials in a safer location, he declined. The line his friends have repeated for twenty-five years is “My work here isn’t finished.”

By the accounts of those who were there, other priests came to the scene that day, but he was the only one who went into the towers. In the lobby, amid smoke and terror, he offered absolution and gave the Last Rites.

At 9:59 a.m., the South Tower fell, and its debris tore through the North Tower lobby. A piece of falling wreckage struck his head. He collapsed and became the first recorded casualty of the attacks, Victim 0001, the number printed at the top of his death certificate.

Five men carried him out: firefighters Christian Waugh and Zachary Vause, NYPD Lt. William Cosgrove, FDNY EMT Kevin Allen, and a civilian named John Maguire. Reuters photographer Shannon Stapleton was there.

The men brought his body up the center aisle of St. Peter’s Church on Barclay Street, laid it before the altar, covered it with a sheet, and set his stole and his fire badge on top of it. They knelt for a moment before going back to work.

That photograph has embodied for me the definition of authentic American patriotism and humble service. It is a modern-day Pietà, and it reminds me of Jesus’s friends carrying him to the tomb after his death.

Why did he go in?

The question matters this week, because empathy itself has become a target among some. In May, Pope Leo XIV said compassion and empathy are “a call from God to reflect his goodness in our daily lives.”

Mychal Judge is what the pope meant. He felt the pain of his firefighters as his own, and that feeling carried him past the point where sense would have stopped him, into the mystery and the darkness of that morning.

His fellow Franciscan Father Michael Duffy described what he was doing when he died: “He was praying, because in the ritual for anointing, we’re always saying, Jesus come, Jesus forgive, Jesus save. He was talking to God, and he was helping someone.”

Leo said at the Angelus in January that God “does not look at the world from afar, without touching our lives, our wounds and our hopes.” As far as I can tell, nobody in New York has lived that sentence out more completely than the Franciscan in the fire helmet.

He had been rehearsing for that lobby his whole life. When Cardinal John O’Connor barred the gay Catholic group Dignity from archdiocesan churches in 1986, Judge welcomed its AIDS ministry into St. Francis of Assisi on West 31st Street, a Franciscan church outside the cardinal’s control, and he later ran the parish’s own AIDS program.

Patients with the disease were treated as lepers in those years, and he sat at their bedsides when many others would not. One dying man asked him, “Do you think God hates me?” Judge picked him up and kissed him, then rocked him in his arms without saying a word.

He worked the bread line outside the church, and once gave a homeless man the winter coat off his back (“he needed it more than me,” he said afterward). He had been in Alcoholics Anonymous since 1978, and he knew the inside of other people’s darkness because he had walked through his own.

At his funeral on September 15, 2001, three thousand people filled St. Francis of Assisi, among them Bill and Hillary Clinton, and the everyday people in the pews described how Father Mychal had helped them in their hour of need, how he had found them medical care, clothing, housing, and a future. Everyone thought Mychal was their best friend, because he was.

Here is how Duffy put it in the homily:

“In the next few weeks, we’re going to have names added, name after name of people, who are being brought out of that rubble. And Mychal Judge is going to be on the other side of death to greet them instead of sending them there.

“And so, this morning we come to bury Mike Judge’s body but not his spirit. We come to bury his mind but not his dreams. We come to bury his voice but not his message. We come to bury his hands but not his good works. We come to bury his heart but not his love. Never his love.”

Soledad O’Brien, Mike Barnicle, and Tim Russert told his story on MSNBC and NBC in poignant segments the next day.

No cause for his canonization has been opened. His own Franciscan province declined in 2021; its leader, Father Kevin Mullen, said the friars would “leave it to our brothers in the generations to come to inquire about sainthood.”

A Vatican postulator, Father Luis Escalante, has kept collecting testimonies without them.

Pope Francis in 2017 created a path to beatification for those who freely offer their lives for others, under the title Maiorem hac dilectionem, and the category fits a chaplain who died mid-anointing.

Nor has Washington moved. Chuck Schumer asked the White House to award him the Medal of Freedom in 2011, and the request sits where he left it fifteen years later.

On Sunday, for the twenty-fifth year, firefighters and police officers walked three miles down Seventh Avenue from St. Francis of Assisi to St. Peter’s, alongside his friends and family, retracing the ground between the friary where he lived and the church where his body was laid. Patti Ann McDonald, whose late husband, Detective Steven McDonald, founded the walk, said, “Father Mike was just there for everybody.”

I was 12 years old and in Tennessee that Tuesday. Every time I visit Ground Zero now, I purposely walk to his name on the bronze parapet of the South Pool, Panel S-18, and take a moment to pray. To me he is exactly what every Catholic in this country, and indeed the entire world, should be: a selfless giver of Christ’s redeeming love.

St. Mychal Judge, pray for us.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Father Mychal Judge and with everyone who still walks toward the suffering when walking away is the easier road — from the chaplains and firefighters of this city to the ordinary Catholics who refuse to let empathy be sneered at from a pulpit.

While some seek wealth and fame, Mychal Judge had a bread line on West 31st Street and a firehouse across from it; we know which of the two the Gospel describes.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than fear and contempt. They are looking for the love Father Duffy said we could never bury, and twenty-five years on, they are still finding it in a Franciscan who died ministering to God’s heroes in a lobby.

If you believe this movement matters, Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the cruelty that now passes for strength, I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this movement.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid subscribers receive the full series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, along with the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series and every investigation we publish.

Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

According to three independent sources, Mayor Zohran Mamdani will attend the Archdiocese of New York’s 25th-anniversary Mass for the victims of September 11 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Thursday evening, along with the reception connected to it.

Archbishop Ronald Hicks will celebrate the Mass at 5 p.m., with Bishop Robert Brennan of Brooklyn concelebrating, before an invitation-only congregation of victims’ families, uniformed members of the NYPD, the FDNY, and the Port Authority police, and the city’s elected officials.

The mayor was at the cathedral this past Sunday as well, for an ordinary Sunday Mass that nobody announced. The archbishop and the mayor shook hands and exchanged pleasantries at both the beginning and end of Mass.

Hicks preached that morning on Matthew 18, the passage where Jesus tells his disciples what to do when a brother wrongs them: go and talk to him, then bring one or two others, then bring it to the Church. Conflict, the archbishop said, is part of the human experience, found at kitchen tables and across backyard fences, in the workplace and the halls of government, in airport terminals and between nations.

“Notice, in today’s Gospel, when a conflict arises, Jesus does not say, hey, just walk away from the conflict,” Hicks said.

“Nor does he say, go into that conflict and go in and prove that you are right. Nor does he say, hey, take the conflict, and because you don’t know what to do, go ahead and post it on social media. Nor does he say, take the conflict, escalate it, and make it worse.”

The Lord’s way, he told the cathedral, is listening, and “his entire teaching is about preserving communion and living in peace.”

He closed by naming the week ahead, Labor Day and the 25th anniversary of 9/11, one a reminder of the dignity of work and the other of how fragile peace can be. The mayor was in a pew for all of it.

This is the latest act of Catholic solidarity from a Muslim democratic socialist whose relationship with Pope Leo XIV’s new archbishop has grown in recent months.

After missing Hicks’s installation at the cathedral, Mamdani attended the St. Patrick’s Day Mass, where Hicks defended immigrants in the middle of the Trump-Vance ICE raids, and the mayor called the new archbishop “someone who will be an inspiration not just to Catholic New Yorkers, but New Yorkers across the five boroughs.”

By June, at the Puerto Rican Day Parade, he was handing Hicks a Knicks jersey the day after a team filled with Pope Leo XIV’s fellow Villanova alumni won the NBA championship, a scene I described in my essay on New York’s odd couple.

Thursday continues that story. The man who wants it stopped is Bill Donohue.

Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights since 1993, stood on the steps of City Hall on Tuesday beside a group of 9/11 families demanding that Mamdani skip Friday’s ceremony at Ground Zero. Fox News posted the clip.

“I don’t have a whole lot to say about Zohran Mamdani. He should not be here,” Donohue said. “He is more concerned about Islamophobia than he is the death of 3,000 people, innocent people, on that day. This man is a disgrace to veterans.”

He closed with the line Fox used as its caption: “Mamdani, do us all a favor and just stay home.”

Donohue, whose organization keeps a running “Mamdani Watch” page logging the 37 news releases it has issued against the mayor since last September, had already sent him a letter on August 3, calling his presence “clearly divisive” and telling him that “your reluctance to speak negatively about the role of radical Muslims in fostering oppression and warfare, including the attacks on 9/11, makes you unsuitable to preside over the ceremony honoring these innocent Americans.”

A word about who is issuing these instructions.

The Catholic League is a Manhattan nonprofit that took in $6.2 million in 2024, and its president drew $596,026 in reportable compensation that year, plus another $74,984 in benefits, according to the Form 990 the organization filed with the IRS; in 2020 his pay topped $1 million.

When NBC News asked about the money in 2022, Donohue explained the job in his own words: “I write 100 percent of the voluminous news releases. I write our monthly journal. I write our direct mail packages.”

The 2017 and 2019 filings NBC reviewed list zero dollars spent on lobbying. This is a press-release operation whose founder has been paid as much as a million dollars a year, and it has appointed itself the bouncer at the door of the city’s mourning.

Donohue’s outfit spent most of February attacking Mamdani for staying away from Catholics. On February 9 it published a piece headlined “Mamdani Stiffs Catholics for Third Time,” faulting him for missing the archbishop’s installation.

Seven months later, the mayor wants to sit in the archbishop’s cathedral, at the archbishop’s invitation, and pray for the dead of his city, and the same organization’s president is on the steps of City Hall telling him to “just stay home.”

No version of Mamdani’s conduct will ever satisfy Bill Donohue, whose business is grievance, and a grievance without a villain does not raise money.

The archbishop of New York has given a different answer, and he gave it by hosting the man. Hicks told New York in his first days that the Church is “not a country club,” and a cathedral Mass for the murdered is the last place a membership committee belongs.

The Church prays for the dead in the presence of whoever comes to mourn them, as it did when Cardinals Egan and Dolan began these anniversary Masses, and the archdiocese says Hicks is proud to carry on the tradition.

Donohue speaks as though Catholic New York wants the mayor gone from Friday’s ceremony. Nothing beyond his own press releases shows that, and even the 9/11 families, some of whom have asked the mayor to stay away, are not of one mind.

Elizabeth Miller, the project director of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, who lost her father in the attacks, is clear about this:

“Mayor Mamdani has assured 9/11 families that he wants to be there to honor our loved ones, and I think he should be allowed to do that.”

The 9/11 Memorial & Museum, which runs Friday’s ceremony, said it has “intentionally worked to keep the commemoration free of politics because remembering those we lost on 9/11 should never be a partisan issue.”

Mamdani has answered the campaign without raising his voice. “I will proudly honor the families, the survivors, the first responders forever impacted by that horrific terror attack by standing alongside them,” he said last month.

Asked about Rudy Giuliani’s objections on Monday, he said, “I love this city. I love this country,” and then, of Giuliani, “I don’t have much more to add.”

Earlier this week I wrote about what 9/11 did to my own generation, and yesterday about Welles Crowther, the man in the red bandana, who died at 24 after leading strangers down the stairs of the South Tower.

Pope Leo XIV told a gathering of Christians and Muslims at the Vatican in May that compassion and empathy “are not something additional or optional, but are a call from God.” A Muslim mayor kneeling among Catholic widows at a Mass for 2,977 dead answers that call in a small way.

Whatever Bill Donohue calls his organization, telling that mayor to stay home from his city’s mourning is a refusal of the same call.

At 5 p.m. on Thursday, the archbishop of New York will process up the center aisle of St. Patrick’s, past the families and the firefighters, and the mayor of New York will be in a pew.

Bill Donohue can watch the livestream.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Archbishop Hicks and the families who will fill St. Patrick’s on Thursday, and with every New Yorker of goodwill who believes a Mass for the dead belongs to the mourners, whatever their creed.

The men who profit from grievance want a Church with a velvet rope.

Pope Leo XIV has asked Christians and Muslims instead to take up “a common mission: to revive humanity where it has grown cold,” and this community exists because tens of thousands of people are hungry for exactly that kind of Church.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the merchants of division — I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid subscribers receive the biographical series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, our exclusive investigations, including the Epstein-Bannon investigation, and the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series.

Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

On Tuesday, I published an essay arguing that Bishop Robert Barron contradicted Pope Leo XIV on empathy in the service of a MAGA culture war.

By Wednesday morning, two clerics I respect had answered me on X, and their answer deserves more than a reply in a thread.

Fr. Matthew Schneider is a Legionary of Christ who teaches theology at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Connecticut. “There is a decent argument to be made that Barron is overly deferential to right-wing politics,” he wrote, before adding that I sound hypocritical making it, since I am “more deferential to left-wing politics than he is to right-wing politics.”

Joseph Nolla is a Jesuit in formation for the priesthood, an Air Force veteran now studying theology in Paris. He granted that “one can make the argument that Barron has been deferential on the mass deportation programs,” then wrote that “Hale’s partisanship is leagues more egregious than what Bishop Barron is doing.”

Setting aside the superlatives, they are both right that I’m a partisan.

I’ve never claimed otherwise. I am a Democrat.

I ran for Congress in Tennessee’s Fourth District in 2020 as one (and lost, as anyone who has driven through Grundy County could have predicted), I served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, and I have spent a good part of the years since trying to rebuild a Catholic left inside that party.

Here’s what I told Jon Favreau in detail this spring about being a “heterodox Democrat.”

I plead guilty, and my conscience is clear, because the Second Vatican Council told me this work was mine — and yours.

Gaudium et spes, the Council’s pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world, assigns the work in its 43rd paragraph.

“Secular duties and activities belong properly although not exclusively to laymen,” the bishops wrote in 1965. They warned the laity against expecting their pastors to run the world for them: “Let the layman not imagine that his pastors are always such experts, that to every problem which arises, however complicated, they can readily give him a concrete solution, or even that such is their mission.”

The same paragraph allows that Catholics will disagree with one another on these questions “with equal sincerity,” and it forbids anyone to “appropriate the Church’s authority for his opinion.”

Pope Leo XIV turned his Wednesday catechesis to this document last week, and he described the Council’s demand this way: “We cannot remain as unengaged spectators; rather, we must listen with our hearts, allow ourselves to be challenged, and become involved.”

Politics in a republic runs through parties. If I wanted to make no difference whatsoever, I could try to operate in an ineffectual third-party alternative, but for anyone who cares about getting political results in 2026, only two secular vehicles are available in the United States — the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.

“Reality,” Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV argue, “is greater than ideas.”

So inevitably, a layperson who becomes involved in the way the Council asks will find himself inside one of them sooner or later, with all the difficult tensions that entails.

The clergy was handed a different assignment, and John Paul II made sure nobody would think otherwise.

In the spring of 1980, he ordered the Jesuits to pull Fr. Robert Drinan out of Congress, where the Massachusetts Democrat was preparing to run for a sixth term, and Drinan obeyed.

Three years later, on the tarmac in Managua, the pope wagged his finger at Fr. Ernesto Cardenal, the Sandinista culture minister who knelt before him after years of ignoring Rome’s demand that he resign his government post, and told him to set his affairs right with the Church.

That same year the pope promulgated a new Code of Canon Law, and the rule went into the text. Canon 285 forbids clerics “to assume public offices which entail a participation in the exercise of civil power,” and canon 287 adds: “They are not to have an active part in political parties.”

It is worth remembering who bore the brunt of that discipline. Drinan, the former dean of Boston College Law School, had gone to Congress in 1970 as an antiwar liberal; the Nicaraguan priests were serving the Sandinista revolution. John Paul was right to remove them anyway.

As far as I can tell, the principle has never depended on which side a priest picks, and a cleric who becomes a party’s protagonist has stopped being the Church’s witness to every party.

This is where my critics’ argument collapses. Two vocations are in play, and they carry opposite rules.

A bishop guides and, when the moment calls for it, rebukes, and he owes both to Republicans and Democrats alike. The layman walks into the party of his choice and tries to make it a little more like the Kingdom, knowing it never fully will be.

I have sat through enough Democratic Party functions in Tennessee, Washington, and elsewhere to know how far from the Kingdom the work starts.

So yes, I work inside the Democratic Party, as a Catholic who believes its positions on immigrants, on war, on labor, and on the poor sit closer to the Gospel than the alternative, and who fights the party where it strays. I want the same from my counterparts across the aisle.

I disagree with Kelsey Reinhardt, the president of CatholicVote, on most days of the week, and I still believe the Republican Party is better for having a sincere Catholic in the room.

John Carr, who ran the U.S. bishops’ justice and peace office for a quarter century before founding Georgetown’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life, put the goal this way in February:

“What if you had a ‘dignity caucus’ in each party that would support the best of their party, but challenge the things that go against our teaching?” That is the partisanship the Council imagined, and it belongs to laypeople like Reinhardt and me.

Bishop Barron has crossed the line the Council drew in many ways since he accepted a seat on Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission in May 2025.

During Holy Week this year, the bishop co-hosted an event at which clergy compared the president to the risen Christ. In May, he told Fox News that the real threat to the Church is wokeism and called Democrats “borderline communists”; two days later, he was headlining a Trump-backed partisan prayer rally on the National Mall.

In my article yesterday, I listed over 30 public instances of Bishop Barron being explicitly partisan in the past two years alone.

Barron knows what he’s doing. He even said so last month: “I know I’ve been posting a lot recently…”

Picture another bishop doing all of that for the Democratic National Committee, and every Catholic conservative in the country would call it a scandal. They would be right.

The Council anticipated him. “The Church, by reason of her role and competence,” Gaudium et spes declares in its 76th paragraph, “is not identified in any way with the political community nor bound to any political system.” A bishop who ties his ministry to a movement forfeits the standing to judge that movement, and the whole Church loses a voice she needs.

The retreat from partisanship that the Council asks of Bishop Barron was never asked of the laity. Fr. Schneider and Joseph Nolla are good men, and I am grateful they took the time to push back, but the charge they leveled describes a vocation rather than a vice.

You and I carry the responsibility, handed down at the Council and renewed by Pope Leo XIV this month, to make both political parties in this country better vehicles for Christ’s justice and love.

One final note.

I think it is a fine thing that two men of the cloth are willing to argue with a layman in public and in good faith, and I hope they keep doing it. Fr. John Jenkins, the former president of Notre Dame, wrote an underappreciated essay for the Wall Street Journal in January 2013 that I agree with wholeheartedly.

“What if, instead of demonizing opponents, we took steps to persuade them?” he asked. “I have to understand their position, which means I have to listen to them. I have to appeal to their values, which means I have to show them respect.”

They did that for me, and I hope this essay returns the favor.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with the Council fathers of 1965 and with the American Catholics who carry their faith into precinct meetings, campaign offices, union halls, and county conventions in both parties, trusting that Christ meant for his Church to shape the world through their hands rather than through a bishop’s cable-news hits.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a Church that speaks to power without being owned by it, and right now, as a bishop with 3.6 million subscribers lends his miter to one party’s culture war, that hunger has never been more urgent.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill working inside every party for the dignity of every person — I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid subscribers receive our ongoing series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, our exclusive investigations, including the Epstein-Bannon files, and the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series.

Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Donald Trump presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the family of Welles Crowther on Tuesday, standing on the Ellipse beside a 21-foot steel beam pulled from the South Tower, with Welles’s mother, Alison, and his sister Paige accepting on his behalf.

Then the president measured the dead man against himself. “The man in the red bandana has become more famous than me,” he told the crowd. “I don’t like it. Very unhappy. But he’s become much more famous than me.”

He is right about the fame. Welles Crowther is beloved because he gave his life for strangers, and in the faith I was raised in, a man who does that is called a saint.

Yesterday I promised to name the Catholic players and heroes of September 11 between now and Friday’s anniversary. Welles comes first, along with a correction. In that essay, and in a piece last year, I called him a Catholic. He was not.

Welles was a communicant at Grace Episcopal Church in Nyack, where his family held a liturgy of thanksgiving for his life on September 29, 2001.

His formation belonged to the Jesuits at Boston College and to Pedro Arrupe’s charge to become “men and women for others.” The Church has never pretended holiness stops at its own doors, and I will not spend a sentence apologizing for using the word saint to describe him.

The bandana came from his father when Welles was six. Jefferson Crowther folded a white handkerchief into the boy’s pocket and handed him a red one for the other pocket, and explained: “This white handkerchief, that’s for show. Here’s a bandana, that’s for blow.”

Welles carried a red bandana for the rest of his life, under his helmet at Boston College, where he wore No. 19 on the lacrosse field. At 16 he had joined Empire Hook and Ladder Company No. 1 in Upper Nyack as a junior firefighter. By 2001 he was an equities trader at Sandler O’Neill on the 104th floor of the South Tower, and he had already told his father he wanted to leave Wall Street for the FDNY.

United Flight 175 cut into the South Tower at 9:03 on the morning of September 11, tearing through the floors between the 78th and the 84th. Nine minutes later, Welles left a voicemail for his mother: “Mom, this is Welles. I want you to know that I’m okay.”

Roughly 200 people had been waiting for elevators in the 78th-floor sky lobby when the plane hit. Ling Young came to on the floor with blood on her glasses, surrounded by the dead and the badly burned. Then a young man’s voice came through the smoke. “I found the stairs,” he said. “Follow me. Only help the one that you can help.”

He led the group down to the 61st floor, carrying one woman for 17 flights, handed them to firefighters, and turned around. Judy Wein, who was still up in the sky lobby, repeated his words to her husband from a hospital bed that afternoon: “Everyone who can stand, stand now. If you can help others, do so.” The South Tower fell at 9:59.

Alison Crowther watched it from her home in Nyack and dropped to her knees. “I said, dear God, take me now. Leave him here.”

His body was recovered on March 19, 2002, in what had been the lobby of the South Tower, beside uniformed firefighters. The family did not learn what he had done until that May, when the New York Times published survivors’ accounts of the 78th floor, and Judy Wein described a man in a red kerchief running a triage station. Alison read the line and knew.

She mailed a photograph of her son to Wein and to Young, and both women told her yes, that was him. By the survivors’ count, Welles saved somewhere between a dozen and 18 people, and the FDNY made him an honorary member of the department in December 2006.

His sisters, Honor Crowther Fagan and Paige Crowther, sat down with KFC Radio on the 24th anniversary last year, and the host asked whether they were religious. “We are Episcopalian, baptized,” one of them answered.

Her first words to her future husband when he picked her up that day were “take me to church,” and she prayed alone inside Grace Church that afternoon. “Maybe this was some grand plan after all,” she said of the families her brother put back together, and she calls him a guardian angel “in flesh and blood.”

The word for what moved Welles back up those stairs is empathy, and empathy has become a target — even among Catholic leaders.

Pope Leo XIV, speaking to Christians and Muslims at the Vatican in May, taught the opposite. Compassion and empathy, he said, “are not something additional or optional, but are a call from God,” and both, he warned, “are sadly in danger of disappearing today.”

Welles felt the terror on the 78th floor as if it were his own, and the feeling turned into a stairwell and a voice people could follow. Feeling alone would have left him on the 61st floor with everyone else.

The Church’s word for empathy once it starts climbing is charity, and no higher form of it exists.

Jesus set the ceiling himself in the Gospel of John: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

In 2017, Pope Francis opened a new path to beatification under that verse’s Latin title, Maiorem hac dilectionem, for those who freely offer their lives for others. The Church built a category for what Welles did.

Father Mychal Judge is still waiting on his country. The Franciscan chaplain of the FDNY walked into the North Tower lobby with his firefighters and was killed there while praying over the dying, the first certified death of the day, Victim 0001.

Chuck Schumer asked the White House to give him the Medal of Freedom in 2011, and fifteen years later the request sits where he left it. We will get to Father Judge later this week. Welles Crowther’s medal is deserved, and the priest who died a few hundred feet away from him is owed the same.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Welles Crowther and with every person who felt a stranger’s fear on September 11 and moved toward it, Father Mychal Judge among them.

We stand with Pope Leo XIV, who calls empathy a summons from God at the very moment powerful men are teaching Christians to sneer at it.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that climbs the stairs.

They are tired of being told that mercy is weakness and that a priest’s sacrifice is a footnote, and they want a Church, and a country, that knows a saint when it sees one.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the gospel of contempt — I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid subscribers receive the full series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, along with the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series and every investigation we publish.

Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. The opening of this essay is free for everyone. The full essay, with a thorough account of Bishop Barron’s descent into MAGA, is for paid subscribers only. Join them today and help sustain this movement.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Bishop Robert Barron told his 3.6 million YouTube subscribers on Sunday that empathy is “not a supreme value,” that it has grown “so exaggerated, in fact, that it threatens truth, reality, justice” and love, and that Jesus never asked for it, a homily that contradicts Pope Leo XIV’s teaching on the subject.

The pope clearly disagrees.

Read more

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Every time I stand in Lower Manhattan, or look across the water at it, I think about the morning of September 11, 2001. It happens whether I want it to or not.

This Friday marks twenty-five years since that morning. I was 12 years old, in Tennessee, hundreds of miles from the city, and I can still tell you that day hour by hour. It sticks to me in more detail than almost any other day of my youth, and I suspect most people my age would say the same.

For my classmates and me, that fall was the season when childhood was ending, and adolescence was beginning. We were slowly learning that the world was larger and harder than the one our parents had built around us.

September 11 sped up the lesson; a single Tuesday morning took whatever innocence we had left. I have never been able to separate the two events in my mind, and I no longer try; the one became the other’s calendar.

The fall of those towers was, in some real way, the fall of my childhood.

The world you and I inhabit was shaped by that morning.

Two wars came out of it, one of them twenty years long, along with airports that treat every traveler as a suspect, a surveillance state that grew up alongside my generation, and a politics that learned to sort neighbors into the trusted and the suspected. You do not have to remember the day to live inside what it built.

That last point took me years to understand, and the way I learned it unsettled me more than almost anything in my adult life. Somewhere in my late twenties I started making friends, real friends, with people who had no living memory of September 11. They were toddlers that morning, or they had not been born yet.

They knew the facts from history class (Pew found last week that among Americans aged 18 to 24, six in ten first learned about the attacks in school), and they treated the day the way I treat Pearl Harbor, with respect and at a distance.

The first time one of them asked me what it had been like, I felt the ground shift. I was a primary source now.

It makes perfect sense. I was 12, which puts me near the youngest edge of the people who remember. Pew’s new survey, released ahead of the anniversary, found that one in ten American adults was born after 2001, and among those who were small children that morning, fewer can say where they were when they heard.

A large share of the American people living today has no memory of September 11, even though the day shaped the country they live in.

The Catholic Church in America lives inside that same shadow, and I do not think we have reckoned with it. The first recorded death at Ground Zero was a Franciscan friar, Father Mychal Judge, the fire department chaplain whose body was carried out of the North Tower by the men he served.

His own prayer, printed on prayer cards ever since, went: “Lord, take me where you want me to go; let me meet who you want me to meet; tell me what you want me to say; and keep me out of your way.”

Welles Crowther, the man in the red bandana who led strangers down the stairs of the South Tower and then climbed back up, was a Jesuit-educated Catholic from Nyack.

Eighteen months later, John Paul II sent Cardinal Pio Laghi to the White House to plead with George W. Bush against invading Iraq, and lost the argument. The just war debate that began in those months never ended; it came back this spring, when Pope Leo XIV declared that there was no just war in Iran.

And in Rome, three days after the towers fell, the Augustinian friars gathered for their general chapter elected a 46-year-old priest from the South Side of Chicago as their prior general. It was his birthday.

After a decade in Peru and two years running the Chicago province, he would now lead friars across the world from a curia in the shadow of St. Peter’s, in a world that had changed shape over a single week. His name was Robert Prevost.

Over the next week, between now and Friday’s anniversary, I am going to try to unwind all of this in a way that, as far as I can tell, few have done in twenty-five years.

I will name the Catholic players and heroes of September 11, including several that history skipped. I will give you an intimate look at who Robert Prevost was on that day, what the world looked like from the Augustinian curia that week, and how the years that followed shaped his ministry and the pope he became.

Then, at the end of the week, I want to say something harder. I have spent a quarter century identified with that morning, and I know I am not alone. There is a kind of honoring the past that quietly turns into living there. Christians are supposed to know the difference.

We keep the memory of our dead, and the center of our faith is the memory of a Friday afternoon outside Jerusalem. Yet the prophet Isaiah, speaking for God, tells a people who had lost everything: “Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider not; see, I am doing something new!” Honoring what happened to us, and how it still shapes us, is different from being imprisoned by it.

I owe that day a great deal, including much of the person I turned out to be, and the debt stops there.

9/11 ended my childhood. As a Christian, I refuse to let it write the rest of my life, and I care far more that it never writes the lives of my posterity.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with everyone who still carries September 11 in their body, and with the growing number of Americans who know it only as history and are trying, in good faith, to understand the country it left them. Both groups belong here. Grief is holy in this community, and so is memory, though the Gospel will not let either one harden into a prison.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than fear. They want a faith that can face the worst morning of a generation and still say, with Isaiah, that God is doing something new.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the politics of fear — I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid subscribers receive the full biographical series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, which this week’s account of Robert Prevost on September 11 will join, along with the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series and every investigation we publish.

Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Cardinal Robert McElroy stood in the pulpit of the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle on Sunday, Sept. 6, and told a congregation of union members and parishioners that “no one intrinsically owns anything.”

The Catholic Labor Network and the Archdiocese of Washington organized the Labor Day weekend Mass, and the first reading came from Genesis. The archbishop of Washington built his entire homily on it.

“Every blessing that we know on this earth is a gift to us from God, created in grace and given to us in love,” he said. Catholic theology calls this the universal destination of goods.

“No one intrinsically owns anything; all that is, that has come ultimately from the gift of God, belongs to all of us,” McElroy said. Private property, in his telling, exists “as an accommodation to the ways of the world to make economies work.” Beneath it sits the older claim that “everyone has a right to part of the world’s bounty.”

From that gift flows a duty.

“When we are workers, we are co-creators with God,” McElroy said, pointing to St. Joseph the carpenter, who made a home for his family and “was a responsible participant in the community.” Work, he went on, “is not something imposed upon us merely as a burden,” even on the days when “it is really hard to get up and go to work.”

Then he turned to Leo XIII. When the world moved from the farm to the factory, Rerum Novarum (1891) confronted “immense new threats to workers,” from the exploitation of wages to the tearing apart of families, and it treated organized labor as “a counter force to the raw economic power of major employers.”

That conviction, McElroy said, “has been in Catholic teaching strongly since that period.” Pope Leo XIV, as I have written before, chose his name to carry that teaching into the age of the algorithm.

In August, McElroy told the congregation, he, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, and Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, spent several days in Silicon Valley with the leaders of the AI teams at “what they call the frontier labs.”

The engineers, he said, spoke “very openly about the state of AI,” including its “many destructive elements.” One of the subjects on the table was work.

“Will there be meaningful work left?” McElroy asked. “And the answer to that is, no one knows.”

The labor market, he said, “is going to radically change in the next 20 years.” Certain sectors “will essentially be wiped out by AI,” while others (he named manual labor and social service) will survive. “Millions of workers who have jobs now will not have those jobs 10 years from now.”

His prescription put labor at the center of the response. “We as a society have to be at the table,” he said, so that “the wealth of the country doesn’t increasingly go to the fewer and the fewer at the expense of the working class.”

Anticipating the transition before it arrives, he said, “is the challenge of labor for labor in our day.”

The U.S. bishops said much the same on Friday. Archbishop Shelton Fabre of Louisville, who chairs the bishops’ Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, issued the conference’s Labor Day statement, and this year it centers on “young people and vulnerable communities who face uncertainty in today’s economy.”

Young people, the bishops write, “have been the most impacted so far” by AI “and also experience the most anxiety about AI’s impact on their work.” Roughly a quarter of the labor force earns low wages, they note, and 72 percent of those workers “lack stable and secure jobs.”

The statement leans throughout on Magnifica Humanitas, the pope’s first encyclical, which the bishops credit with naming the risks AI poses to workers: “de-skilling, surveillance, rigid and repetitive tasks, reduced agency and creativity, unemployment, job insecurity, concentrated power, and increased inequalities.”

Leo wrote the union question into the encyclical himself. “Labor unions, which the Church has consistently supported, are called upon to be open to new types of employment and the corresponding needs of workers, in order to represent and defend them,” he writes in paragraph 155, warning that without “bold decisions” many people will be left “marginalized, stranded and surrounded by the machines and automated systems that have replaced them.”

When Chicago labor leaders visited him in Rome last October, he reminded them that Pope Francis “urged every union to be re-born each day at the peripheries.”

Michael Sean Winters, in a beautiful Labor Day column for the National Catholic Reporter, traces how this alliance formed and how it frayed. The bond between the Church and organized labor in the late 19th century “was entirely organic,” he writes: immigrant Catholics filled the factories and the Knights of Labor, and when a Canadian archbishop condemned the Knights as a secret society in 1884, the American bishops appealed to Rome, where Leo XIII took their side on his way to writing Rerum Novarum.

The relationship “atrophied in the last half of the 20th century,” Winters writes, as the GI Bill carried Catholics to the suburbs and “many bishops also retreated from the public square except on abortion.” Rebuilding it, he concludes, “will not be organic; it must be intentional.” He adds a line I keep returning to: “I do not see how the country can dig itself out of the many holes it is in without a strong labor movement.”

I would add one piece to Winters’ diagnosis. Labor lost young people somewhere along the way, and I count myself among the lost. In fifteen years of campaigns, including my own run for Congress in Tennessee in 2020, the movement struck me, as far as I could tell, deeply out of touch with young people.

It had its own form of lay clericalism, where young people weren’t given positions of influence and authority.

A cause that leaves a 25-year-old feeling like a guest at someone else’s club has a problem no policy paper can fix, which is why the bishops were right to put young workers first.

If this pontificate helps organized labor become young again on this side of the Atlantic, in the middle of the revolution McElroy described, it will rank among Leo’s lasting gifts to his own country.

McElroy closed with thanks “for men and women and children and families who have little of this world’s good,” and with a charge: “let us do everything that we can to vindicate workers in this moment in which we live and in the years which are going to come, which will transform human labor.” A pope who took his name from Rerum Novarum and a bishops’ conference writing about anxious young workers add up to a Church that has decided the AI question is a labor question. Whether labor can answer it remains open.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Cardinal McElroy and the workers who filled St. Matthew’s Cathedral on Sunday, and with a pope who wrote the word “unions” into an encyclical on artificial intelligence.

Leo XIII put it in writing in 1891, and McElroy preached it from the pulpit on Sunday: a worker is a person before she is a cost of production, and the goods of the earth were given to all of us. That teaching is about to be tested by machines that can do the work of millions of people, and by an economy tempted to let the bounty flow, as the cardinal put it, “to the fewer and the fewer.”

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that takes their labor seriously, a faith that can look at an IBEW electrician in the pews at St. Matthew’s or a nurse on a night shift and see a co-creator with God. That hunger is not going to be met by a chatbot.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for the dignity of work against an economy that treats workers as disposable — I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid subscribers receive the full series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, our ongoing coverage of Pope Leo’s confrontation with Silicon Valley, and the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series.

Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Last August I wrote that Catholics in MAGA country had become the most visible, organized counterweight to Donald Trump’s ICE raids, and I counted six red states to prove it.

Dan Merica of The Washington Post had asked me why. My answer then was that twelve years of Pope Francis appointees had produced an episcopacy willing to stand in contested public space, and that Pope Leo XIV had given those bishops a leader who is not afraid.

As the summer comes to a close, I made the list again, and it got longer.

I grew up in a Tennessee parish the Ku Klux Klan once threatened, so I have never accepted the coastal shorthand that says the Church in MAGA country is just an adjunct of the Trump White House.

I know this reality in the flesh, and the evidence shows something quite different.

In the states where Trump won by the widest margins are, as far as I can tell, the places where Catholics have spoken most plainly in 2026, and the speaking has moved well past ICE raids, though the raids have not stopped.

Here is what Catholics in nine Trump states did in 2026, in the order it happened.

• Kentucky: On January 4, the four bishops of Kentucky (Archbishop Shelton Fabre of Louisville, Bishop John Iffert of Covington, Bishop John Stowe of Lexington, and Bishop William Medley of Owensboro) issued a joint statement in a state Trump carried by 31 points. “We oppose all efforts to stigmatize immigrants as a group or to spread fear based on national or ethnic origin,” they wrote, naming “the elimination of sanctuary protections for churches, hospitals, and schools” among the causes of the “hostility, anxiety, and fear” they now see in their parishes. They pledged to “stand with all of our immigrant brothers and sisters who have been victimized by unjust government action or by harmful rhetoric.”
  

• Arkansas: Bishop Anthony Taylor of Little Rock, whose grandfather lost twenty first cousins in the Holocaust, told readers of his January column that he views “troubling things in today’s world through the lens of 1930s Germany.” He recalled how Hitler exploited public fear, then the 937 Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis whom the United States turned away, and then he wrote: “These are the kinds of atrocities to which the dehumanization of mass, indiscriminate deportation can naturally lead.” Caring for refugees and the poor, the bishop of a 31-point Trump state insisted, “is a pro-life issue.”
  

• Texas: Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso called the campaign of mass detention and deportation “a grave moral evil” in a March pastoral letter and told Catholic agents that “no one has to obey an immoral order.” On June 28, ICE agents handcuffed Sister Leticia Ugboaja, a Nigerian nurse in her habit, a block from her home in McAllen as she walked to Sunday Mass. Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville called the protocols behind it “wildly disturbing,” and a Republican congresswoman joined two Democrats to get her home by nightfall. Nine days later an ICE agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Houston homebuilder, as he drove his crew to work. Sister Rose Kuhn still drives to the Harlingen immigration court every Wednesday to sit beside children as young as four who face a judge alone.
  

• Oklahoma: On April 7, Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, the president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, told Trump to “step back from the precipice of war and negotiate a just settlement for the sake of peace and before more lives are lost.” Trump had threatened to destroy Iran outright. That threat, Coakley wrote, together with the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, “cannot be morally justified,” and he invited every American Catholic to join Pope Leo’s vigil for peace that Saturday. Trump won Oklahoma by 34 points and carried all 77 of its counties.
  

• Wyoming: On Divine Mercy Sunday, April 12, Bishop Steven Biegler of Cheyenne released a pastoral letter titled “Be a Merciful Neighbor” in the state that gave Trump his widest margin anywhere, 46 points. “We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement,” Biegler wrote, grieving “for parents who fear being detained when taking their children to school.”
  

• West Virginia: On May 1, Pope Leo named Evelio Menjivar the lone Catholic bishop of West Virginia, a state Trump carried by 42 points. Menjivar crossed the border at Tijuana in the trunk of a car in 1990, and Cardinal Prevost’s last retweet before the conclave carried Menjivar’s question about the deportations to El Salvador’s CECOT prison: “Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?” Installed at the Cathedral of St. Joseph in Wheeling on July 2, the new bishop told West Virginia Watch how his Church treats the stranger: “We help people without asking, without questioning their status. We just help because they are human beings.”
  

• Florida: Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami has had two fights on his hands this summer. As the administration moved to end Temporary Protected Status for more than 300,000 Haitians, he wrote on July 24: “To make America Great again is a worthy goal but you don’t make America great by making America mean.” After gangs killed at least 47 people at Kenscoff on August 23, he asked Washington to rethink the deportations, because Haiti “is still a house on fire.” Attorney General James Uthmeier, meanwhile, gave the state’s bishops seven days to start granting religious vaccine exemptions in Catholic schools or watch their students lose state vouchers; the bishops answered that they “do not have to justify to your office their position on Catholic teaching,” and Uthmeier compared them to “Muslim schools teaching sharia law.”
  

• Ohio: After ICE began mailing letters in late July to the Haitians of Springfield, a city where roughly one in four residents is Haitian, Catholic sisters started standing outside the ICE office in Blue Ash, north of Cincinnati. They come from the Sisters of Charity, the Sisters of Notre Dame, the Sisters of Divine Providence, the Sisters of Mercy, and the Sisters of the Precious Blood, and on Sunday, August 9, nearly 700 people lined the street with them. Sister Patricia Wittberg’s sign read: “It’s so bad even the NUNS are mad!” Their presence, Sister Anita Marie of the Sisters of Notre Dame said, “is a type of prayer.” Trump carried Ohio, JD Vance’s home state, by 11 points.
  

• Indiana: On Thursday, September 3, Archbishop Charles Thompson of Indianapolis issued a decree dispensing from Sunday Mass “all those persons living within the Archdiocese of Indianapolis who reasonably fear being detained, separated from their families, or experience intimidation due to the increased immigration enforcement.” It added: “This applies even to those with proper legal documentation.” Days earlier, cellphone video had caught masked agents chasing a man across several lanes of traffic on Post Road at Interstate 70, and Sen. Jim Banks promised that “we will not let Indianapolis become Minneapolis.” Thompson invoked canon 87, which lets a bishop lift a law “when it contributes to their spiritual welfare,” in a state Trump carried by 19 points.

Trump carried those nine states by an average of 27 points (Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Wyoming alone account for 122 of the 240), and in every one of them the Church told him no about something he wanted.

On Wednesday in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Leo told Catholics that “we cannot remain as unengaged spectators” before the injustices of their own age, and he asked them to share the griefs of those “crushed by injustice, discrimination, and violence.”

The bishops, priests, nuns, and most importantly, lay women and men of Trump country had not waited for the instruction; they have been living it since the first week of January.

Last August I closed with a line I believed: in red states and blue, the conscience of the Church is alive and unafraid.

A year later I would add only this, and I say it as a Tennessean who watched our own three bishops find their voice on the Nashville raids: it is loudest where the president won biggest.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Archbishop Thompson, Bishop Taylor, the sisters on the sidewalk in Blue Ash, and the millions of American Catholics (and countless others of goodwill) who believe that a nun walking to Mass is no threat to anyone and that, as Bishop Seitz put it, no one has to obey an immoral order.

In a season when the loudest voices in American religious life belong to the prophets of doom (the phrase is St. John XXIII’s, from the morning he opened the Council in 1962), we remain rooted in a faith that refuses to flinch before injustice or bow to the idols of fear and authoritarianism.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than rage and propaganda. They want to know that the Church in Trump country has not gone quiet, and this year, from Cheyenne to Little Rock, it has not.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a government that handcuffs nuns and sends Haitians back into a house on fire — I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid subscribers have access to the biographical series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, the Epstein-Bannon investigation, and the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series, along with the full archive of our reporting on the Church’s confrontation with this administration.

Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Dear friends,

The late Mark Shields once said that strong institutions seek converts and weak institutions punish heretics. Put another way, are we spending our time and energy making our communities bigger and more vibrant or smaller and more rigid?

Pope Francis said that choice runs through the whole history of the Church, and Pope Leo XIV preached on this exact theme in St. Peter’s Square this morning.

Today’s Gospel gives us a modus operandi to be a people who build up and unite rather than tear down and divide.

We’ll explore that in depth in today’s scripture reflection.

These Scripture reflections are available exclusively to paid subscribers. If my work means something to you, I’m asking for your help.

If you’d like to invest in our mission during this critical time, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Today’s Readings

“If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won over your brother.” — Matthew 18:15

For close to a thousand years, the Easter Vigil was celebrated on Saturday morning.

Many of you know it is my favorite night of the year, and I have written before about what it feels like to watch grown adults decide to enter the Church.

Fewer people know how new the night itself is. Sometime in the Middle Ages, the liturgy started creeping earlier, until a rite originally built around fire and darkness was being celebrated in the morning sunlight.

Pius XII sent it back to the night in 1951 as a temporary experiment, and in November 1955 he made the change permanent with a decree that said the vigil, “torn from its own place in the night hours, lost its innate clarity and the sense of its words and symbols.”

The night Augustine called the mother of all vigils is, in the form you and I know it, barely seventy years old.

My favorite moment of the night comes after the baptisms, when the newly baptized are confirmed, and the whole Church stands to profess the faith in the old question-and-answer form (do you believe in God, the Father almighty? I do).

Then the celebrant says this line: “This is our faith. This is the faith of the Church. We are proud to profess it in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

The word that carries that sentence is “our.”

Nobody stands up alone that night to profess a private faith they worked out for themselves. They do so as a collective community of believers.

Since the Enlightenment, the West has been building a civilization on the sovereign individual, the self who believes as she pleases and answers to no one. Christianity has never worked that way; you cannot baptize yourself, and there is no such thing as a Mass said by a congregation of one.

Pope Leo chose as his episcopal motto a phrase from Augustine’s commentary on Psalm 127, In Illo uno unum, which the saint used to say that although we Christians are many, in the one Christ we are one. It is the shortest version of the argument I made last week about how Augustine made this pope.

A line that circulates in disability ministry, attributed to the artist Dan Wilkins, goes: “A community that excludes even one of its members is no community at all.” Communities have rules and thresholds, of course, and somebody always lands outside them.

But the Church’s name is a claim about who belongs. Catholic means universal, every nation and the whole human family, and a Church that quietly writes people off has stopped being what it says it is.

That’s exactly what today’s readings are about. Pope Francis made that clear back in perhaps the best homily of his entire pontificate.

Read more

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication an…

Read more

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Sister Rose Kuhn goes to Mass in McAllen, Texas, on Wednesday mornings and then drives roughly forty miles east to the federal immigration court in Harlingen. She has no client in the building. What she is doing there, she tells the children who come before the judge, fits in one sentence:

“I introduce myself as a Catholic nun, I tell them I went to Mass this morning for you, and I’m not a hearing officer, I have nothing to do with the whole process, I’m here to accompany you,” she told Dan Stockman of Global Sisters Report in July.

Kuhn belongs to the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the congregation headquartered in Immaculata, Pennsylvania, whose sisters taught generations of Philadelphia schoolchildren.

She moved to McAllen in 2022 with two other sisters as part of a joint mission of the three IHM congregations. Last year, she started attending hearings in Harlingen with two Jesuit priests. Since then, she has gone on her own every week.

Here’s her full story.

Read more

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Louis Prevost sat down with Piers Morgan for seventeen minutes on the eve of the Fourth of July, and almost nobody noticed.

I missed it, but I promise that I have an excuse.

I was on Lampedusa that weekend, covering Pope Leo XIV’s Mass among the migrants at Europe’s southern door on America’s 250th birthday. The national press missed it too, and so did the Catholic press.

Their excuse was (fairly) the Fourth of July.

A holiday weekend swallowed the interview whole, and when I went looking for coverage of it this week, I came up empty.

That is a shame, because Louis talks about his brother the way no one else alive can, as an older sibling who calls his brother quickly.

He has been on this beat since shortly after his election. Trump said “I really like his brother” in July 2025.

We’ve learned more about him through the profile of the three Prevost brothers, through his previous sit-down with Morgan, and into April, when Trump called Leo “weak on crime” and praised Louis as “all MAGA.”

The segment ran inside a 250th-anniversary debate episode that Morgan taped on Thursday, July 2, and posted the next day, which is part of why it sank. Here are eight things we learned from it.

Two of them sit in front of the paywall. Paid subscribers get the rest.

1. Pope Leo will talk to Trump. Trump has to dial.

The president and the pope have never spoken, a point Morgan made near the end of the interview. Louis said he has already put the question to his brother directly: what if I get the president on the phone? “Sure, if you want, but he has to call me,” Leo told him. Louis described it as a Vatican rule. “You have to request from the pope. The pope doesn’t go.”

A message has already traveled the other way.

A day or two before UFC Freedom 250 on the White House lawn on June 14, which was Trump’s 80th birthday, Louis asked his brother whether he had anything for the president. The pope told him to wish Trump a happy birthday.

Louis delivered it ringside. “Oh, that’s very nice,” Trump answered, by Louis’s account, and promised to pass along his thanks. The president has yet to pick up the phone to thank the pope himself.

2. “He’s always been Catholic first.”

Morgan asked whether a man goes from American first to Catholic first when he becomes pope. Louis answered before the question was finished. “He’s always been Catholic first. Whether when he was a priest, a bishop, a cardinal, that’s him. He’s the Church.”

Then he made the point the administration refuses to hear. On the border, Louis said, his brother has also said “a country has a right to its borders and to control its immigration,” so “there’s really no argument there. It’s just the way it gets presented.”

This came from a Navy veteran who told Morgan he would “go back and die for this country again, if necessary.” The order he put them in, faith above flag, is the story of this papacy.

The remaining six takeaways are for paid subscribers, including Louis and Leo’s conversations about immigration, a possible trip to the United States, his takeaway from the Trump-Leo fight, and who the pope will talk to next in American media.

If you have been waiting for a reason to join, this is a good one.

Read more

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic c…

Read more