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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.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
September 11, 2001...
The Day America Wept.
I was 43 and living in NYC. We saw the second plane hit in disbelief. The days that followed are a blur of humanity; the smell; and the feeling was surreal. We grieved. What changed? Everything. We lasted 5 more years but could not tolerate nor change the direction of our country. We left 20 years ago. More happened that day to change our people and nation than anyone will ever admit. I am pleased to see you, even so young at the time, understand.