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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.
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