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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).
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
I agree. Less fear. More love🙏🏻♥️
As I look back on President George W. Bush’s response, I have to say it was magnificent. Can you imagine if Trump had been president? Best not to contemplate it.