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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.
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It is such a relief these days, to be proud of what my church does instead of constantly apologizing for the American bishops’ hypocrisy.
Donohue is not a Gospel Christian. With his dedication to his own self-interest and interest in fomenting division among people, he has disqualified himself from speaking on behalf of anyone other than himself and his own self interest. He would better serve by remaining open to receiving those who neither look like him nor pray in the same manner as potential colleagues in an effort to increase connection in the service of the public good.