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.
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That line about refusing revenge ten days after 9/11 is remarkable.
America was practically vibrating with rage, and Prevost was already saying: maybe vengeance is not the same thing as justice.
Twenty-five years later, that still feels like the harder Gospel.
I have often wondered, What if we did not assume we were at war, as opposed to being the victim of a heinous international crime?
What if we had undertaken a worldwide criminal hunt and investigation for the masterminds behind the tragic events?
Did our response from a war mentality create and perpetuate a legacy of unending conflict?
At 25 years, there are very difficult soul questions still to be asked and seriously dealt with if we are to change our current course of hate and destruction instead of getting on with the work to become a ‘beloved community’ on this mortal coil!
Now juxtapose the Gospel readings for the last three days from Luke with last night’s Trump speech and pledge of allegiance to him and his command to CHEAT - a set up for another insurrection (of a different sort).
But, I’d say the questions and challenges posed by Leo and Luke still need for attention to be paid.