Dear friends,
I have written to you a great deal this week. I apologize for the crowded inbox, and I want to tell you why I did it.
Since Sunday I have sent you Father Mychal Judge, Welles Crowther and his red bandana, George W. Bush inside a Washington mosque, a young Augustinian named Robert Prevost preaching against revenge ten days after the towers fell, and, this evening, the people who jumped.
That is a lot of one subject for one week, even from me.
Here is the reason.
If you want to understand the country we live in, the wars we fought, the border we built, the way our politics now runs on an enemy, I think you have to start with that Tuesday morning, with how it felt, and with how we reacted to it then and are reacting to it still, twenty-five years later, mostly without noticing that we are.
I must confess that it is also personal.
Anyone who knows me knows I have carried a particular fascination with September 11, one that has grown rather than faded in recent years.
I said on Sunday that 9/11 was the end of my childhood, and in many ways that is true. The days after it, though, were some of the most moving and invigorating days of my life, and I have never quite admitted that in print.
I struggle with being vulnerable, but I hope you saw a little more of my heart this week: what I believe in, what gets me up in the morning, and the worries that keep me up at night, which turn out to be mostly the same things.
As much as a human being can love an institution, I love the Catholic Church and the United States, and September 11 is where those two loves run together.
As I told Mayor Mamdani this week, as many as nine in ten of the first responders who died that morning are believed to have been Catholic. They were our brothers and sisters in the faith of the apostles, and I am here to honor their sacrifice and to be inspired by their memory. That is why we wrote about them this week.
Mamdani’s answer, which I posted on X on Thursday night, has been viewed more than twelve million times since, and as far as I can tell, it was the most viewed post in the world today. I take that as a sign that the American people want to be united.
I am writing this from a bench overlooking lower Manhattan as dusk gives way to night, trying to gain some vista of everything I have seen and felt this week. Lady Liberty is out there in all her glory, and the new World Trade Center is lighting up the skyline. I have never heard New York this quiet. It is almost like sitting in a pew at Sunday Mass, and the words Peter blurted out on the mountain keep coming to mind: “Lord, it is good that we are here.”
For the younger people who read this newsletter (and there are many of you; one in ten American adults today was born after that morning), no one will ever be able to describe to you the degree to which this nation came together. For a season the words Democrat and Republican lost their meaning. Partisanship ended, and we became one people.
Robert Kagan’s Of Paradise and Power, written in the shadow of those months, makes the point in its own way, as far as I can tell, that nothing binds a people together like a clearly defined enemy. His subject was the Atlantic alliance and what became of it once the Soviet Union was gone, but the lesson travels, and Americans of my age learned it in our bones before we could have named it.
From a Christian vista, that is precisely the weakness. Unity purchased with an enemy makes you blind. Ours blinded us to the catastrophes we would endure, and inflict, in Afghanistan and Iraq; in the Patriot Act and the surveillance state it built, which we mostly kept; at Guantánamo; in what we did to migrants and to Muslims; and in a politics of the American right that learned the lesson of those months too well — if you can name the enemy, the people will follow you anywhere.
Ten days after the attacks, on Sept. 21, 2001, the future pope stood in a Roman church and said out loud what almost no American wanted to hear. “While many seek revenge,” Prevost preached, “Augustinians must bear witness to the Gospel and its values of unity, dialogue, peace and reconciliation.” He was right, and it took most of us a quarter century to admit it.
So when I say we need to be a 9/12 people, I am talking about tomorrow, September 12, 2026, and every day after it.
As I wrote on Sunday, it is time, in many ways, to move on, and that goes for me personally before it goes for anyone else.
Shortly after his resurrection, Jesus meets Mary Magdalene at the tomb, and after he calls her by name, the first instruction he gives the first witness of Easter is “Do not cling to me.” What wonderful advice that is. We must not cling to the past, and the vista of 9/11, however sacred, is the past.
The best way of facing trauma, as far as I can tell, is to come slowly to the realization that the thing cannot hurt you anymore.
September 11 has been the defining feature of the last twenty-five years of American life. It can no longer hurt us.
From this bench, I can see the two beams of the Tribute in Light climbing out of the ground to remind us what happened that day, and the light looks a bit more faded tonight. Thank God for that. Moving on is now within our power, and so is making sure that morning does not define the next twenty-five years.
Being in Manhattan during these ceremonies has reminded me of something else. The leaders of this generation are, in many ways, post-9/11 people.
Nearly three in ten Americans are now too young to remember the day at all, and so many of the people running our cities, our parishes, and our movements were in grade school that morning, or not yet born.
We castigate them for it (I do it too), as though a memory were a virtue. God reminds us that we are not to be held hostage by what happened to us: “Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”
It is time for a post-post-9/11 generation, which is to say a 9/12/26 generation.
The details of that generation are not clear to me yet, sitting on this bench with the harbor gone dark in front of me.
A few things do come to mind, though. The first mark of such a generation is unity, and close behind it comes a forward-looking habit of mind, the refusal to spend a whole life turning around. Its members would trust one another again, which sounds small until you try it.
Innovation belongs on the list as well, because the people who built this city did not do it by staring at the ground, and so does a squarely, unmistakably dedicated commitment to justice — the kind Prevost was preaching about in Rome while the rest of us were choosing sides.
Before I close the laptop, one more look at the harbor.
She is still there, shining in all her glory, a beacon to all those seeking the blessings of liberty.
I think of my ancestors and of yours, and of everyone who passed through this harbor, went by this lady, and looked up at her torch, which will light tonight and every night in their honor.
It is up to you and me to make sure that light shines for our posterity, so it is time to get to work.
Let us rise and be on our way.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with the young Augustinian who preached unity, dialogue, peace and reconciliation while a wounded nation reached for revenge, and with the millions of Americans, Catholic and otherwise, who are ready to stop being governed by the worst morning of their lives.
In an era that runs on fear and on the constant manufacture of enemies, we remain rooted in a faith whose founder told the first witness of Easter not to cling to him, and whose God keeps insisting that he is doing a new thing.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something better than a politics built on an enemy.
They are hungry for courage and for the nerve to trust one another again, and on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day that taught this country fear, that hunger has rarely been more urgent.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill who want to be a 9/12 people — I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
This will bear some thought, and rereading. I am not certain that I am prepared to become a 9/12 person yet, or even if I should. The events of 9/11 and the weeks and months following that day are deeply ingrained in my psyche, the time I spent in New York somewhere between a memory and a scar.
Remembering how we came together as a nation, as a people, should not be put aside or forgotten. Remembering how the rest of the world supported us— I remember meeting not just Canadian rescue teams joining ours, but a French cadaver search team (with the biggest, scariest Alsatian I’ve ever seen!) as well, and there were others I didn’t meet.
What followed— the neoconservatives’s fake evidence that took us into an unnecessary war against a nation that hadn’t attacked ours— brought us in the absolute wrong direction, but what we had for that short period following the worst terrorist attack in our history is worth remembering, worth keeping as part of who we are as individuals, as Americans, and as believing Catholics. So I ask you, is there not a way that we can be both, be people of 9/12 *because* we are people of 9/11?”
Christopher, all your writings this week were so inspiring, thoughtful, and enlightening. As horrible as that day was, no one cared what sex, race, or faith we were. We were one. May we use this day as a reminder of what we can be and live a more Christian life.