Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Pope Leo XIV finished the Angelus on Sunday, switched into English, and gave four sentences to mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11.
“Two days ago marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks in the United States of America,” he told the crowd beneath his window. He renewed his prayers for the dead and for “those who continue to bear the wounds of that tragic day,” then asked everyone listening to pray that God would “bestow his gift of peace upon the world.”
A little over an hour later, the Vatican put that paragraph on his X account, word for word. Nearly 600,000 people have seen it since.
Then the replies started.
Kevin DeAnna wrote what became the thesis of most of the complaints. “Two days late,” he wrote, “and just some vague hand waving about violence itself being bad.” The post has been seen more than 15,000 times.
DeAnna spent years writing as James Kirkpatrick at VDARE, the anti-immigration site Peter Brimelow founded in 1999 and named for Virginia Dare, which suspended publication in July 2024 while New York’s attorney general pursued its foundation over the Brimelows’ handling of its charitable money.
He now hosts a podcast for American Renaissance, and the Southern Poverty Law Center calls him one of the main ideological architects of this century’s American white-nationalist movement.
The second charge arrived stacked on the first, from an account with 278,000 followers. “The Pope posts this two days late and doesn’t even mention Islam or Muslims — just the usual ‘violence is bad’ platitudes,” wrote Humble Flow, who graded the prayer “pretty weak.”
He is not an anonymous crank.
Humble Flow writes The Western Spirit, a Substack with more than 36,000 subscribers that bills itself as “a publication devoted to the Catholic spirit that shaped Western civilization,” and he runs a private book club of some 60,000 readers organized around the Western canon.
Anthony Galli, a conservative writer, quoted the pope’s own sentence about conflict and violence back at him and answered it with two words of instruction. “‘At a time when conflict and violence…’ blah, blah, blah,” he wrote. “Condemn Islam.”
Mark Davis, who hosts a daily show on Salem Radio’s 660 AM The Answer in Dallas and writes columns for Newsweek and Townhall, supplied the respectable version of the complaint. “Praying for peace is vital,” he wrote. “So is understanding that peace is not defined by pacifism, but by success in fighting and defeating evil when it arises.”
One bystander scrolled the whole thing and gave up. “All of the replies are negative,” he wrote. “Not surprised everyone missed the point of the message. The goal is to heal the world. Adding more hatred is not making the situation any better. You sound like such miserable people. I would hate to have any of you as neighbors.”
Both accusations fall apart against any look at normal modern papal protocol.
The Angelus is a Sunday prayer, and this year the anniversary landed on a Friday (his Wednesday general audience had come two days before it, not after), which made Sunday the pope’s first turn at the window.
Three days before that, Leo’s ambassador in Washington, Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, was inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral concelebrating Archbishop Ronald Hicks’s vigil Mass for the anniversary — the Joe Biden, Zohran Mamdani, Kathy Hochul, and yours truly attended after Donald Trump and JD Vance turned down their invitations.
As for whether Robert Prevost has given September 11 any thought, we have his answer from ten days after the towers came down.
“While many seek revenge,” he preached to his Augustinian brothers in Rome, “Augustinians must bear witness to the Gospel and to its values of unity, dialogue, peace, and reconciliation.” They had elected him prior general the week before, on his forty-sixth birthday, three days after the attacks, and nobody outside the order was listening.
Leo gave the rest of that same Angelus to Sunday’s Gospel, where Peter asks Jesus how many times he has to forgive his brother and gets seventy times seven for an answer. Nobody screenshotted that part.
“Forgiveness is indispensable, and without it, we cannot live in peace,” the pope said. He kept going: “Only forgiveness sets us free and restores the light, even where human material and moral poverty has darkened the horizon and made the path uncertain.”
Preach that on the weekend of the twenty-fifth anniversary, to a country that has spent a quarter century organizing its politics around the memory of that Tuesday morning, and you find out quickly who needs the wound left open.
None of it is new, which is really the point. MAGA came for his posts about loving the poor last October; the prayer room followed days later. Tom Homan led another round of attacks on him in November, and by New Year’s the online right had settled on a verdict: Leo is more dangerous than Francis ever was.
He called for peace in March and was called a Marxist for it.
In April he told the Chaldean bishops that Christians must never be “on the side of those who yesterday wielded the sword and today launch bombs”, and two days later the president informed the country that Leo owed the papacy to him.
Peter Thiel spent the summer telling an Aspen audience that the pope is working for the Chinese Communists. At the start of this month they came for a prayer about clean water.
All of these fights began with something published under the pope’s name, which is why a comforting theory keeps circulating in Catholic group chats. Some twenty-five-year-old in the Dicastery for Communication is going rogue, the thinking goes, and the Holy Father would never.
Michael J. O’Loughlin, now executive editor of the National Catholic Reporter, wrote the book on this — literally.
The Tweetable Pope, which HarperOne published in 2015 while he was covering the Church for Crux, made the case that the account was doing real catechesis rather than decoration.
Francis, O’Loughlin told Millennial the following winter, had managed “to communicate Church teaching in a wholly refreshing way,” and had been “the most influential global leader on the platform three years in a row, reaching tens of millions of people with just a few keystrokes.”
The account itself dates to December 12, 2012, when Benedict XVI, then 85, sent “Dear friends, I am pleased to get in touch with you through Twitter.”
The mechanics have never been a secret, either. The posts are short extracts from the pope’s own speeches, and those extracts are proposed to him to choose among before anything goes out.
The Vatican’s own communications office wrote of Francis that he “reads the Tweets he is to publish with joy and approves them with great enthusiasm.” That was the arrangement for a decade, under the same dicastery that runs the account today.
Sunday’s post was a transcript. Every word had already been spoken out loud, in English, in front of a crowd in St. Peter’s Square, by the first American pope. No intern improvised any of it.
That is the fact the reply guys cannot metabolize.
They think they are arguing with a communications office. What they actually have on their hands is a pope who keeps saying, in his own voice and under his own name, that vengeance has no place in a Christian’s answer to murder, and who is not going to stop saying it because a few thousand accounts are furious.
Twenty-five years ago, 343 members of the New York City Fire Department went up the staircases everyone else was coming down.
The Church buried a great many of them, and it has spent the quarter century since insisting that their deaths mean something other than a permanent license for our own cruelty.
On Sunday the pope said so again, in four sentences, and the loudest Christians on the internet told him he had it wrong.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with the pope who prayed for the dead of September 11 and got called a coward for it, and with the millions of American Catholics — and countless others of goodwill — who know that praying for peace is not weakness dressed up as piety. It is the hardest thing the Gospel asks of anyone who has been hurt.
Seventy times seven was never a suggestion.
Jesus said it to Peter, the first pope, and Leo XIV repeated it on the weekend an entire country was busy tending its wound. That is what the fury in those replies is really about, because a faith that forgives takes away the one thing authoritarian politics cannot operate without, which is a permanent enemy.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are worn out by a public Christianity that has learned to sound like vengeance. They want the real thing: mercy with a spine, dignity that does not check a passport, courage that shows up at the funeral and then refuses to bless the next war.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a politics that treats forgiveness as surrender — I am asking you to join us.
If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:
Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.
Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.
Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.
Paid members get the full biographical series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, including the Augustinian years that shaped the man who stood up ten days after the towers fell and told his brothers to refuse revenge. They also get our Sunday Scripture Reflection Series and the investigations we can only run because readers pay for them.
Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.
Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
My only comment is that these guys are not really that loud, thankfully. Even at 50k or 800k followers, they represent only a fraction of the numbers to hear or read what the Pope has to say. But I am glad that you are calling them out, regardless. We who have cast our loot with the Truth, and who appreciate the power and authority of Leo's teaching cannot remain silent. We have to speak in our families, in our communities. Thanks for your work.
"There are none so blind as those who will not see."
Who do not WANT to see, as they have their own agenda.
So sad. And so dangerous. And so prevalent.
Let us all pray for our Leo. It is easy to see he is goodness personified.
Guess the world is not used to that?