Bishops across the country issued remarks, reflections, and prayers for the United States and the lives lost in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks 25 years ago.
“Twenty-five years later, its memory lives on; in a new skyline, in simple plaques and great memorials, and in the photographs of first responders who were lost, still displayed outside of firehouses and police stations,” Archbishop Ronald Hicks of New York said in a statement.
“We remember those who died and the extraordinary courage, service, sacrifice, and compassion that followed,” Hicks said.
Hicks will celebrate an invitation-only Vigil Mass on Sept. 10 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to commemorate all those affected by the terrorist attacks. It also will be available via livestream.
The archdiocese reported the Mass will remember those who died as a result of the tragedy and mourn with their loved ones.
In honor of the anniversary, the archdiocese also shared words from Cardinal Edward Egan, who served as New Yorkʼs archbishop in 2001 and died in 2015.
“We will not pretend that words can deal with this adequately. The healing will take time, as it always does,” Egan said. “Still, we insist that the extraordinary goodness of our people has marched alongside the pain and the hurt.”
“Amidst the tragedy, the sadness and the grief, there was this real genuine kindness and fraternal love in the city of New York of all places,” Bishop John Bonnici of Rochester, New York, previously said in an interview with the diocese’s news publication.
“The Lord was able to use people to reach out to others and allow for the healing that was so necessary,” said Bonnici, who served as a priest in New York at the time of the attack.
In the nation’s capital, the faithful also will gather to remember those who died. Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who leads the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA, will celebrate Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., inside its Crypt Church.
The Mass will “honor the brave first responders and members of our Armed Forces who answered the nation’s call in its aftermath, and entrust to the mercy of God all affected by that tragic day,” the basilica reported.
It will be held at the 5:15 p.m. on Sept. 11 and will be livestreamed.
President of U.S. bishops encourages commitment to be ‘instruments of peace’
Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City invited Catholics to join “in prayer for the victims taken from us in acts of unjustifiable violence 25 years ago at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in rural Pennsylvania.”
“In a special way, we lovingly embrace in prayer the victims’ families and friends, who still mourn the irretrievable loss of their loved ones on that day,” said Coakley, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).
“We also remember the first responders and emergency workers, so many who gave their lives in selfless acts of courage,” he said in the statement.
Coakley said that amid the fear and uncertainty following the attacks, “our faith lifted us up and sustained us,” as the nation turned to God in prayer with “a new intensity and a sense of unity.”
“As conflicts intensify around the world, let us renew our commitment to be Christ’s instruments of peace in an increasingly fractured and divided world,” Coakley said.
He echoed Pope Leo XIV, who said peace “is more than just a goal, it is a presence and a journey.”
Bishops offer personal reflections of 9/11 attacks
Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore, who was then the bishop of Bridgeport, Connecticut, reflected on Sept. 11, calling it an “unthinkable morning.”
After learning about the attacks, “I quickly realized that many of my parishioners worked in the World Trade Center,” Lori wrote in an article for the Archdiocese of Baltimore.
“Driven by an urgent need to be with my flock, I arranged to offer Mass at St. Augustine Cathedral in Bridgeport. As the hours unfolded, I also celebrated unannounced, yet well attended, Masses at St. John’s in Stamford and St. Thomas Aquinas in Fairfield.”
Throughout the day, Lori met “incoming trains from New York, simply to stand with commuters emerging dazed and traumatized by what they had witnessed,” he said.
Lori also said he checked local hospitals for burn victims but realized “the vast majority had not survived.”
“What followed was a relentless, agonizing search through the rubble,” Lori said. “As names were identified, the agonizing weeks of funerals began. I sat with spouses, children and parents trying to make sense of the unimaginable.”
“Nearly 3,000 souls perished that day, including 343 firefighters, 72 law enforcement officers and 55 military personnel, followed by thousands more responders whose later illnesses stemmed from their selfless recovery efforts at Ground Zero,” he said.
“To truly honor those we lost and the legendary courage of our first responders, we must never forget,” Lori said. “Let no one believe that terrorism or violence can ever resolve injustice.”
Bishop Frank Caggiano of Bridgeport also recalled his experience and what his community taught him afterward.
“Twenty-five years is long enough for a wound to close into a scar, and long enough for a generation to grow up knowing that morning only as a chapter in a textbook. It is not nearly long enough for the families I serve,” Caggiano said.
“In Fairfield County the loss has never been abstract. Our trains carried neighbors into those towers, and that evening they came back with empty seats,” he said.
“In the years since, I have sat with some of them: parents who lost children, children who were infants then and are grown now, colleagues who still wonder why they were late to work that day,” he said.
Caggiano said they have taught him numerous lessons, including “that resilience is not the same thing as moving on” and “that fear must not be allowed to govern us.”
“The third lesson is the hardest, and I offer it carefully,” Caggiano said. “It is mercy.”
“It is not forgetting, excusing, or indifference to justice. Justice without mercy becomes vengeance, and mercy without justice becomes indulgence. Forgiveness begins with a full acknowledgment of the wound and then refuses to let that wound dictate the rest of a life,” he said.
“It is not a feeling that arrives one morning but a deliberate decision, sometimes one that must be made again and again over years,” he said.
Ukrainian Catholic bishops: ‘What is the legacy of September 11?’
The Ukrainian Catholic Bishops of the United States issued a pastoral letter about the attack and the legacy it left.
The bishops said Christians must do more than remember. They asked: “What is the legacy of September 11? What have we learned? What can that terrible day teach us today?”
The tragedy “confronts us with the terrible reality of the capacity of fallen humanity for evil,” they said. “When hatred is allowed to take possession of the human heart, when another person is no longer seen as a child of God but as an enemy to be destroyed, the consequences can be horrifying.”
Sept. 11 also revealed “an even greater capacity for goodness, courage, compassion, sacrifice and love,” the bishops wrote.
“We saw strangers helping strangers. We saw firefighters climbing stairways toward almost certain death. We saw ordinary people performing extraordinary acts of courage. We saw communities opening their doors, people donating blood, churches filling with worshippers, and a nation and the entire world coming together in grief and solidarity,” he said.
“Even in the midst of tragedy, God gives us opportunities to become instruments of His love,” they said.
The bishops concluded with the words of St. Paul: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
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