OSV News photo/Evan Vucci, Reuters

This September marks 25 years since the morning the sky over three American cities filled with smoke, and the world as we knew it changed in the span of an hour.

Twenty‑five years is long enough that someone born on Sept. 11, 2001, has since grown up, entered a career and perhaps started a family of their own. It is long enough that many students—filling our Catholic school classrooms this fall—have no personal memory of that day at all. And yet 25 years is not nearly long enough to dull the ache still carried by those who lost a spouse, a parent, a child, a friend, or a fellow firefighter, police officer or first responder on that fatal Tuesday morning. 

I remember where I was on Sept. 11, 2001. Most of us who lived through it do. We remember the stillness of the grounded planes, the improvised memorials of flowers and photographs, the long lines to donate blood and the churches that filled—not just on the following Sunday, but on ordinary weekdays—with people who suddenly needed to pray. Fear drove some of that. But something else drove it too: a recognition, however brief, that we belong to one another, and that love is stronger than the hatred that had just been unleashed against us. 

September 11 taught us, in the cruelest way possible, how fragile life truly is. An ordinary Tuesday morning—coffee poured, children dropped at school, briefcases carried onto planes and into office towers—became, without warning, the last morning nearly 3,000 people would ever know. We are not owed tomorrow. That is a hard truth, but it is also, strangely, a gift, because it teaches us not to waste the days we are given, and not to let love go unspoken to the people beside us. 

That day also revealed, with unforgettable clarity, the cost that others pay so that the rest of us can live in safety. Three hundred forty‑three firefighters. Sixty law enforcement officers. Emergency medical technicians and Port Authority officers who ran up the stairwells while others were running down. We honor them each September, and rightly so—but I wonder how often, in the ordinary months between anniversaries, we take for granted the men and women who still answer that same call today: the police officer on patrol in the early hours of the morning, the firefighter trying to get some sleep at the station waiting for the alarm, the soldier deployed far from home. Their willingness to place their lives between danger and the rest of us did not end in 2001. It is a daily sacrifice, and it deserves much more than an annual moment of gratitude. 

Scripture gives us the language for a day like this one. St. Paul assures the Romans that nothing in all of creation is able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. I have returned to that assurance many times over the years, not because it makes the grief disappear, but because it refuses to let grief have the final word. The evil done on September 11 was real. The suffering it caused—the nearly 3,000 who died that day, and the first responders and survivors who died in the years since from illnesses tied to their exposure at Ground Zero—is real. But so is the promise that love does not end at the grave. 

St. John Paul II, addressing pilgrims just days after the attacks, called on the faithful to resist the temptation toward hatred and instead to become, in his words, artisans of peace. That charge has aged well. A quarter century on, we have watched what happens when nations answer violence with more violence, and we have watched, too, what happens when ordinary people—first responders running toward danger, neighbors sheltering strangers, communities of every faith standing shoulder to shoulder at candlelight vigils—answer violence with courage and with love. Both responses are still available to us today. The anniversary asks us, again, to choose. 

A silver jubilee of grief and grace 

I have not forgotten how, for a brief season after the attacks, our divisions seemed to fall away. Strangers helped strangers out of the wreckage and off the island of Manhattan by boat. Flags appeared on porches in every kind of neighborhood. Congregations of every faith—and no faith at all—gathered to pray, sometimes for the first time in years, simply because grief had made us need one another again. A nation that so often quarrels over much lesser things stood, for a while, genuinely united in mourning. That unity was forged in sorrow, and I do not wish sorrow on anyone. But I do wish we could recover what it taught us without having to relearn it through tragedy. Forgetting is the real danger now—not forgetting the names or the dates, which are carved in granite and steel, but forgetting the debt we owe to those who died and forgetting how quickly we can lose the solidarity that suffering, for a moment, gave us. 

Here in the Archdiocese of Atlanta, so many of our parishes carry their own quiet threads back to that day: firefighters and police officers in our pews who serve because of what they witnessed as young recruits; families who moved south afterward, carrying New York or Washington or Shanksville in their hearts; children, now grown, who were baptized in the weeks after 9/11 as their parents clung to hope for the future in the middle of grief.  

We do not forget our dead. We commend them to God, and we ask their intercession for a world still very much in need of peace. 

I think often of the words inscribed at the National September 11 Memorial, drawn from Virgil’s “The Aeneid,” promising that no day will erase the fallen from the memory of time. That is a pagan poet’s promise, and a true one, but our faith makes an even bolder claim. It is not only that we will remember. It is that God remembers—that every name lost that day is known and held by the One who numbers even the hairs of our heads, and that the mercy of Christ reaches even into the ashes of Ground Zero, the wreckage of the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania field where 40 passengers and crew chose, in their final minutes, to fight rather than surrender their fellow citizens to greater harm. 

Twenty‑five years is a jubilee number in our tradition—a time appointed for remembrance, for reckoning and for renewed hope. As we mark this silver jubilee of grief and grace, let us pray: for the dead, that they may rest in the peace they were denied that morning; for those who still mourn them, that their grief may soften into hope; for the first responders who continue to suffer the day’s long aftermath, in body and in memory; and for ourselves, that we may have the grace to be, in our own generation, the artisans of peace the Holy Father asked us to become. 

May God console the grieving, honor the fallen, and make of our remembering not a wound reopened, but a seed of the peace the world still awaits.