Friday, September 11, 2026: 9/11 Remembrance at 

St. Patrick's Cathedral: 

Written by Christopher Hale

From: Letters from Leo — the American Pope & US Politics

Biden, Mamdani, and Hochul Join Archbishop Hicks’s 9/11 Mass. Trump and Vance Decline. The White House declined the invitation from Pope Leo XIV’s new archbishop of New York. I interviewed both Mamdani and Biden, who told me his health is doing well.

To read the full article please use this link:

https://open.substack.com/pub/lettersfromleo/p/biden-mamdani-and-hochul-join-archbishop?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Sep 10, 2026

Archbishop Ronald Hicks most impressive move on Thursday came before a word of the homily was spoken. He invited a Muslim mayor whom a Catholic pressure group wanted barred from the building, a Catholic former president, a Catholic governor, and the Republican president and vice president, and he put no conditions on any of them.

When he arrived in New York, he told this city that the Church is “not a country club,” and on St. Patrick’s Day he showed what that meant for immigrants. The guest list on Thursday extended the same welcome to politicians, including the two who said no.

It’s disappointing, but not surprising, that the White House turned him down for this opportunity to show a unified country.

Sitting in that pew, watching the mayor, the governor, and a former president bow their heads under the same roof as the widows of firefighters, I was thankful for the three who came. It was a deeply moving evening, and I will not soon forget it.

Before Mass I caught up with Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who came at the archbishop’s personal invitation, and asked him what he wanted to say to Catholic New York on this anniversary.

He answered with a message for Catholics here and across the country: “We can never say thank you enough to the Catholic community that … in this city’s darkest ever day, showed so much of the light that kept New Yorkers moving forward.”

Then Joe Biden walked in. When the former president made his surprise appearance, the congregation broke into loud applause, a sound you rarely hear inside that building. He took his place beside Governor Kathy Hochul and the mayor, and the three of them looked at home together, trading words before the procession and again at the sign of peace.

The most endearing scene of the night came at Communion, when the three knelt side by side; the governor and the former president flanking the thirty-four-year-old mayor looked for all the world like a mom and dad with their boy in his First Communion suit.

The archbishop preached on hope. He opened with what New York built after the towers fell: the human-service organizations, the rebuilt Trade Center, the museum, the foundations, the prayer that crossed every religious line.

He turned next to what has never healed. A tragedy of this magnitude never completely disappears, he said; there are still tears and unanswered questions, and there are families who carry the physical and emotional effects of that day a quarter century later. “Healing takes time,” he told them, “but hope is eternal.”

He was careful with the word. “Hope is not optimism,” he said. Optimism promises that tomorrow will be a better day, and Hicks allowed that optimism is a fine thing, but hope in his telling is about today, the knowledge that God is walking with us in good times and bad, and that God will not leave. That hope, he said, is the one that leads to eternal life.

The ask followed. Since arriving in New York, Hicks said, he has been struck by who fills this cathedral whenever the city gathers here: rabbis, imams, Protestant ministers, people of every faith and every walk of life, who “stand together, pray together, listen together, and seek the common good together.”

One of the lessons of September 11, he said, is that “we need each other,” and he called on the faithful to see one another first as brothers and sisters made in the image and likeness of God, across every line of religion and nationality. Bridge-building is never finished, he added; it takes intention and humility, and it belongs to the healing itself.

He pointed the congregation to the back of the cathedral, where Adam Cvijanovic’s mural “What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding,” unveiled last September, rises over the doors in gold leaf: immigrants past and present on its outer panels, saints and civic leaders on another, and, beneath an angel, the first responders. People who find a face they know on that wall stop in front of it, he said, and those faces still give the city hope.