The Theology of Remembering: Twenty-Five Years After September 11

Twenty-five years after September 11, 2001, the world remembers an act of terror. But for those who lived through it, remembrance is not merely historical. It is personal, communal, and—ultimately—theological.

Twenty-five years have passed since September 11, 2001.

A quarter of a century is long enough for a generation to be born that knows the attacks primarily through photographs, documentaries, textbooks, and the solemn repetition of a date. For many, September 11th is history. For those of us who remember that morning, however, it is something else entirely.

It is a memory held in the body.

I still remember the tears my mum shed when she asked me to go to the church service that would be held in town. I remember the particular gravity in her voice—not the ordinary concern of a parent, but the unmistakable recognition that something had happened which had altered the world beyond our ability to comprehend it.

We lived beside Red Stewart Airfield. In the bewildering hours after the attacks, the proximity of an airfield suddenly carried a meaning it never had before. The ordinary sounds and rhythms of aviation that we typically heard were transformed by fear and silence. My mum made me sleep close to her that night, much like the families of Flight 93's passengers would have known the terror of an aircraft becoming an instrument of destruction.

I was seven years old.

At school, the adults were trying to maintain an impossible balance: protecting children from fear while attempting to explain a world that had suddenly become terrifying. The principal and administrative staff ran through the halls, calling to our teachers to turn on the televisions because the school was going into lockdown.

The telephones in the secretary's office rang almost without interruption. Again and again came the same refrain: No, this isn't a normal day, and we are trying our best to keep it as normal as we can for these kids.

But there was no normal to return to.

My first-grade teacher, Mrs. Muterspaw, had the impossible task of explaining terrorism and death to a room full of seven-year-olds. We watched the television as the second plane struck the second tower. There are moments in childhood when one does not yet possess the vocabulary to understand what one has witnessed, but one understands that the adults are afraid.

That was one of those moments.

Some of my friends were separated from their parents for days. Their mothers and fathers worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, one of the nation's major military installations, which was placed on lockdown. My classmates stayed with one another while they waited for their parents to come home.

And so, in a tiny Ohio community, September 11th arrived not as an abstraction but as a rupture.

The attacks occurred in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. Yet their psychological and spiritual shock traveled thousands of miles. It entered classrooms, kitchens, churches, military bases, airports, and bedrooms. It entered the consciousness of children who could not have explained geopolitics but knew that something terrible had happened and that the adults they trusted did not have answers.

That day hit my tiny hometown with a fear that you do not simply shrug off.

Memory as a Moral Act

Twenty-five years later, the Christian question is not merely whether we remember September 11th. It is how we remember it.

For Catholic theology, memory is never an insignificant exercise. The Christian faith itself is structured around remembrance.

At the heart of the liturgical life of the Church is the command of Christ: "Do this in memory of me." Christian remembrance is not passive nostalgia. It is an act by which the past is brought into the moral and spiritual present.

The Church remembers Christ's Passion not because Christians are fascinated by suffering, but because remembering rightly reveals something about God, humanity, sin, sacrifice, mercy, and redemption.

This provides an important theological framework for remembering September 11th.

We must remember the dead without reducing them to numbers. We must remember the wounded without allowing their suffering to become merely a historical statistic. We must remember the families who waited for loved ones who would never return. We must remember the children who watched television screens they were too young to understand. We must remember the first responders, military personnel, medical workers, teachers, clergy, parents, and communities who carried the consequences of that day long after the buildings fell.

To remember is to affirm that these lives mattered.

The Catholic doctrine of the dignity of the human person provides no room for treating human beings as expendable instruments in an ideological struggle. Every person bears the imago Dei—the image of God. No political grievance, religious distortion, historical grievance, or ideological cause can erase that dignity.

The victims of September 11th were not symbols.

They were persons.

They were someone's mother or father, someone's child, someone's spouse, someone's friend. They had ordinary mornings, unfinished conversations, plans for the evening, birthdays yet to celebrate, and people waiting for them to come home.

Remembering them as persons is itself an act of resistance against the dehumanization that made their murder possible.

The Sin of Turning Fear Into Hatred

Yet Catholic remembrance demands something more difficult than mourning.

It demands moral clarity without surrendering to hatred.

The temptation after violence is to permit fear to become contempt, and contempt to become vengeance. Human beings understandably want the scales of justice restored when innocence has been violated. But Christianity distinguishes justice from vengeance.

The Catholic tradition does not ask us to pretend that evil is anything other than evil. Terrorism is evil. The deliberate killing of innocent human beings is evil. The exploitation of religion to sanctify murder is a profound corruption of religion itself.

But Christian moral reasoning cannot end with the identification of evil. It must also ask what kind of people we become in responding to it.

Christ's command to love one's enemies does not abolish justice. Nor does forgiveness require indifference toward evil. Rather, it prevents the human heart from becoming captive to the very logic of dehumanization it condemns.

This is one of the most difficult lessons of the Christian life: we can condemn an act without learning to despise an entire people. We can pursue justice without worshiping vengeance. We can defend the innocent without abandoning the universal dignity of the human person.

The Cross itself reveals this paradox.

Christianity does not teach that suffering is good. It teaches that God can enter suffering without being conquered by it.

That distinction matters enormously when remembering September 11th.

Providence Without Easy Answers

There is another theological temptation we must resist: the desire to explain suffering too quickly.

In the years following September 11th, countless attempts were made to explain why such a tragedy occurred. But Christianity should make us cautious about claiming certainty concerning God's purposes in the face of catastrophic suffering.

The Book of Job offers perhaps the clearest biblical warning against simplistic explanations. Job's friends attempt to explain his suffering through neat theological formulas. They are ultimately rebuked. Their failure is not that they take suffering seriously, but that they presume to possess an explanation for God's providence that they do not have.

Twenty-five years later, I do not believe we honor September 11th by forcing it into a tidy theological narrative.

There are questions for which we may never have satisfactory answers.

Why did one person survive while another died? Why did one family receive a phone call while another waited in silence? Why were some children reunited with their parents while others were not? Why did some communities experience the attacks directly while others, like my own, encountered them through the strange and terrifying proximity of an airfield and a nearby military installation?

Christian faith does not require us to pretend that these mysteries have simple solutions.

It gives us something else.

It gives us permission to lament.

The Church as a Place to Bring Fear

I think often of that church service.

At seven years old, I could not have articulated what the Church was doing by gathering people together in the aftermath of catastrophe. Today, I understand it differently.

The Church was doing what she has always done when human beings encounter suffering that exceeds their capacity to carry alone: she was gathering the wounded into the presence of God.

The Catholic tradition possesses an extraordinary language for grief. We have prayers for the dead, prayers for the dying, prayers for those who mourn, prayers for peace, prayers for mercy, and prayers for those whose hearts have been broken by violence.

We bring our incomprehension to the altar.

We bring our anger. We bring our fear.

We bring the names of the dead.

And we trust that God receives what we cannot adequately express.

This is why the Church's ministry of remembrance matters. Memory becomes an act of communion. The dead are not forgotten, and the living are reminded that they do not suffer alone.

In the Mass, the Church continually proclaims that death does not have the final word.

Not because death is unreal.

But because Christ has entered death and emerged victorious.

Twenty-Five Years Later

The children who watched the towers fall are now adults.

Some have children of their own.

The world they inhabit is profoundly different from the world that existed on September 10, 2001. Security procedures, military policy, international relations, technology, travel, public discourse, and American consciousness were all transformed one mere day later on September 11th.

But beneath the historical changes is something more intimate.

There are people who still remember the sound of a parent's frightened voice.

There are people who remember empty chairs.

There are people who remember waiting for a parent stationed at Wright-Patterson to come home.

There are people who remember classrooms suddenly becoming places of crisis management.

There are people who remember teachers attempting to explain death to children who had only recently learned how to read.

There are people who remember going to church at noon because their parents knew, instinctively, that when the world becomes frightening, human beings need somewhere to place their fear.

And there are people who remember sleeping beside their mothers because an airfield next door no longer seemed ordinary.

Twenty-five years later, I still remember.

I remember because those memories belong to the moral history of my life. I remember because the seven-year-old child who watched that television screen deserves to have her fear acknowledged rather than dismissed. I remember because my friends deserved to see their parents come home. I remember because somewhere, at that same moment, thousands of families were discovering that they would never again hear a loved one's voice.

And I remember because Christianity teaches that remembrance can be an act of love.

Memory, Mercy, and the Hope of Resurrection

The Catholic answer to September 11 cannot simply be never forget.

It must be something deeper:

Remember, and pray.

Remember the dead. Pray for their souls.

Remember the families who mourned. Pray for those whose grief has never entirely disappeared.

Remember the first responders and all who sacrificed themselves for others. Pray for those who continue to bear the consequences of violence.

Remember the Resurrection. And believe that death is not the end.

Twenty-five years after September 11, the Church continues to proclaim the ancient Christian hope: "Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them."

This prayer does not erase history. It does not minimize suffering. It does not offer a cheap explanation for tragedy.

It does something more profound. It places the dead into the hands of God.

And perhaps that is what faithful remembrance ultimately means: refusing both to forget and to despair.

We remember because love remembers. We mourn because human life possesses immeasurable dignity. We pray because there are wounds no human institution can completely heal.

And we hope because the Christian story does not end with a collapsing tower, an extinguished life, or a frightened child watching a television screen.

It ends with resurrection.

Twenty-five years later, I still think about me as that little girl.

She did not understand terrorism.

She did not understand geopolitics.

She did not understand why adults were crying, why the phones would not stop ringing, why the school had suddenly gone into lockdown, or why her teacher had to explain death to a room full of seven-year-olds.

But she understood one thing.

The world had become frightening. And so her mother brought her close.

The Church gathered at noon. And for a moment, in the midst of a frightened world, people prayed. Perhaps that is where our remembrance should begin; and where it should end.

Not with hatred. Not with vengeance.

But with the solemn recognition that every human life is sacred, every innocent death demands remembrance, every wound deserves compassion, and even in the darkest history humanity has written, Christians are called to keep faith with the light of Christ.

"Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."

Twenty-five years later, we remember. And we pray.

And we refuse to forget.