Healing Is Not Passive: The Spiritual Labor of Remembrance After 9/11

Twenty-five years after the towers fell, the sanctuary of St. Patrick’s Cathedral filled with the sound of pipes and drums — not triumph, but lament. About 2,000 clergy and laypeople gathered for a vigil Mass on Sept. 10, where Archbishop Ronald A. Hicks presided over his first 9/11 memorial Mass as New York’s archbishop, concelebrated by Bishop Robert J. Brennan of Brooklyn.

Hicks’s homily pressed beyond ceremony into obligation. “Faith does not allow us to stop at remembrance,” he said. “Because one of the lessons we have learned over the last 25 years is that healing is not passive. Healing does not just happen. Peace does not just happen. Justice does not just happen. Unity does not just happen. We have to work for it.”

It is a distinctly biblical claim: that grace is freely given, yet its fruits must be tended. The Mass honored not only those lost on that September morning but those claimed in the years since by related illness — a reminder that grief keeps its own long calendar.