9/11, God’s Warning, and the Quarter-Century We Wasted

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 11, 2026

The thing I remember the most is, oddly, the weather. September is usually the most beautiful month of the year in Connecticut. But that particular September 11th, twenty-five years ago today, the day radical Muslim terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 Americans, was one of the most beautiful days I had ever seen. Not a cloud in the sky. Perfect temperature. The was air was crisp, with a cool breeze that felt medicinal on my asthmatic lungs.

In fact, the whole month of September 2001 was like that. The most perfect sunny September I can ever remember. It was as if God was trying to make it up to us. A year later, on the first anniversary of 9/11, Connecticut had this eerie, haunting wind that was everywhere. It was unusually noisy, as if the dead were trying to speak to us.

Some “vibe shifts” following 9/11 were even more short-lived than the ones that gave Trump his historic re-election two years ago. I think the uptick in church attendance in the autumn of 2001 lasted for about six weeks. National unity lasted only so long as President Bush didn’t do anything to offend the Democrats.

But the patriotism? Ah, that lingered. It was a rougher patriotism for what, by the 21st century, was already a rougher country.

In my 1970s and early ‘80s boyhood, we Cub Scouts were taught all the proper ways to honor the American flag. I don’t think anyone taught the same etiquette to the folks who kept those little American flags on the radio antennas of their cars until they were torn and frayed and barely recognizable. But I get it. God bless them for trying.

Likewise, Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” was a song focused almost entirely on vengeance. The lofty principles of the classic patriotic music that I was taught when I was six years old, during the American Bicentennial, were missing. But again, that “There’s a lot of men dead / So we can sleep in peace at night when we lay down our head” is no small thing. I get it.

First Things and Crisis Magazine were the Catholic standard bearers of neoconservatism at the time, before “neoconservative” became a dirty word. They were all-in for the coming wars. From a quarter-century’s hindsight, it’s easy to look back on it with contempt. But not everything they said was wrong. I particularly remember this paragraph from Rod Dreher in the first post-9/11 issue of Crisis:

Is the Church in America ready for the coming war? I fear not. Thirty years of bourgeois therapy and vapid mollycoddling about the teaching of virtue and sacrifice have done their enervating work. A Church that feeds its people with the insipid hymn “On Eagle’s Wings” is not a Church with the courage and will to defend itself and its civilization against renegade Islamists.

Dreher went on to describe the miraculous victory of Christian forces over Muslim invaders at Vienna, in 1683, thusly: “Whatever hymn they sang at that desperate hour, one can be sure it wasn’t Gifts of Finest Wheat.”

Another thing I remember is the different reactions of Catholic and Protestant publishers. For some time after 9/11, the religion sections of bookstores were filled with row upon row of Protestant books attempting to discern the spiritual meaning of 9/11. There was nothing from Catholics. Fr. Benedict Groeschel’s “The Cross at Ground Zero,” a series of talks he gave for EWTN in book form, is the only one I can recall.

But when the Catholic clergy sex-abuse crisis became public a few months after 9/11, Catholic publishers responded with an avalanche of material for several years. That’s important too, of course. But why so little Catholic spiritual writing about 9/11? The discrepancy left me with a sense that Evangelicals are focused on, well, evangelizing, while many Catholics prefer to engage in endless ecclesiastical navel-gazing.

To this day, I don’t think the events of the last quarter-century have received the attention they deserve from writers of Catholic spirituality. I lived the first three decades of my life tucked away in a quiet corner of North America. The history of those years was something you watched on the evening news. But, beginning with 9/11, history started arriving here. And it never really stopped. 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Great Crash of 2008, Covid, and on and on.

From the Old Testament all the way up to Our Lady of Fatima, we have been told that war is sometimes a punishment for our sins. That was my read on 9/11. A shot across the bow from God. Get it together or worse things are coming. If I’m right, then we are in more trouble than we know. Think of all the evils our country has since embraced that did not even exist on 9/11. Same-sex marriage, genital mutilation of children, laws for abortion and against religious liberty more radical than any we had 25 years ago.

Fr. Groeschel said in his book that God allows evil but he wills that the worst not occur. 9/11 could have been worse. Covid could have been worse. Yet each time our nation responded to these chastisements by digging in our heels against God even more and embracing even greater offenses against him. Unless we turn back to him in some major way—a “revival” or “Great Awakening,” as our Protestant friends would say, or, in the language popularized by Pope St. John Paul II, a “New Evangelization” or “New Springtime,” of faith—I don’t think the next quarter of the 21st century is going to end well for us.

I think God has been trying to tell us that for 25 years. Ever since 9/11. And we’re still not listening.