Published September 9, 2026
Several weeks after Islamist terrorists hijacked four planes, wreaking havoc in lower Manhattan and at the Pentagon in the name of deranged religious convictions, I was at dinner in the papal apartment with John Paul II and three of his closest associates.
The mood was somber, which was unusual at that table. The Pope’s hope for a “new springtime of the human spirit” in the wake of the bloody 20th century, which he had proclaimed at the United Nations in 1995, seemed to have been thwarted. And a country he had come to love and appreciate, the United States, had been deeply wounded. So an hour’s conversation revolved around what this all meant — a question John Paul put to me directly.
Here is what I replied, as recounted in Lessons in Hope: My Unexpected Life with St. John Paul II:
“I said I thought it was a turning-point in world history; an example of the mystery of evil at work through the corruption of an already defective monotheism; a possible moment of moral sobering-up in the U.S.; and a very complex mess from a strategic and international-political point of view. All of this, I continued, was a moral challenge as well as a political challenge: and while the first duty of a responsible government was the security of its citizens, President Bush’s September 20 speech indicated that American military action against al-Qaeda and its Taliban facilitators would be conducted according to just-war principles and not as a matter of vendetta or revenge. It was essential for everyone to understand that what was at stake here was not simply the security of the United States but the very possibility of any world “order.” I also pointed out that Osama bin Laden was a very rich man and that it didn’t help clarify what we were all facing when it was said that terrorism was the product of poverty — the line being taken at the U.N. by Archbishop Renato Martino, the Holy See’s permanent representative.“
How does that analysis stand up, 25 years later?
George Weigel is a Distinguished Senior Fellow the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Catholic Studies Program. A Catholic theologian and New York Times bestselling author, he is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on the Catholic Church and one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He served as president of EPPC from 1989-1996.
