From the Pastor’s Desk:
Congratulations to Chett Johnson, son of Zachary and Jessica Johnson, who was baptized on September 13 at Notre Dame Church!
The pet blessing at Notre Dame went well: 8 dogs, and 1 cockatoo! The St. Bartholomew pet blessing is this Sunday, Sept. 27, at 9:45 a.m. outside the Church. If it is raining, we will have a “drive through pet blessing” in the parking lot: just roll down your window, and holy water will be sprinkled on your pet in your motor vehicle!
As a quarter century has now elapsed since the Sept. 11th attacks, some people wonder what the Church has to say about Islam today. Fr. Raymond J. de Souza addressed some aspects of this in his Sept. 14, 2026 article in the National Catholic Register. Here is the article:
25 Years After 9/11, Where Does the Church Stand With Islam?
COMMENTARY: Pope Benedict’s Regensburg address on the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks remains the fullest theological response.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, where do Catholic-Islamic relations stand?
The problem of Islamist terrorism has certainly not disappeared. It is enough to remember only the beheadings in Libya or the Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka, to say nothing of the ongoing lethal attacks on Christians in Nigeria.
Yet there have also been important developments during the pontificates of both Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis. The question of Islam was central to their papal legacies. Benedict gave a theological response; Francis a fraternal one.
The terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, received their fullest theological response 20 years ago on Sept. 12. Returning to his quondam academic home at Regensburg, Pope Benedict XVI addressed the question of violence in the name of religion.
Benedict argued that the act of faith must be, by its very nature, a free act. To coerce, all the more so with violence, the act of faith was therefore contrary to reason — literally unreasonable. And because God is reasonable, what is contrary to reason is contrary to God.
To coerce faith in God by violence is illogical. The Holy Father traced out how such questions had been worked out in the Christian tradition, and suggested relevant lessons for the world of Islam.
The Regensburg Address provoked a global firestorm at the time — including Islamist violence against Christians — but the Holy Father’s perspicacity and courage led to a genuine breakthrough in Catholic-Islamic relations. Henry Kissinger considered it the most important statement on Islam after 9/11.
Benedict’s analysis and arguments were sufficiently welcome among Islamic leaders that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia made a historic visit to Benedict at the Vatican in 2007, the first-ever such meeting of a pope with the “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques” (Mecca and Medina). It was, in a sense, analogous to the visit of Mikhail Gorbachev to the Vatican in 1989, weeks after the Berlin Wall fell.
As important, dozens of Islamic scholars addressed an open letter to Benedict, specially engaging the points made in the Regensburg Address. What had originally been criticized by some as a reckless papal provocation had sincerely resonated in the Islamic world and produced a genuine theological breakthrough on the question of religious violence.
Building upon the theological clarity of Benedict, Pope Francis then took note of two historic changes in global Islam.
King Abdullah’s visit was a sign of changes to come in Saudi Arabia. The reforms of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have been significant — permitting women to drive, openness to Western trade and tourism, sponsorship of international sports abroad and even hosting WrestleMania at home (with female wrestlers modestly clad).
Saudi Arabia reduced its support for extremist forms of Islam both domestically and through funding overseas. President Donald Trump chose Saudi Arabia as the destination of his first foreign trip in each of his presidential terms (though in 2025 he made a brief prior visit to Rome for the funeral of Pope Francis).
With Benedict having made the theological arguments, and some religious moderation emerging in the Gulf States, Pope Francis made enhancing fraternal relations with Islam a priority of his pontificate, traveling to Egypt (2017), the United Arab Emirates (2019), Iraq (2021) and Indonesia (2024) — the last trip his longest and undertaken in diminished health. Speaking on the first anniversary of his death, Pope Leo XIV chose to highlight those fraternal relations as central to the legacy of Pope Francis.
In Abu Dhabi, Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, signed the Abu Dhabi declaration on “human fraternity for world peace.” Al-Azhar, in Cairo, is the leading center for Islamic scholarship and jurisprudence, making its Grand Imam one of the most important Muslim voices in the world.
Due to some imprecision in theological phrasing — not unusual during the time of Pope Francis — the document created a stir in the Catholic world, which required clarification that it is God’s “permissive will” that permits religious pluralism in history, not his aboriginal intent.
The importance of Abu Dhabi, though, was not that the Pope signed, but that the Grand Imam did, given that he and Al-Azhar have not, to put it delicately, generally regarded Christians and Jews with brotherly affection. It was a worthy attempt by the Holy See to engage with, and elevate, hopeful Muslim developments with the leading scholarly authority in Islam.
The declaration led to the building of the tripartite “Abrahamic Family House” in Abu Dhabi, including places for Jewish, Christian and Muslim worship — an expression of religious pluralism challenging the most extreme interpretations of Islam. An annual prize for leadership in fraternity and pluralism — the Zayed Award — is given each year in Abu Dhabi. The officials associated with the award were received each year by Pope Francis, and last year by Pope Leo as well.
Francis’ 2024 trip to Indonesia highlighted that, far from its Arabian roots, Islam can look quite different. The trip took note of the rise of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) in Indonesia. It is the world’s largest Muslim organization — some 100 million members — in the most populous Muslim-majority country. Indonesian Islam, led by NU, has developed theological resources from within Islam itself to advance a less aggressive, more fraternal face. It has, notably, advocated that “citizenship” — open to all — should be the fundamental civic identity, not distinguishing between Muslims and “infidels.”
When Indonesia hosted the G20 summit in 2022, Nahdlatul Ulama — whose leader speaks favorably of finding guidance in the texts of Vatican II — took the opportunity to convene an “R20” summit of global religious leaders. A keynote speaker and keen supporter was professor Mary Ann Glendon — former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See — who saw the work of the R20 and Nahdlatul Ulama as advancing the project of providing deeper, religious foundations for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The Islamic initiatives of Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis met with some resistance — Benedict in the Islamic world and Francis in the Christian world. The latter was not new; Pope St. John Paul II’s Jewish initiatives also garnered some opposition from those who feared that the singularity of the Catholic faith was being undermined.
That was too anxious a reading. Given the prevalence of Islamist violence — most dramatically evident on 9/11 — it was nevertheless understandable. Yet 25 years later — in large part due to the Regensburg Address of 20 years ago — there are reasons to hope for the emergence of a more fraternal face of Islam.
Saints Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, Archangels, Pray for us. Father Miller