25 Years After 9/11, Where Does the Church Stand With Islam?
National Catholic Register, 14 September 2026
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.
Continue reading at the National Catholic Register.