Fr. Don’s Weekly Letter ~ 28 September 2025

Dear Good People of Saint Bernadette,

As I write this letter it is Monday afternoon and we don’t leave for pilgrimage until Wednesday evening! Please know we will pray for you everywhere we go, and ask that you remember us, too. In case you’re curious about our journey, here is a short itinerary:

Thursday, Sept 25 - arrive Athens (evening)
Friday - Corinth
Saturday - Athens
Sunday - Crete
Monday - Santorini
Tuesday - Ephesus
October 1, Wednesday - Mykonos
Thursday - cruising day
Friday - Philippi
Saturday - Thessaloniki
Sunday - cruising day
Monday - Piraeus to Istanbul
Tuesday - Istanbul
Wednesday - Return to US

Maybe you’d like to do a little research about these fascinating places, many of the stops along the journeys of Saint Paul, and the people to whom he wrote letters.

My brothers and sisters we are living in very strange times. I came across this quote to the left and suggest everybody clip it and put it on your refrigerators.

It has been my experience that people can become hostile at what you say and what you didn’t say. Most days it is better to keep silent. But sometimes you have to say something and must pick your words very carefully.

People in today’s world are just angry. Some people use words to provoke anger in others. So much is said today that is not true, nor kind, nor necessary. But that does not mean humanity turns to killing, even though the words themselves may be flawed.

See how hate can spiral, like a tornado that rolls in and sweeps everyone and everything that isn’t grounded off to places where they never would have gone.

It is time for us to measure our words, to regulate our emotions and just pray. I was speaking with a person this week, so full of anger and threats, even expressing desire to do harm to others. I was at a loss to know what to say. To prepare for this kind of encounter we need to think up some simple, nonthreatening strategies.

When I run across another’s blatant hostility against immigrants, I usually lead with the idea that we are all immigrants. One time this didn’t work, the cancer was deeper than what was immediately visible. The conversation eventually can come around to the reality that we are a nation of immigrants, and immigrants have always been treated like unwanted trash. One group after another. Wouldn’t it be wonderful (and holy) if we did not assign a degree to the extent by which a person is made in the image of God? That every human is equally deserving of those basic human rights which are spoken of in our own Declaration of Independence? All humans...and yet even the signers of the Declaration looked the other way about the enslaved persons they owned.

Before October 7, 2023, I was working with an interfaith group hoping to address what polls showed to be an alarming rise of Islamophobia among members of the Catholic Church. After the attack, any such dialogue was put on hold. But the problem remains. We should do our best to put the mirror up to ourselves when we find (sometimes unexpectedly) cultural vestiges such as Islamophobia and antisemitism in ourselves. Hopefully the example will cause others to stop before they speak words without thinking. Once words have flown, you can’t get them back.

A Jewish theologian from Haifa spoke recently at our Nostra aetate at 60 Conference at Georgetown. She had an interesting perspective. She said that Jews, Muslims and Christians have lived together in the Holy Land for centuries, in peace. (There are neighborhoods around Jerusalem where this has been the case for centuries, such as the neighborhood where John the Baptist was born.) The conflict didn’t start in the Holy Land, she said, until all of the persecution, injustice and inhumanity in the West came home. The Holocaust, she said, was a western reality which shaped the current situation. It takes a long time for that kind of hatred to find peace. And yet we must try to bring peace to all these broken places, trusting that God’s will will result.

The Lord be with you,