Fr. Don’s Weekly Letter ~ 23 March 2025

Dear Good People of Saint Bernadette,

Some weeks are easier than others to meet a bulletin deadline with an article. This week I’m struggling. As I write this, the ceasefire in Gaza has ended and escalated destruction is promised. There were another thousand dead and wounded people today as missiles destroy their tent cities. Focused on all the news here, the destruction of the West Bank (what is left of Palestinian territories) is underway, largely overlooked by the news cycle. East Jerusalem and Bethlehem could become another Gaza. Apparently our loyalty to Ukraine is no more after losing nearly 500,000 soldiers, according to U.S. officials. Not to mention the family that each of these Ukrainians and Russians leave behind. It is heartbreaking, all of it.

We have also been praying for people in Sudan, a conflict that I am ashamed to say I knew little about. Sudan is on the other side of Egypt from the Holy Land, to the south. I looked it up. In 2003 there were already a million refugees in Sudan from South Sudan and neighboring countries. Military overthrows by warring factions following an autocratic leader have, in the past five years, displaced 12.5 million people. Last year, complicated by new climate realities, an officially confirmed famine threatens everyone. Half of the population, some 25.6 million people, need assistance and protection and face acute food insecurity, 8.5 million of them at emergency levels. Cholera, measles and malaria are spreading at a time when two thirds of the population do not have access to health care. 90 percent of the country’s 19 million school-age children have no access to education.

These are the places where CRS, Catholic Relief Services, uses our support to help people. Every rice bowl from you makes a difference.

We consider the penance we are doing in Lent as effective for the reparation of our own sins, personally, but our Lenten sacrifices and good works are also efficacious when applied to the sins of the world in a broader sense.

We can apply the grace of our actions for the benefit of others. When I talk about this with my non-Catholic friends they find it a strange concept, because faith for most of the world is just “between me and God.” According to Catholic tradition, you can ask God to use that grace for whomever needs it most. Maybe you can receive Holy Communion and ask that the grace be given to your non-Catholic wife or husband, or a son or daughter who might not be coming to church anymore.

Sometimes you will hear that the Pope has declared a day of fasting for the intention of world peace, or for the sanctity of life. We do not pray for concepts, but to benefit people. Our prayers, fasting and almsgiving may be offered to God for a person who might be able to bring about the change that is needed, or people who might die of hunger today in Sudan. Or they may benefit the Christian and Muslim families who, in the Gaza tragedy, are largely forgotten.

They might be offered for the conversion of heart of the very ones who are causing so much suffering and death.

Consider this for Lent. Take a day each week and fast or pray a little extra, or intentionally offer up your joys and sorrows, your successes and failures, breakthroughs and frustrations for these, the least of our brothers and sisters, as Christ himself clearly explained to us.

Who knows what the general judgment on last day will be like? The Church teaches that it will take place at the end of time, after the resurrection of the dead, when Christ returns to judge the living and the dead, revealing the full consequences of human actions and determining eternal destinies.

Not the particular judgment which every soul will experience at the hour of death, this “universal judgment” is the moment when all people will be judged at the end of time, according to what we did to care for one another and how the consequences of our good or evil deeds have affected the overall virtue of all.

We are responsible for each other, bound together... so let us get going with our prayers, good works and sacrifices for the benefit of those who need the grace we can share to do the right thing.

The Lord be with you.