Fr. Don’s Weekly Letter ~ 16 November 2025

Dear Good People of Saint Bernadette,

As you know, I often muse about what sticks in my head from week to week. This week I continue to reflect on a conference I attended this past week at Georgetown University, entitled “Nostra aetate and Muslim-Catholic Relations.” This is what is in my mind.

I’ve written about Nostra aetate before. This was the apostolic constitution that was prepared for the second Vatican Council in the 1960s about the relationship between the Church and people who are unbaptized. It clearly proclaims that we do not reject anything that is consistent with the teachings of Jesus when they are found in other religions, even if they are unaware that this connection exists. All people are made in God’s own image and likeness - not just Catholics - and it is our job to find Jesus in them whether they know him or not, and honor them with reverence. The respect we hold for them as sisters and brothers will bring the healing so badly needed in our world today.

Well, this conference was, for me, a revelation. A professor at Notre Dame, Ebrahim Moosa, gave a talk that might have been the most moving talk I have ever heard. Some of it was hard for my western ears to hear.

He began with the concepts of dignity, justice and peace. He quoted the Qu’ran, surah 2.62: “And the Christians and the Sabians, any who believe in Allah and the Last Day, and work righteousness, shall have their reward, with the Lord: on them shall be no fear, for shall they grieve.”

Allah, by the way, is the all merciful God who, same as the God of Israel, was the author of life and truth.

This is what Dr. Moosa spoke: The Catholic document Nostra aetate was the Catholic Church’s badly-needed response to the Shoah, the great holocaust of the Jewish people in World War II which was the result of centuries of antisemitism. The Catholic Church had an obligation not to remain silent in the face of such hatred.

Both Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV have described the current global situation as a series of interconnected, localized conflicts that constitute a single, all-out war.They call it “the third world war fought piecemeal.”

Regional rivalries yield global indifference, he says, even assistance. Think about Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan. Life is lost regardless of nation or creed.

Dr. Moosa continues. This “post-war humanitarianism” allows the rest of the world to change moral obligation into sentimentality. Suffering, into moral spectacle. Prophetic justice into redemptive pity, declaring evil to being limited to the past, not today. “How terrible,” we say, but nothing is done.

Post-war humanitarianism de-politicizes outrage. Justice is reduced to empathy; history, to therapy. Do we consider what structures of power still allow this injustice?

True dialogue, he says, cannot be impersonal politeness. We cannot simply co-exist without compromise.

Dr. Moosa continued with an explanation of the Muslim understanding of God which is different. He said for Christians, God is love. For Muslims, God is mercy. Love follows obedience: love is the fruit of discipline, not the starting point.

When confronted with global migration, economic instability, planetary fragility — the moral force must speak justice, which has inevitable impact on reality.

He ended with a quote of Pope Francis in Fratelli tutti with regard of the state of the world today. Don’t miss the remarkable witness he gives, Muslims in a precarious relationship Jews and antisemitism. Pope Francis says, “Pray for the grace to be ashamed of what we have done.” Do not underestimate the abyss of evil at the heart of war.

This was the seminal message of Vatican II, the role of the Church in the world. People of faith must live the faith. This was the lens of social justice teaching with Pope Leo XIII, probably the reason that our beloved pope took the same name as Leo XIV. Dialogue cannot be marginal nicety. Faith and love are performative. It must be a dialogue of ACTION. In the end, belief and worship are good, but not enough. Our internal conversion must become the light of the world.

The Lord be with you,