Five Ways – Sep 25

September 30, 2025

First, some joy from children: On the first day of school, about mid-morning, the kindergarten teacher said, “If anyone has to go to the bathroom, hold up two fingers.”  A little voice from the back of the room asked, “How will that help?” 

A four-year-old girl was learning to say the Lord’s Prayer.  She was reciting it all by herself without help from her mother.  She said, “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us some e-mail.  Amen.” (Thanks to Fr. Gloat, Book 2, p. 84).

Secondly, Father Ron Rolheiser, O.M.I., recently explained on Facebook that he will be undergoing more treatment for his colon cancer.  Perhaps two weeks in a San Antonio hospital around Thanksgiving time, doctors are very hopeful that he will die with colon cancer rather than the colon cancer cause his death.  He continues to write his weekly column, which you may find on his website. He appreciates our prayers for him.

Thirdly, Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople has used a new expression to help understand how other religions and Christianity must work together.  “The encounter of the different religious traditions, each one a bearer of a unique experience of the Sacred, becomes the necessary condition for the confrontation of a globalized meaninglessness, for the rearticulation of a discourse that dares to speak of love, compassion, mercy, forgiveness and self-sacrifice not as abstract moral values, but as active elements of a fuller reality.”  The Patriarch emphasizes the need “for common action” (July 29, 2025, Meeting of the World Council of Religions for Peace).

During October, may we pray the rosary for peace, peace especially in the Middle East, remembering the Five Mysteries of Light established by Pope St. John Paul II, especially for Thursdays.

The item attached below, from the Catholic Near East Welfare Association, was published just before President Trump announced his “Twenty Points for Peace in Gaza.”  Let us pray fervently for peace in the Middle East.

Many thanks to those who responded to the Aug. 22, 2025, Five Ways.

Fraternally in Christ,

Fr. Harry Winter, O.M.I.

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