Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen and the Mission of the Church, 2025 Engage Virtual Summit, October 21, 2025

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
2025 Engage Virtual Summit
Dedicated to the theme “Made for Mission”
October 21, 2025

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This recorded talk was based on this text: 

• I’m Msgr. Roger Landry, National Director of TPMS. Honored to participate in the 2025 Engage Virtual Summit dedicated to the theme “Made for Mission.”
• We’re all made for mission because we’ve been made in the image and likeness of God. Within the Trinity, we have two missions: the mission of the Word sent by the Father and of the Holy Spirit sent by the Father and the Son.
• Our mission is a participation in and continuation of their mission and it’s meant to bring us ultimately into the inner life of the Trinity.
• We receive that mission in baptism.
• It’s strengthened when we receive the Holy Spirit in our own personal Pentecost of Confirmation.
• It is intensified every Mass when, having heard the Word of God and received the Word made flesh, we are sent out. The very words that conclude the Mass, Ite Missa Est remind us of that mission. Go, the Church has been sent. Or in English, “Go and announce the Gospel of the Lord.”
• We are made for mission. The Church is made for mission. As the Popes remind us, the Church doesn’t have a mission, but is a mission. You and I are a mission. Pope Francis hoped we would all recognize that the reason why we’re on earth is for mission.
• Jesus, the great missionary of God the Father, discussed this mission in the Gospel.
• When he came to the Synagogue of Nazareth, he said that the Spirit was upon him because he was sent to proclaim the Gospel to the poor.
• When he began calling his first followers, St. Mark tells us that it was so that they could be with him and so that he could send them out.
• He sent out the 12. He then sent out the 72.
• During the Last Supper, he said to God the Father, “As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.”
• After the Resurrection, he said, “Just as the Father sent me, so I send you.”
• At his Ascension, he said, “Go and make disciples of all nations” and “Go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature.”
• We are made for mission. Not just any mission. But the continuation of Christ’s mission for the salvation of the world.
• On Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came down as tongues of fire to help us proclaim the Gospel with ardent love.
• We are to become joint witnesses, together with the Holy Spirit.
• Someone I want to feature is the Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. He was my predecessor as National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies for 16 years, between 1950-1966. His whole life was about sharing the faith. He even gave us the royalties for his books and radio addresses and left 40 percent of all he owned to continue the work of the Missions.
• He teaches us very valuable lessons about the way we’re called to carry out our mission of sharing Christ with others.
• FIRST, he shows us the importance of using all the means at our disposal.
  • He used the classroom as a university professor at Catholic University.
  • He used newspaper and magazines, writing thousands of columns for decades that were must reads.
  • He used books, writing 73 books.
  • He used radio as soon as it was born and built “The Catholic Hour,” one of the most popular radio programs of his age, with a weekly audience of four million, every Sunday night on NBC for 20 years.
  • He used television as soon as it was born and had two highly rated television series, “Life is Worth Living” (1952-57) in black and white and “The Fulton Sheen Program” (1968) in color. He twice won Emmy Awards. With the first program he went head-to-head on Tuesday nights against Milton Berle and Frank Sinatra and beat them both in the ratings. He would draw 30 million a week, including many non-Catholics.
  • He was involved in the first live broadcasts of the Mass, giving voice over commentary.
  • He used cassette tapes recording so many retreats and programs for OCIA.
  • He died in 1979, before the rise of the information age and the possibility of things like emails, websites, social media, youtube videos and more, but he would clearly have used these means intelligently for the Gospel.
  • As would have St. Paul, St. Francis Xavier and the greatest missionaries in history.
• SECOND, he shows us a burning zeal to bring people to Jesus.
  • He was one of the great convert makers in US history, personally preparing scores for baptism and reception into the Church, including Jews, Protestants, communists, ambassadors, celebrities, simple people and more. He would make the time to care for each one, about 25 hours of instruction one by one, going over the same material time and again taking people’s questions. With all the rest he was doing to cast the nets into vast oceans, he never forgot how to fish with his rod, and not only help people become Catholic but really good Catholics. He prioritized instruction. Just like Jesus would leave the 99 to go after the one lost sheep, so he would leave the 30 million viewers behind in order to care for the one whom Christ was calling.
• THIRD, he had a clear strategy of how of the content of the mission.
  • He said it was to have one foot in the fonts of the faith and the other in the daily newspaper. He wanted to show that Christ was the answer to the questions people had, the light for the darkness that plagued the world, the salt that the world needed to preserve and flavor all that God had provided. He had one ear listening to the Lord and the other ear listening to the questions and cries of God’s people. That’s part of the mission in every age.
• FOURTH,
  • He never forgot the primacy of the Church’s mission to all the nations. He knew that there were vast multitudes who had never yet heard the Gospel and he poured himself out to help them and to inspire American Catholics to take the missions seriously.
  • One of the noteworthy aspects of our age is that everybody now uses the word “mission.” Even totally secular businesses and non-profits have “mission statements.” Parishes have Lenten missions meant to strengthen the faith fundamentally of those already coming to the parish. We have FOCUS missionaries and NET missionaries even on faithfully Catholic campuses.
  • There’s of course something good here. If the Church is a mission, if you and I are a mission on earth, then everything we do is meant to flow from our identity as missionaries. It’s therefore fitting to integrate everything into this mission.
  • But the downside of calling almost everything a mission is that we lose the distinctiveness of the Church’s, and our, mission proper. That’s the mission to all the nations, what the Church calls the missio ad gentes.
  • Archbishop Sheen was always attentive to this important distinction. The work he was doing to prepare converts wasn’t enough. The work he was doing to strengthen the faith of American Catholics through radio and television, books and articles, wasn’t enough. He never lost sight of those who had never yet heard the name of Jesus, those who had not yet met him and had their life forever changed because of him.
  • That’s why he raised tens of millions of dollars to support the Church’s missionary territories and dioceses in Africa, in Asia, in Oceania, and in Latin America.
  • That’s why he traveled there frequently visiting remote villages and leper colonies and places where the Church was too young, too poor, or too persecuted to be self-sustaining.
  • Today, we who are made for mission cannot forget the missions proper either.
  • It’s a shocking reality that 2000 years after Jesus Christ ascended, 5.5 of the 8.0 billion people on earth still are not Christian. 80 percent of those 5.5 billion don’t really even know who Jesus is.
  • Once St. Therese of the Child Jesus, the co-patronness of the missions to all nations, was asked by one of her spiritually adopted priest missionary brothers in Africa how it was possible, then almost 19 centuries after Christ’s birth, that so many people did not yet know him. And St. Therese, with the simplicity and clarity that made her a doctor of the Church even though she had never attended high school, said that it was because of the lack of concern, lack of faith, and even laziness of Christians. If we and our immediate family members and friends are Catholics, if we and they are practicing the faith, then we’re at peace, even if vast multitudes still haven’t received the incredible spiritual gifts we, through no merit of our own, have received.
• St. John Paul II, whose feast day is October 22 during our Virtual Summit, wrote to priests in his beautiful 1990 exhortation The Mission of the Redeemer that everything in Church life is meant to flow from the mission to all nations.
• He said, “Without the mission ad gentes, the Church’s very missionary dimension would be deprived of its essential meaning and of the very activity that exemplifies it.” In other words, unless we get the mission to the whole world right, unless we’re passionate about proclaiming the Gospel to all nations — including Saudi Arabia, including Israel, including Antarctica — every other mission in the Church will be negatively impacted because it will lose its reason to be.
• It’s important that we unpack that.
• St. John Paul II said the Church has three sometimes overlapping tasks of evangelization.
  • One is what he called “new evangelization,” which means to re-propose the Gospel to those who have previously heard it, perhaps even lived it, but who have wandered from the practice of the faith and fidelity to their baptism. This is a very important work in the United States, for example, when 10 percent of the population is ex-Catholic and of the 24 percent of the population that is Catholic, only about quarter actually practice the faith by coming, for example, to Sunday Mass. They’ve either drifted away from the faith or chosen to give up practice. But we are sent out to them like to the lost sheep to try to invite them, urge them, and help them return home. This is called the new evangelization, trying to help the seeds of the Gospel bloom once more in those who have been baptized and perhaps practiced the faith for a time.
  • The second task of evangelization, St. John Paul II said, is the “pastoral care of the faithful.” By these he means helping practicing Catholics grow in faith. This is what happens in catechesis, in adult faith formation, what’s supposed to happen in the preaching at Mass, the advice given in confession, the various apostolates that happen in parishes, movements, religious orders and Dioceses. We can’t take this for granted. As Sheen said, there are no plateaus in the spiritual life. We’re either going uphill or we’re sliding downhill.
  • The third and most fundamental aspect of evangelization, St. John Paul II said, is the missio ad gentes, the proclamation of the Gospel, the bringing of Christ, to the nations, to all those who have not yet encountered him. This is what can get overlooked sometimes even by good Catholics. They focus so much on their own individual spiritual life or on strengthening their parish that they forget about the 5.5 billion in the world who don’t know Jesus, or about all those who have become recent Catholics in the missionary territories of the world, some of whom are threatened with death as a result, or where missionaries are trying to build the Church one convert at a time into family of faith.
• For example, in Nigeria, the Catholic Church is exploding in numbers. 93 percent of Nigerian Catholics come to Mass every Sunday. But many die for it. There are 5,000 Catholics killed a year in Nigeria. Their Churches are bombed and burned. Priests and religious and faithful are kidnapped or simply mowed down. They need our help to keep going.
• Or take Bangladesh, where I traveled in April. There are 400,000 Catholics in a country of 170 million Muslims and Hindus. The Church is really poor. It takes $10,000 to build a Church but they don’t have close to that type of money to do so and need the help of Catholics across the globe who can sometimes spend $10,000 simply on a parish dinner.
• The priests survive exclusively on Mass stipends, the $5 or $10 offering for the celebration of a Mass that Catholics in the United States or elsewhere send when their local parishes can’t accommodate them. That means they survive off of $3650 or $1825 a year, provided that they can get a Mass each day from abroad. And from those small sums, they have to care for their parishioners, often pay the catechists, etc.
• In Vietnam, classes were taking place on a covered boat on a polluted river because that was the only edifice they could obtain to have the kids in the shade and out of the path of torrential storms.
• Archbishop Sheen lived what St. John Paul II wrote about and, despite all of his other great works for the Church, works in terms of the new evangelization and the pastoral care of the faithful, his heart never stopped beating in love for the missions to all the nations and he really gave the best of his life, and even his possessions at death, to the missions.
• When we say we’re made for mission, if we don’t realize we’re made for the missio ad gentes, the missionary character of our life, to paraphase John Paul, would be deprived of its essential meaning and of the very activity that exemplifies our Christian mission.
• So what is this missionary dimension that Archbishop Sheen lived? What did he lead? How did he try to stimulate American Catholics to live out the missionary dimension of their baptism?
• The Pontifical Mission Societies are a union of four related societies caring for four interrelated dimensions of the Church’s mission.
  • The first and most famous is the Society of the Propagation of the Faith.
  • The second is the Missionary Childhood Association.
  • The third is the Society of St. Peter the Apostle.
  • And the fourth is the Pontifical Missionary Union.
• To understand their importance, we need to go back to 1622.
• We know that the Church from the beginning has had a mission. Christ sent out the 12, then the 72, then at his Ascension, the 500. Strengthened by the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, the Church spread and basically extended outward to the then whole known world, which was basically Europe, Asia and North Africa. The mission of the Church took place ordinarily by the salt, light and leaven of practicing Catholics, religious orders, monasteries, parishes and dioceses.
• But then, with the discovery of the new world in the 15^th century and the Protestant Reformation in the 16^th century, the Church needed to refocus on mission. How was the Church to carry out the spread of the Gospel to the Americas? How was the Church meant to re-evangelize Europe and bring Protestants back to communion with the Church and the practice of the Sacraments? How was the Church to end the then 500 year schism between East and West, between the Orthodox and Catholics?
• In 1622, Pope Gregory XV founded the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. It was a Vatican department meant to focus on and lead the whole Church in sharing the treasure of our faith with others in the new world and to guide the re-evangelization of the old. It grew very fast. There were many missionary religious orders. Catholic countries got involved in supporting diocesan priests becoming missionaries in foreign countries, like the French Foreign Mission Society or the Italian Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions.
• Eventually lay people got involved.
• In 1822, exactly two centuries after the founding of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, there was a 23 year old French girl names Pauline Jaricot who wanted to help the missions. She had had a dream about two lamps, with the old of one lamp pouring into another empty one, and then having that second lamp renew the first with its old. She saw that as the way France would come to greater faith after the French Revolution thanks to the growth of the faith in the United States and she hoped China.
• So she got a group of ten workers in her dad’s factory to come together to pray each day for the missions and to give a sou a week. They called the work, The Society for the Propagation of the Faith.
• Within a few years there were 3,000 such groups of ten women. Their first funds helped the Diocese of Louisiana and the Floridas and the Diocese of Bardstown, Kentucky. They helped to build the (old) Cathedral in St. Louis. Altogether they gave 7 million dollars before the US ceased to be a mission territory in 1908.
• As lay people, they couldn’t go to the missions themselves. But they were as made for missions as those that were going far from home. So they did what they could. They prayed for the missions. And they sacrificed for the missions. But their help very much made the missions possible.
• That’s what the Society for the Propagation of the Faith continues to do. The US funds 40 percent of the Church’s missionary work in the 1,124 missionary territories and dioceses across the globe. We build about 1,000 Churches a year, support dioceses in their day-to-day work in spreading the faith and so much more.
• We do it in the World Mission Sunday collection and in various other activities over the course of the world. Made for mission, we, like Blessed Pauline Jaricot, are made for prayer for the missions and for missionary support according to our means.
• The second work is the Missionary Childhood Association, in some places called Holy Childhood or Holy Infancy. This was founded by Bishop Charles de Forbin-Janson, a French bishop, in 1843, a supporter of Blessed Pauline. He was particularly concerned about children dying without every having to know Jesus and he wanted to allow French children to support children in China. Eventually it became worldwide. Children pray for other children and sacrifice what they can to help build Catholic Schools or support catechesis and other projects by which children can grow in faith. To form young children in the faith means to help them realize that they are made for mission, and that’s what the Missionary Childhood Association seeks to do. That’s what Archbishop Sheen sought to catalyze in the States through his missionary leadership.
• The third work is the Society of St. Peter the Apostle. This was particularly dear to Archbishop Sheen’s priestly heart. The Society helps those with priestly vocations in missionary territories to be formed as priests. It was founded in 1889 by two French lay women, Jeanne Bigard and her mother Stephanie, who sold their house and many possessions in order to support a missionary seminary in Japan and then their work expanded.
• We need to form an indigenous clergy. It can’t perpetually be staffed by missionaries. That’s what happens in the Society of St. Peter the Apostle. We build high school, college and major seminaries. We pay for the education of priests to get advanced degrees to serve as seminary faculty. In 2024, the Society of St. Peter the Apostle funded 82,500 seminarians across the globe. There are only about 109,000 seminarians in the world. We give them about $700 to cover all of their expenses. We likewise give the priest faculty Mass stipends in lieu of a salary so that they are able to stay teaching in seminary rather than get poached by universities that can pay them a better salary. The future priests of the world come, in large part, from this extraordinarily important missionary work that Archbishop Sheen led.
• The fourth society is the Pontifical Missionary Union, founded in 1916 by Blessed Father Paolo Manna, to help form a missionary spirit first among priests and religious and through them in the whole Church. He had been a missionary in Burma, what we now call Myanmar, but after a decade of service, got sick and needed to return to Italy. From that point forward, he tried to spur the whole Church to recognize it was made for mission. Through writing, workshops, missionary seminaries and other work, he promoted a missionary mindset in the Church. Today the Pontifical Mission Union provides formation materials to help us all grasp the missionary dimension of our baptism.
• In 1922, the first three societies were made Pontifical, meaning under the supervision of the Holy Father, who wanted the whole world to take them seriously. In 1956, when Bishop Sheen was at the help of the Church’s mission work in the United States, the Missionary Union was joined to the first three. And so The Pontifical Mission Societies refer to all four.
• To be made for mission means that we are made for the mission to the nations, made to help in the propagation of the faith, in forming children to help other children, in supporting the formation of future priests in and from missionary lands, and to form a missionary spirituality throughout the entire Church.
• So Archbishop Sheen teaches us these four great lessons. Using all the means at our disposal to share the faith. The personal zeal to help people one by one to know, love, follow and share Jesus. The keeping of one foot in the fonts of the faith and the other in current events. And about the primacy of the mission to all nations, collaborating with the pope in the spread of the Gospel to the ends of the earth.
• With the time we have left I would like to make one more point about our growth as disciples and apostles and the formation of others not only to recognize that they’re made for mission but to live out that identity.
• Sheen had a huge love for the Church in Latin America. Because it was evangelized five centuries ago, eventually it was no longer classified as “mission territory,” well before the US was no longer so classified in 1908. But because it wasn’t technically considered mission territory, Sheen couldn’t support it through the moneys he was raising through the Pontifical Mission Societies.
• So he fought to get things changed. He appealed to St. Pope John XXIII directly and in the late 1950s got the permission for 5 percent of the Mission Sunday Collection in the United States to help with the Church’s missionary work in those parts of Latin America that don’t have priests for Mass except once or twice a year. We continue that support. He even used his intervention at the Second Vatican Council to talk about the care we should have for the Church in Latin America.
• Back in 2007, led by Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the future Pope Francis, the Church throughout Latin America and the Caribbean came together to discuss a continental-wide mission, which involved mission proper, new evangelization and pastoral care. Their thoughts were published in what’s called the Aparecida Document, named after the famous Marian shrine in Brazil where their meetings took place.
• The Aparecida document is the best document on mission and evangelization the Church has ever produced. I’d urge you to read it and re-read and apply it to your life.
• But I want to focus on one part of it, which is the way Christian growth is supposed to occur. The document says it’s basically five stages.
  • Encounter with Jesus
  • Conversion
  • Discipleship
  • Communion
  • Mission
• I want to speak about each of those, because they show how we’re supposed to grow and how we’re supposed to train others to grasp that they’re made for mission.
• Encounter with Jesus. Source of everything. Can’t take it for granted. That’s why Sheen wrote his famous Life of Christ. That’s why he urged the Holy Hour and prayer.
• Conversion. Once we meet Jesus we can’t remain the same. He shows us how to live and helps us to embrace that new life. To turn with him in everything. She was one of the greatest preachers of conversion in US Catholic history, especially on Good Friday in his Seven Last Words.
• Discipleship. We enter his school. We learn him. We follow him. We try to pattern everything off of him. That’s what Sheen tried to do in all of his media work.
• Community. Christ doesn’t save us alone. He wants to make us his Body, his family. The importance of the Church in missionary work. Not just converts but churches! This is what Jesus prayed for in John 17 during the Last Supper as the precondition for the Church’s mission.
• Mission. The last step is the flourishing of all four previous ones. It’s that we can’t keep the faith to ourselves. Woe to me if I do not proclaim the Gospel. The love of Christ impels us. This is what characterized Sheen’s life. This passion to spread the love for Christ and Christ’s love.
• To help people live out the mission for which they’ve made, we must not just talk aoubt mission, but about the regular encounter with Jesus, about continuous conversion, about growing as faithful and devout disciples, and about enhancing the Church’s communion.
• We see all of these stages in the life of Archbishop Sheen. We see them all in the life of St. John Paul II. They’re praying for us that we will mature through them all, too, and learn how — through means both old and new — lead many others on that journey, not just in our families, parishes, high schools and colleges, dioceses, and movements.
• But across the globe, especially in those areas where people have not yet been privileged to have the first of those five stages, encountering Christ.
• God has made us for mission. Christ came on mission and called us to be with him and so that he may send us out. The Holy Spirit has been sent to help us, with tongues and hearts of fire, to extend Christ’s mission. The fields are ripe and white. Let’s get down to work!