Christ’s Prayers for the Church’s Mission of Unity, 7th Thursday of Easter, June 5, 2025

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
New York City Chapter of the Leonine Forum
Thursday of the Seventh Week of Easter
Memorial of St. Boniface, Bishop and Martyr
June 5, 2025
Acts 22:30.23:6-11, Ps 16, Jn 17:20-26

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the Gospel we see what and for whom Jesus was praying on Holy Thursday. We look at his words in the light of his resurrection and in anticipation of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. Jesus first prays for the apostles present with them, but then for all “those who will believe in me through their word.” He was praying for us. He was praying for all those who would ultimately come to hear the faith through the work of the ones Jesus would send out from the Upper Room when the Holy Spirit would descend upon them 53 days later. He was praying for the generations of Christians before us. He was praying for those generations of Catholics who will come after us. He was praying for those who would announce and live the word of God and for all those who would hear in and be summoned to live it. It’s an extraordinary thing to think about, that Jesus has prayed for the success of the fishers of men he has sent out, he’s prayed for the harvesters, he’s prayed for the sowers of the Seed of the Word of God, and we know his prayers are heard. What an incredible consolation to ponder that we received well the word of God because of Jesus’ prayers. What an even more unbelievable gift for us to remember that Jesus has prayed for all those with whom we will attempt to share him, and his word, and his life. As we conclude the first year of the Leonine Forum and seek to bring what we’ve learned out to a world that needs Catholic social teaching, fraternity, the worship of God and charity as much as we do, we do so not on our own, not just helped by the Holy Spirit, but with Jesus’ prayers for us.
• During the Last Supper, Jesus was praying for something specific for those who would announce and receive the Word of God throughout the centuries. He said it multiple times in John 17, what has come to be known as Jesus’ great Priestly Prayer. He prayed us to be one, just as the Father and the Son are one in the person of the Holy Spirit. The ultimate, eschatological battle in which all of creation is engaged is one of communion versus disunity. Jesus came to reconcile all things in himself, to draw all things to himself on the Cross, to make us one flock with one Shepherd. This will culminate in heaven, when we hope to enter into the communion of saints within the communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But it is opposed by the work of the devil, who is always seeking to isolate us, divide us, and permanently alienate us from God and from others, just as we saw him do with the first family in the Book of Genesis in the distrust between Adam and Eve and in the fratricide of Cain versus Abel. The most accurate image of Hell is not one full of flames; it’s one in which everyone is as far as possible away from others… The choices we make here on earth are ultimately able to be understood as choices for or against communion with God and others.
• Jesus prays in the Gospel that we might be as united with each other as Father and Son are united, something that’s impossible for us but not impossible for God. This communion of saints among the communion who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit is the Spirit’s principal work. Everything else is an explicitation of that mission. Jesus prays for the success of that Mission in today’s Gospel with insistence, begging him that we might be one so that the world might know that he was sent by the Father and that the Father loves us just as he loves him. That’s an extraordinary prayer that points to the Holy Spirit’s mission. The world will be convinced of Jesus’ presence and mission by the way we’re united with each other. The world will be convinced of God’s personal love for each of us by the way love each other. Our union, our Christian communion brought about by the Holy Spirit, is the most important element of the Church’s mission to the nations and of the new evangelization of those who have given up the practice of the faith. That’s why we pray for that unity at every Mass as well, uniting ourselves as Bride to Bridegroom, as Body to Head, praying for that gift.
• We might be tempted to dismiss Jesus’ prayer as something that sounds beautiful, but which is obviously utopian and beyond our grasp. But Jesus would never have prayed for something impossible. He, through whom we and the whole world were created, never engaged in “wishful thinking.” He not only knew the Truth about us and God, but enfleshed that Truth, fully aware of what was possible and what was not. It is also true that the Father would never refuse the prayer of his Son. As Jesus prayed before the raising of Lazarus, “I thank you, Father, for having heard me. I know that you always hear me” (Jn 11:42). The Father always hears his prayer. Therefore, if Jesus were praying that we be one, that we be as united among ourselves as are the Persons in the Blessed Trinity and that we abide in them as they abide in each other, then that must mean it is possible and is what should be the reality among us. This is the stated mission of our new Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV, encapsulated in his papal motto, In illo uno, unum, “One in the one Christ.” This dual communion with God and with each other is, in fact, what will happen in heaven. If by God’s mercy we follow Christ all the way to heaven, we will be in full communion with the Communion-of-Persons-in-Love who is the Holy Trinity and in that communion, we will be in full communion with everyone else in the communion of saints.
• What is obvious to us, though, is that we do not have this union in this world. We see the ugliness of disunity, of the lack of the Holy Spirit, in today’s first reading in the dispute between the Pharisees and Sadducees about the Resurrection, and about the way so many of the Sadducees and Pharisees were not only fighting each other but against Paul and the proclamation of the Gospel. But we see such seemingly intractable divisions often. So many families are in fact divided today. Countries, like our own, are polarized. Even the Church is fractured into so many camps. This is not a new problem. In the early days of Christianity, there was the division between the Greeks and the Jews especially with regard to the care of widows. There were the numerous heresies that divided the Church: Gnosticism, Marcionism, Sabellianism, Donatism, Arianism, Nestorianism, Eutychism, Monophysitism, Monotheletism and the Iconoclasm controversy. Since 1054, the Church has been divided between Catholics and Orthodox. For the last 508 years, the Church in the West has been divided between Catholics and Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Pentecostals and 40,000 other Protestant denominations. Outside observers studying the Church today will often notice far more easily what divides us than the unity that Christ prayed would exist.
• But it is not as if the type of unity for which Jesus prays and worked has never been approximated. The first disciples approached it. The members of the Church in Jerusalem “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers,” as we read in the Acts of the Apostles. “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.” And the impact of their loving union was dramatic, obtaining the results Jesus prayed such union would bring about: “Day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved” (Acts 2:42-47).
• The chronicle of division that has happened in the Church since then is not a sign that Jesus’ prayer was ineffectual or had an expiration date. Jesus’ prayer was heard and God the Father will certainly not withhold the graces necessary for this communion. The reason for division rests in our not receiving those graces, in the actions various Christians have committed over the course of the centuries against communion, and in the various things we have failed to do in order to keep communion. Every sin ruptures communion. Every genuine act of Christian love begins to repair it. If this communion with God and with each other meant so much to the Lord that, on the night he was betrayed, he poured out his very soul praying for it to the Father, then each of us who loves him must make it our life’s mission to try to bring about that union of love.
• The saints are those who do. Today the Church celebrates a great Missionary who sought to bring both Germany and Holland into communion with Christ and with the Church. St. Boniface became a Benedictine in England early in life. At the age of 41 left his monastery where he was a Latin scholar and a Scripture teacher to become a Missionary. In his first attempt, in modern Holland, he was rejected. He went to Rome where the Pope ordained him and sent him as a Bishop to evangelize Germany, where he helped pagans overcome their worship of trees and through four decades of labor built up the communion and structure of the Church. At the very end of his life, he went back to Frisia, to Holland, to try to bring them, too, into communion, but they killed him as he was preparing for Mass. Pope Benedict gave a catechesis on him in 2009 in which he stressed his zeal to bring the Word of God even as an old man. “Although he was getting on in years (he was almost 80), he prepared himself for a new evangelizing mission: with about 50 monks he returned to Frisia where he had begun his work. Almost as a prediction of his imminent death, in alluding to the journey of life, he wrote to Bishop Lull, his disciple and successor in the see of Mainz: ‘I wish to bring to a conclusion the purpose of this journey; in no way can I renounce my desire to set out. The day of my end is near and the time of my death is approaching; having shed my mortal body, I shall rise to the eternal reward. May you, my dear son, ceaselessly call the people from the maze of error, complete the building of the Basilica of Fulda that has already been begun, and in it lay my body, worn out by the long years of life.’ While he was beginning the celebration of Mass at Dokkum (in what today is northern Holland) on 5 June 754, he was assaulted by a band of pagans. Advancing with a serene expression he forbade his followers from fighting, saying, ‘Cease, my sons, from fighting, give up warfare, for the witness of Scripture recommends that we do not give an eye for an eye but rather good for evil. Here is the long awaited day, the time of our end has now come; courage in the Lord!’ These were his last words before he fell under the blows of his aggressors.” Pope Benedict asked, “Centuries later, what message can we gather today from the teaching and marvellous activity of this great missionary and martyr? For those who approach Boniface, an initial fact stands out: the centrality of the word of God, lived and interpreted in the faith of the Church, a word that he lived, preached and witnessed to until he gave the supreme gift of himself in martyrdom. He was so passionate about the word of God that he felt the urgent need and duty to communicate it to others, even at his own personal risk. … At the age of 80, he went to a region in which he foresaw his martyrdom. By comparing his ardent faith, this zeal for the Gospel, with our own often lukewarm and bureaucratized faith, we see what we must do and how to renew our faith, in order to give the precious pearl of the Gospel as a gift to our time.” Jesus had prayed for him and he acted on those prayers. Jesus is praying for us, too, to imitate St. Boniface’s missionary zeal and courage to seek to bring all people into one in Christ.
• We pray at Mass that the Holy Spirit will make us “one body, one Spirit in Christ.”  To make us one body with Him and with others, Jesus commanded us to consume his body. It is not coincidental that since the beginning, we have called our reception of the Lord Jesus’s real presence “Holy Communion,” because by receiving God inside, we are supposed to be caught up into communion with God and with all of the other members of the Church, the “Body of Christ.” The reception of Holy Communion is supposed to be sign of a communion that already exists and a source of a deepening of that communion. Saint Thomas Aquinas used to teach that the ultimate effect of the Sacrament of Holy Communion is not Jesus’ real presence on the altar. Jesus’ real presence is both an effect and a sacrament of something else: namely the communion that he seeks to bring about in us as we, in communion with him, enter into communion with each other. To the extent that we receive Jesus in Holy Communion and don’t seek communion with each other, we’re receiving poorly. That’s why Jesus told us in the Sermon of the Mount that if we come to the altar and recognize that our brother has something against us, that we should first reconcile and then come and bring our gift. We can’t have communion with Jesus but not ardently desire communion with each other. When we truly receive Jesus well, he is at work within us, helping us to become more like him, so that we might love others the way he does, and enter into a communion of love with him. Let us pray this Mass and receive Holy Communion today earnestly desiring that unity that Jesus prayed for in the first Mass! And then let us go out like St. Boniface, strengthened by the Holy Spirit and by everything we’ve received this year in the Leonine Forum, to bring those for whom Jesus prayed into communion with us here on earth and, we pray, eternal communion with Him, with St. Boniface and with all the saints!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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