Climbing the Mountain of Faith Rather Than Sliding Into Corruption, Fifth Thursday (II), February 12, 2026

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Leonine Forum NYC Chapter, IESE Business School
Thursday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
February 12, 2026
1 Kings 11:4-13, Ps 106, Mk 7:24-30

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Earlier this week, the great news was published that Archbishop Fulton Sheen, the greatest preacher in American Catholic history and my predecessor as National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies, will be beatified later this year. One of Sheen’s famous quips was that there are no plateaus in the spiritual life: you’re either striving to go uphill or you’re sliding downhill. We’re either striving to come, follow Jesus up the Mount of the Beatitudes, the Mount of the Transfiguration, Mount Zion, or Calvary, or we’re descending into a pit, further from Jesus. St. Paul counseled St. Timothy in his second letter that the real choice in life is between perseverance and denial, between faith each day and infidelity (2 Tim 2:12-13). In today’s readings we see those two paths on full display. We see in the Gospel what perseverance and growth in faith look like, and the sometimes unconventional means Jesus uses to help us, and in the first reading we see the sad consequences of the lack of perseverance, corruption and the idolatry in the lives of someone God had blessed beyond measure. Insofar as there are indeed no plateaus in the spiritual life, these readings help us to diagnose which path we’re on and, regardless of where we are today, determine to follow Jesus on the path of faith.
•  The scene in the Gospel is one of the most moving — and at first glance disturbing — in all of Sacred Scripture. Jesus went into the heart of pagan territory to escape from the crowds. A pagan mother got word that he was there and came to beg him with desperation to exorcise the demons from her daughter. St. Matthew’s version of the scene gives us the most details. The woman first fell at Jesus’ feet and begged, “Have pity on me, Lord, Son of David! My daughter is tormented by a demon.” But Jesus at first gave her no answer at all. She didn’t quit, however. Next she turned to the apostles and begged for their intervention, but they merely came to Jesus and begged in turn,  “Send her away, for she keeps calling out after us.” Jesus, therefore, said to her, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she still didn’t quit. She approached Jesus now that he was speaking to her, fell down before him in homage, and used one of the most powerful words in any language: help. “Lord, help me!,” she cried out. She gave an SOS, proclaimed Mayday, and pulled a verbal fire alarm. Yet Jesus told her, “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.” It seems like an insult, but it really wasn’t, it was a strong play on words that used to be exchanged between Gentiles and Jews of the time. Jesus was testing her. He was giving her the occasion to grow in faith. She passed the test. She didn’t give up. She reminded Jesus that he was the Good Shepherd even of puppies. “Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters.” Jesus pronounced his amazement at her persevering faith and gave her the greatest compliment in Sacred Scripture: “O woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish!” And at that moment her daughter was healed. She never ceased going up hill, even as the slope seemed to get steeper. That’s why Jesus recognized her great faith — and wanted all of us to recognize it, too.
• Her perseverance in faith is contrasted with what we see in the first reading with King Solomon. Solomon, as we saw last Saturday, had been blessed by God with the gift of wisdom, of an understanding heart so that he could properly discern, judge and guide his people. As we noted yesterday, he became famous across the ancient world for the wisdom with which he had been blessed such that the Queen of Sheba would journey 2,300 miles each day to listen to him and in amazement leave him 120 gold talents, the equivalent in today’s money of $821 million. But eventually his wise and understanding heart, his pure heart, became a lustful heart, then a corrupt heart and finally an idolatrous one. It began with his entering into political alliances, which in the ancient world were normally sealed by intermarriage. The Lord had precisely forbidden the Israelites to intermarry because, he said, they would “turn your hearts to their gods.” But Solomon not only intermarried, but fell in love with what those he married loved. As the sacred author of First Kings tells of in the verse immediately before today’s first reading begins, Solomon “had seven hundred wives of princely rank and three hundred concubines, and his wives turned his heart.” He basically had 1,000 wives (in the ancient world concubines were not mistresses as they were wives of a lower social class) who served his vanity and turned his heart away from pleasing God toward pleasing them. Then the great builder of the Temple of Jerusalem — the one who had so praised God for his presence in the Temple — began to build temples to pagan gods, including as we see the god of Moloch, before whose image innocent babies would be sacrificed. Rather than going uphill to the summit of holiness with God, he slid down into the pit of idolatry.
• What happened? Pope Francis once described it very well in a homily. He said Solomon simply lost his faith due to his vanity and lust. When he began to sin, he didn’t repent of it like his father David did; he rather pressed on the gas pedal and became “corrupt,” an unrepentant sinner. And that led to his idolatry. “He began to take so much pleasure in his pagan wives and concubines that they diverted his heart to others gods,” Pope Francis said. “These women weakened Solomon’s heart slowly. His heart no longer remained wholly with the Lord, like David’s, his father’s. His heart weakened so much that he lost the faith. He lost the faith! The wisest man in the world let himself be led away by indiscreet, indiscriminate love; he let himself be led astray by his passions.” To be faithful, we know, is not a thing merely of the mind, but of one’s whole life. To be faithful means to seek to love God with all one’s heart, mind, soul and strength. Solomon had lost faith while retaining knowledge because precisely his heart — the core of his being, what he desired — had been weakened by sin. But it didn’t stop there. Pope Francis continued, “He went astray even further and was converted from a sinner into someone who was corrupt [an unrepentant sinner]. His heart was corrupted through this idolatry. … His vanity and passions let him to corruption. It’s in the heart where one loses faith. The evil seed of his passions grew in Solomon’s heart and led him to idolatry.”
• What happened to the Syro-Phoenician woman and to Solomon can happen to each of us. I’ve had the joy many times in my priesthood to see people come to Christ late in life, those who came the Lord in prison, those who were once drug addicts and philanderers, deadbeats and even involved in the modern Moloch worship of the abortion industry. Something makes them come to recognize they need the Lord. In some ways the most important thing that happened in the life of the Syro-Phoenician woman was that her daughter got possessed by a demon, probably because of the context in which she was being raised. But that terrible event in the life of her family led her to seek out Jesus, to place persevering faith in him, and to have her life changed forever. On the other hand, I have seen seen many people go the way of Solomon. How many Catholic politicians, to take just one class of people, say that they were once altar boys, that they went to Catholic school for 12 or 16 years and then they begin to use their office to advance the destruction of human life, attacks on religious freedom, false ideas of marriage, policies truly injurious to the poor and needy in favor of special treatment for friends. They can go from people who once sought to please God to those who have been thoroughly corrupted. We’ve seen the same thing with some priests, including those who were blessed by God with enormous abilities to teach the faith and bring people to God. Even though they knew the truth, they gave themselves over to vanity and to lust, lost their faith, betrayed their vocations, God and their people, and began to live a life of sin. We have seen the same thing happen with faithful Catholic husbands and wives. They’ve been great Catholics for decades, but slowly they give in to tepidity, cave in to temptation, and before you know it, they’ve gone from happily married faithful spouses to adulterers, destroying their marriages, their families, their careers and their souls in the process. We’re all old enough to have seen some people we once knew were holy forget God, forget who they were, and slide down the grease poll to the type of unrepentant corrupt sinners Solomon became. The truth is that faith isn’t a once-and-for-all gift that just grows on its own. It’s a gift of God that grows also in response to acts of faith, in response to tests, like we see with the Canaanite mother today. We need to persevere in faith, to continue to live by God’s wisdom, to persist in informing and following a conscience well-tuned to God’s voice. We need to recognize that but for the grace of God, we can go the path of Solomon, but with the grace of God, we can indeed climb the mountain of the Lord.
• The Canaanite woman begged Jesus just to let her and her daughter eat the crumbs that fell from the Master’s table. Today Jesus is going to let us have far more than crumbs, he’s about to give his whole body, blood, soul and divinity, in order to build us into a temple where the one, true God is worshipped rather than any idols. This is the means by which he wants to help us grow into the types of persons who today, tomorrow and increasingly each day, Jesus will be able to say to us, whether woman or man, “great is your faith!”

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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