Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Mission Magazine Summer 2025 Edition
May 30, 2025
It was an extraordinary privilege for me to be in Rome helping to anchor EWTN’s daily onsite coverage of the funeral of Pope Francis, the interregnum, the papal conclave and the election and first days of the papacy of Pope Leo XIV.
We first gave thanks for all the ways God blessed us through the papacy of Pope Francis, in particular for the way he sought to help the whole Church go out with God’s mercy to those on the peripheries of life. He helped us all to grasp that, as he wrote in his first major papal document, entitled the Joy of the Gospel, that the Church doesn’t have a mission but is a mission, and that God wants to help each of us recognize that the reason why we’re born is to fulfill the mission God has given us of completing Jesus’ saving work in us and in others.
His beautiful funeral began nine days of mourning with Masses each day entrusting his soul to the mercy of God he so powerfully preached and reflecting on various of the ways he sought to lead us to be more faithful to God. While these Masses were taking place, the Cardinals were meeting to discuss the needs of the Church and to discern the qualities of the man they thought God would be calling to lead the Church to meet those challenges.
Few were ready for what would be announced after only about 24 hours, and four ballots, in the conclave: that the 267th Peter was an American, Cardinal Robert Prevost, a native of Chicago, and the first true missionary to be chosen pope since Christ chose St. Peter.
Every pope — and indeed every baptized Catholic — is supposed to be a missionary. We have seen this missionary dimension of the papacy on display in the indefatigable apostolic journeys of Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis. We have witnessed it in several popes with burning missionary zeal, like Gregory XV, who founded the Society of the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith in 1622, and Gregory XVI, who led that Congregation for five years before the Cardinals elected him in 1831.
We have had popes from missionary lands — until the establishment of Christianity as a majority religion in various countries, every place was properly missionary territory. We have also had popes serve in places far from their country of origin before their papal election, like Pope Urban IV, the French-born former Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem before being elected pope in 1261.
Somewhat shockingly, however, until May 8, 2025, we have never had a Pope whose vocation in the Church had been to serve in the Church’s missions to the nations: leaving home and traveling to a far different part of the world to share the Gospel in places where people have not yet heard it or where the Church is too young, too poor, or too persecuted to be self-sufficient.
That was the vocation of Father, and later Bishop, Robert Francis Prevost. As a child, he nourished a priestly vocation through celebrating “Mass” at home on an ironing board, preaching to his forbearing older brothers. He entered an Augustinian high school seminary and continued his formation at the Augustinians’ flagship university, Villanova, before officially becoming a novice and making first vows. Living in community with fellow Augustinians, he met several friars who had returned from the Order’s missions in Peru, established in 1551, and developed a desire, should God want it, to dedicate himself to that work. He served there for a year in between advanced studies in Rome. After completing his doctorate, he was delighted to be assigned full-time to the missions in Peru for the next decade.
He was then elected by his fellow Augustinians in the United States their prior provincial, or superior, and two years later, the prior general of the nearly 3,000 Augustinians across the globe. The latter position was a different type of missionary work, traveling half the year to the 50 different countries where the Augustinians are trying to reap the Lord’s harvest, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, India, Korea, Indonesia, the Antilles, Philippines, and more, strengthening the Order’s missionary work and her missionaries.
After 12 years of that service, he returned for a short stint serving his Province in the United States before Pope Francis sent him back as a missionary to Peru, as Bishop of Chiclayo and later apostolic administrator of Callao. After nine years, Pope Francis summoned him to Rome to serve as Prefect for the Dicastery of Bishops. When he was selected as the successor of St. Peter earlier this month, he was only just over two years removed from having been a missionary bishop. Emerging on the Loggia of Blessings, he arrived having dedicated basically half his life — 22 years in Peru and 12 years crisscrossing the globe visiting the Augustinian prior general — to the Church’s missionary work.
That’s far more than a piece of trivia. It’s likewise far more than a missionary “perspective” or series of “experiences” on which he can draw in his new Petrine ministry. It means that he has a deep missionary identity. It’s inevitable that his missionary vocation and experiences will impact profoundly the way with which he now exercises his papal ministry.
Without question he will focus the Church’s attention much more on the missions and missionaries. Two thousand years after Christ’s incarnation, birth, public ministry, passion, death and resurrection, 5.5 out of the 8 billion people alive still do not know Jesus Christ. The Great Commission had no expiration date, but many Christians do not take Jesus’ command to “proclaim the Gospel to every creature” as personal marching orders, whether by going to the missions themselves or supporting them by prayer and financial sacrifices. During his opening words as Pope, minutes after his election, he emphasized our common calling: “Together, we must look for ways to be a missionary Church.”
For the last 50 years, the Popes have tried to spur the faithful to commit themselves anew to the mission ad gentes (to those who have not yet heard the Gospel) as well as to the new evangelization of those given up the practice of the faith. Now, the Church’s chief missionary begins his papacy with 34 years of experience putting that summons into action.
When Jesus first called St. Peter, he told him to put his boat out into deep water and lower his nets for a catch, and Peter, Andrew, James and John caught so many fish that their nets were at the breaking point. Jesus then called them to be “fishers of men.”
Pope Leo, because of his vast experience of missionary work, is supremely capable of leading the Church’s worldwide fishing expedition with great credibility, conviction and confidence. The election of the first American pope is likely a sign that the Lord is asking even greater involvement, leadership and contributions from Catholics from America in the Church’s overall saving mission. Together with Pope Leo, let’s get ready to lower the nets!