Msgr. Roger J. Landry
National Director, The Pontifical Mission Societies
Daily Reflection for December 9, 2025
Here is the video of today’s reflection.
The Youtube generated transcript for today’s reflection is:
I’m Monsignor Roger Landry, national director of the Pontifical Mission Societies. It’s Tuesday, December 9th, which is the 46th anniversary of the death of my predecessor, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, now a venerable who’s for whose beatification we pray with great ardor in the United States. And it is Tuesday of the second week of Advent. And in today’s Gospel, we see the motivation for Jesus’s coming into the world. He gives us this image of what shepherd among you if he has a hund sheep but one go stray would not leave the 99 and go out in search of the stray and when he finds it will he not celebrate more for the finding of that lost sheep than for the other 99.
Jesus cared for every single one of us. He loved us so much that he entered into our world in order to be able to redeem a hundred out of a hundred of us. That means when we look out at the world, there are no tax write offs for somebody who hasn’t come to the gospel. There’s no easy dismissal of the people who yet haven’t come to faith. Jesus cares for a hundred out of a hundred. And if we love him, we must care for 100 out of a hundred. And when we recognize that he gave everything in order to save my soul individually, how can we not seek to pay that love forward for every last person on the planet? I’ve said before that 5.5 of the 8.1 billion who are alive today don’t celebrate Christmas with us. They don’t know Jesus as their king and savior. They don’t know him as the one who loved him so much as to take on our humanity to redeem it. What a tragedy to go throughout one’s entire life without knowing Jesus that way. And the whole mission of the church is to help us to live that reality.
Today, as we mark the 46th anniversary of Archbishop Fulton J Sheen, we have to ponder his great missionary zeal. He cared that people came to know Jesus. He wrote all his books so that they might know Jesus, most especially his life of Christ. He was a zealous mission director for 16 years, crisscrossing the globe trying to help the fledgling Christian communities really grow strong because of his work and the work of so many of our Catholic grandparents and great-grandparents. We were able to strengthen the church in Asia, in Oceania and Africa. And now so many priests from those areas are coming back because of that zeal. He used means that would have made St. Paul and St. Francis Xavier salivate like the invention of the rosary and the invention of television in order to be able to share the faith with far greater multitudes than any one pulpit in a church would ever accomplish today. As we pray for him, we ask him if he already is in the Lord’s glory to pray for us that we might have a double portion of his zeal as we seek to go out for all 100 out of a 100red, all 8.1 billion out of 8.1 billion. Jesus coming into the world to save us all. Let’s go with him to complete that work and help everybody across the planet run out to meet Christ, our savior. God bless you.
The Gospel reading on which the reflection was based on:
Gospel
Jesus said to his disciples:
“What is your opinion?
If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray,
will he not leave the ninety-nine in the hills
and go in search of the stray?
And if he finds it, amen, I say to you, he rejoices more over it
than over the ninety-nine that did not stray.
In just the same way, it is not the will of your heavenly Father
that one of these little ones be lost.”