Msgr. Roger J. Landry
National Director, The Pontifical Mission Societies
Daily Reflection for July 28, 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 in the U.S., here at the Shrine of Divine Mercy, Łagiewniki, Krakow, Poland. Behind me is a beautiful bronze statue of Jesus’ divine mercy. Jesus came into the world as mercy incarnate. And everything he did was to try to reconcile us to God. In the gospel today, Jesus is going to give us two powerful parables. One is about a mustard seed, one is about yeast. Both are essentially making the same point that the Kingdom of God, the kingdom Jesus by his mercy came to inaugurate, starts small, but it’s meant to grow huge and it’s meant to influence everything. We know that what Jesus did in this small little sliver of earth called the Holy Land was relatively unknown in most of the other parts of the world, but it was what revolutionized everything. And it was from there, like that mustard seed, that the church grew everywhere. Similarly, 90 years ago, we had the image of divine mercy that had come down to St. Faustina here, and now that mercy has likewise spread throughout the entire globe. Today, July 28th, is the memorial of Blessed Stanley Rother, a priest from the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City who went as a missionary to Latin America and was slain for the faith in Guatemala. Blessed Stanley Rother tried to bring the mercy of God to those whom Jesus died for and to help them to be able to receive that mercy especially through the sacraments and it was because of that that Stanley Rother followed Jesus even till death. He had been rescued a little bit and he came back to Oklahoma, but then he was always looking out the window toward where his mission was. And so he returned to Santiago Atitlán, and he was murdered there because he said, “a shepherd can never have been in his sheep.” That’s the type of mercy that beat in Jesus’ heart. That’s the mercy that beats in the heart of the mystical body which Blessed Stanley Rother enfleshes so powerfully. So through this great mission of the Lord’s mercy, through the great missionary priest from America, Blessed Stanley Rother, let’s pray for all missionaries who try to take this same mercy to the ends of the earth. God bless you.
The Gospel reading on which the reflection was based was:
Jesus proposed a parable to the crowds.
“The Kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed
that a person took and sowed in a field.
It is the smallest of all the seeds,
yet when full-grown it is the largest of plants.
It becomes a large bush,
and the birds of the sky come and dwell in its branches.”
He spoke to them another parable.
“The Kingdom of heaven is like yeast
that a woman took and mixed with three measures of wheat flour
until the whole batch was leavened.”
All these things Jesus spoke to the crowds in parables.
He spoke to them only in parables,
to fulfill what had been said through the prophet:
I will open my mouth in parables,
I will announce what has lain hidden from the foundation of the world.