Daily Reflection for the Pontifical Mission Societies, July 30, 2026

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
National Director, The Pontifical Mission Societies
Daily Reflection for July 30, 2026

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 United States. It is Thursday, July 30th, and I’m coming to you from Mundelein Seminary on the Feast of Blessed Solanus Casey, one of the great Americans who has ever lived, humble Capuchin friar, to whom we will return in a second. In today’s Gospel, we hear anew what we heard on Sunday in the third of the three parables Jesus gave us then. It is about a dragnet. It’s about a big fishing net that’s cast out into the sea, much bigger than Saint Mary’s Lake behind me. And it draws in good and bad fish. And in the parable, Jesus says that eventually the good fish are put in one pile and the bad fish are tossed away. So will it be at the end of the age, he says. It’s a lesson to us that in the church, there are always going to be good and bad. And so we should never be shocked that occasionally we find hypocrites in the church, because we recognize that sometimes we are capable of going the wrong way rather than the right way. But that the Lord waits until the end of time so that there might be able to be that type of miracle in which a bad fish becomes good. But we always have to make sure that the good fish doesn’t become rotten, too. Jesus finishes that passage that if you understand these things, you’ll be like a scribe, the head of a householder, who is able to go into his warehouse and take out both the old and the new. The scribes were the ones who knew the entire Old Testament very well. Every dot, every crossed letter, they were experts in. But Jesus was instructing them about the kingdom of God with all of these parables. And if they were understanding it, they would be like that wise householder. We’re called as Christians to be able to take both the Old Testament and the New Testament and apply it to our life, because it all comes from the same God who wants to teach us his ways so that we can walk in them. So, we rejoice in the old and the new and want to become like those wise householders. Somebody who was was Blessed Solanus Casey. He was one who was one of the good fish. And he sought to make other fish likewise good. He was a Capuchin friar. He wanted to become a priest, but much like Stanley Rother early this week, who couldn’t learn Latin, Solanus struggled learning German. He was an Irishman. Solanus Casey. And as a result of that, he wasn’t able to be ordained a priest with full faculty. He was ordained a simplex priest, which meant that he could celebrate mass, but he basically couldn’t preach and he basically couldn’t hear confession. He accepted that humbly. He recognized the incredible good he could still do as a Capuchin religious, as a Christian, but also being able to offer mass, which he did faithfully every day. He only preached a few times like at family funerals over the course of his time, but boy, did he make a difference by what he preached in his holy life. He really wasn’t able to hear confessions except in danger of death circumstances, but how many people he brought to experience the sacrament of the Lord’s mercy. He was a porter for most of his life. He opened doors to people. And then everybody wanted to come to talk to him about the Christian life. And he was able to encourage them to much better, to much higher, to be that type of good fish, to take from everything God had given them, both old and new blessings. Through his intercession today, we pray for the church in the United States. His beatification mass in Detroit was the largest beatification ever on American soil. Beatification of Fulton J. Sheen coming up September 24th is expected to be even greater than that. The amount of good fish in the United States, the amount of holy ones, is growing. Let’s pray through Solanus’ intercession for more and more and more. God bless you.