Daily Reflection for the Pontifical Mission Societies, November 11, 2025

  I’m Monsignor Roger Landry, national director  of the Pontifical Mission Societies. It’s  November 11th. I’m coming to you from   the shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs in  Auriesville, New York, where saints  Isaac Jogues, Rene Goupil, and John Leland were martyred for the Lord in the 1640s  and where 10 years later, St. Kateri Tekakwitha the first saint of North   America was born. Behind me, you see an  image of St. Isaac Jogues teaching the young   mohawks about the saving name of Jesus   as well as about the cross which he was  tracing on a tree.  Yeshua in Hebrew means God saves. And he   was instructing them about the salvation   of the Lord that came paradoxically   through Jesus’s death on the cross and   how that cross became the new tree of   life that St. Isaac was trying to help   these young Mohawks embrace. And it was   a cross that essentially St. Isaac  himself would carry when he was martyred  here by a tomahawk in 1646.   Today’s Gospel as we continue to ponder in the month of November, the four last things of death, judgment, heaven, and  hell, Jesus talks to us about how like  St. Isaac Jogues blike St. Martin of Tour  that the church remembers today on his  feast day, we’re called to be good  servants of the Lord. And so he says it   in something that is at first a little   jarring. He says, “Which among you, if   he had a servant who was out plowing the   fields or laboring, and came on in after   hard days of work, hard days work, would   immediately sit your servant down and   say, “Let me serve you.” Wouldn’t you,   according to the culture of the time,  have him continue his work to continue   to serve you to prepare you some dinner   and then eat dinner himself?   He said, “We shouldn’t feel entitled to   anything. We should recognize what an   extraordinary gift it is that we have a   job by which we’re able to sustain   ourselves and sustain others.   God wishes nevertheless to serve us as   Jesus did washing the feet of the   apostles in the last supper as he   promises to do forever in heaven. But we  should never feel entitled to it. We  should feel just so incredibly grateful   that we have a chance to do the Lord’s  work in the fields. that we have a   chance to love him and serve him. When  we come back on in so that we’re able to  pray before him, we’re able to adore   him. This is something that St. Martin  of Tour taught the French Catholics in  the 4th century. He was a soldier who   had a huge conversion experience when he  met a shivering man in the freezing cold   at the gates of Amy. He dismounted from   his horse as a Roman soldier, took out  his lance, cut his great Roman kappa,  his cape into two, and put half of it  around this shivering man. And at night,  Jesus appeared to Martin of Tour in a  dream and said, “Martin, you have   covered me with your cape.” That Jesus   was identifying with that poor person   that Martin had served. Martin um became  eventually a priest and a great bishop  who was constantly fighting to bring   people to turn toward the Lord to work   for him in the apostolate and then to  come to adore him in prayer to recognize  how lucky they were to be the servant of   the Lord. Useless or unprofitable as the word would be by themselves but they had   become so useful for the most important   thing of all. This is what missionaries  seek to do all across the globe. St.  Martin of Tour was a great missionary in   France trying to bring the gospel to   those who didn’t yet know Jesus. And the   missionaries continue that work to the   5.5 billion alive today who don’t really   know Jesus as their savior and don’t   know the cross as the way to eternal   life. Through St. Martin’s prayers,  through the prayers of St. Isaac Jogues and all the saints. Let us ask for that   grace to serve the Lord and work hard in   all the things that he’s asked us to do.  And then when we’ve done that work to   come and enjoy loving and adoring him as  he seeks to feed