Daily Reflection for the Pontifical Mission Societies, November 13, 2025

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
National Director, The Pontifical Mission Societies
Daily Reflection for November 13, 2025

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’s November 13th, the feast of the great American St. Francis Xavier Cabrini and I’m coming to you from the shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs in Auriesville, New York. Today in the Gospel, Jesus in this month of November continues to prepare us for the last things, for death, for judgment, hopefully for eternal communion with him and hopefully not eternal self-separation by our own choices to make something else our God here on earth. And he was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come. And they were looking for a specific type of messianic kingdom, the reestablishment of a Davidic political reign that would kick the Romans out of their country and allow the religion of the Jews to dominate once again according to the interpretation of the scribes and the Pharisees. And Jesus said, listen, the kingdom of God is not going to be a spectacle. You’re not going to be able to say, look, there it is, or here it is. Because he said, the kingdom of God is already among you. the kingdom was among them because the king was already there. And then he warned everybody. He said, “Beware of the time in which everybody’s going to be trying to say that the Messiah has come and that there he is or here he is. Don’t follow them.” He says, and he said that the kingdom already present among them would come when the son of man would be betrayed by the chief priests of the elders, suffer, and be killed. what we see in this beautiful scene of the pieta behind us which immediately followed Jesus’s triumph through his death on the cross that would be punctuated by Jesus’ resurrection on the third day. St. Francis Cabrini was somebody who believed in her whole heart about the kingdom of God. She was touched when she was a little child with the love of God and she wanted to spread love of him. She read in the annals of the propagation of the faith about the great work of the church and particularly her missionaries in China. She wanted to be one of them. But she was orphaned when she was young. She was sick. She wasn’t vigorous and therefore everybody was basically saying she couldn’t go to the missions. So she did the best thing she could. She founded an orphanage or took over after religious sisters needed to leave. She formed a little community around her. But she always wanted to go to the east. Eventually moved by God, she approached Pope Leo the 13th and asked for his help. And he said, “Not to the east, but to the west.” He wanted her to go to New York City because there were so many Italian immigrants who had come there who didn’t really have good spiritual leadership. And the kids of whom weren’t receiving instruction in the faith. And the Holy Father’s heart was touched through the letters he was receiving from the Italians abroad that they really needed help. And so he sent St. Francis Cabrini there. There she founded orphanages, she founded schools, she founded great hospitals. From there, Chicago, New Orleans, Denver, and so many other places. She established an empire of hope as it was called during her lifetime. She had extraordinary confidence that in God she could do all things. I can do all things in him who strengthens me. As St. Paul said in his fourth chapter of his letter to the Philippians, which became her motto, missionaries continue that passion to help people enter into the kingdom of God, which is a kingdom in which we live with God in the present. We choose him, we love him, we allow ourselves to be loved by him, and we allow ourselves to be strengthened by him so that we can continue to do all things in him. As we pray for missionaries throughout this month of November and we pray for all those whom they’re trying to bring into the kingdom, let’s ask St. Francis Xavier Cabrini’s help and let’s ask this first ever canonized American saint, the only one whose figure is in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome to help us to become American saints and zealous missionaries.