Msgr. Roger J. Landry
National Director, The Pontifical Mission Societies
Daily Reflection for November 2, 2025
Here is the video of today’s reflection.
The Youtube generated transcript for today’s reflection is:
I am Monsignor Roger Landry, national director of the Pontifical Mission Societies. It’s Sunday, November 2nd, the commemoration of all the faithful departed. What a beautiful gift we have today to be able to pray as a united family all together on the Christian Sabbath to pray for those who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith. I am coming to you from Auriesville, New York, from the Jesuit cemetery on the grounds of the beautiful shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs. In today’s Gospel, Jesus describes God the father’s will and his will. God the father’s will is that Jesus lose no one whom the father has entrusted to him. And the will of Jesus is to save all those that the father has entrusted to him. And if they see him and believe in him, live their life of faith trying to follow him, then he will raise them up on the last day. This is the great source of Christian hope that we recognize that this world isn’t everything. As beautiful and as good as it is and has been created, we’ve been made for more. We’ve been made for God. We’ve been made for eternal love. We’ve been made for the communion of saints. And so that’s why today on All Souls Day, we pray for all our faithful departed. We pray for our deceased relatives and friends. We pray for all those who have passed on to us the treasure of the faith. priest, religious, catechists, godparents, grandparents, great-grandparents. There have been so many in our life for whom we pray. And we likewise pray for those with no one to pray for them because our will is to insert ourselves in Jesus’s saving will, which is to not lose one that the father entrusted to him. We’ve always been made free. We can choose to say yes and receive Jesus’ gift of salvation or tragically we can say no and reject it. As CS Lewis, the great 20th century writer said, “All who are in hell choose it because there are only two types of people. Those to who say to God, thy will be done and those whom God reluctantly says, thy will be done.” Hell is a place of definitive self-alienation. But we’re called first and foremost to live with God. If only we respond to that summons and do what Jesus is asking of us. Take in his gloriously scarred hand and follow him all the way. That’s what missionaries try to bring to the world. There are great stakes as to whether someone comes to know Jesus in this life and learn how to love him. It is possible. The second Vatican Council says for those who have never formally become Christian to be saved, it’s just much harder, much harder than those of us who have received the fullness of revelation by God incarnate and been shown who is the way so that we can follow him with confidence in the midst of the world. And that’s why missionaries work so hard, leaving home, leaving their families, leaving careers, you name it, to go to far away places to introduce people to Jesus who is the way, the truth, the resurrection, and the life. We pray for them. We support them with whatever financial sacrifice we can make. And we seek in our own places to continue that saving work to those around us who don’t yet really know Jesus at the depth at which he desires to be known and aren’t yet following him. In this setting where so many Jesuit priests who taught the faith, who were missionaries themselves are now buried, awaiting the general resurrection, we pray for the church throughout the world that we might carry out God the Father and God the Son’s will with the power of God the Holy Spirit. God bless you. Eternal Rest Grant Unto Them, O Lord, and Let Perpetual Light Shine Upon Them. May They Rest in Peace. Amen.
The Gospel reading on which the reflection was based on:
Gospel
Jesus said to the crowds:
“Everything that the Father gives me will come to me,
and I will not reject anyone who comes to me,
because I came down from heaven not to do my own will
but the will of the one who sent me.
And this is the will of the one who sent me,
that I should not lose anything of what he gave me,
but that I should raise it on the last day.
For this is the will of my Father,
that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him
may have eternal life,
and I shall raise him on the last day.”