Msgr. Roger J. Landry
National Director, The Pontifical Mission Societies
Daily Reflection for September 5, 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 here on the south of Sicily from a boat. In today’s gospel, certain Pharisees come up to Jesus and are asking him about fasting. Why do John the Baptist’s disciples fast, why do the Pharisees fast, and Jesus disciples don’t fast? And Jesus gives us a super important principle. He says it is a real newness to our Christian faith. He says the guests of the bridegroom, the groomsmen don’t fast while the bridegroom is with them at a party. We have to feast first and then we fast.
Christianity is fundamentally about the joy of feasting. But then Jesus gives us a principle. He says you can’t patch a new patch on old clothing because it’s going to tear the old clothing or pour new wine into old wines skins. It’s going to make the wine skins burst. There’s a fundamental novelty in Christianity. A brand explosive newness that we have to take seriously in the faith that Jesus isn’t just a small improvement on what came, but a revolution.
Jesus wants us to bring that revolution to the ends of the earth. Someone who did, who received the faith in ever new wine skins, not as just a little patch to her baptismal garment but a totally new garment was St. Teresa of Calcutta, whom the church remembers on September 5th. She was an Albanian girl growing up in Skopje, what’s now North Macedonia. And she received a vocation to be a Sister of Loretto teaching in Calcutta. And from there she was called within her vocation to become a missionary of charity, to take Jesus’ burning love to the ends of the world.
It wasn’t just the simple religious sense. There was something absolutely new in Jesus’ call for love that she herself received and she wanted to spread. Every one of us in the church is supposed to be a missionary of charity. We’ve received Jesus’s love, and we’re called to bring that love to others. There’s supposed to be no confines at all to that love. Today through the intercession of St. Teresa of Calcutta, let’s pray for that grace. Pray for the grace for Pope Leo.
Pray for the grace for all missionaries wherever they are in the world. Pray for the grace of for each of us that we who have been loved by the Lord might love others by that same standard. This is the newness of Christianity. This is the way we’re going to renew the world.
The Gospel reading on which the reflection was based was
Gospel
The scribes and Pharisees said to Jesus,
“The disciples of John the Baptist fast often and offer prayers,
and the disciples of the Pharisees do the same;
but yours eat and drink.”
Jesus answered them, “Can you make the wedding guests fast
while the bridegroom is with them?
But the days will come, and when the bridegroom is taken away from them,
then they will fast in those days.”
And he also told them a parable.
“No one tears a piece from a new cloak to patch an old one.
Otherwise, he will tear the new
and the piece from it will not match the old cloak.
Likewise, no one pours new wine into old wineskins.
Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins,
and it will be spilled, and the skins will be ruined.
Rather, new wine must be poured into fresh wineskins.
And no one who has been drinking old wine desires new,
for he says, ‘The old is good.'”