Evangelical Spirit, St. Louis Collaborator Summit for the PAC 27 Marian Conference, September 4, 2026

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Augustine Institute, Florissant, Missouri
St. Louis Collaborator Summit for the PAC 27 Marian Conference
September 4, 2026

To listen to an audio recording of this first part of a three-part keynote, please click below: 

The text that guided the talk was: 

• Introduction
  • It is a great joy to be with you here at the Augustine Institute as we prepare together for the PAC27 Marian Congress a year from now and then for the events of the 2000^th anniversary of Jesus’ public ministry, his passion, death and resurrection, his Great Commission and sending of the Holy Spirit that the Church will mark with great gratitude between 2030-2033. It’s good that we prepare and prepare well to receive the graces that God wants to bestow upon us and through us on others.
  • When St. John Paul II was elected in 1978, his great mentor, Blessed Stefan Wyszynski, told him that he was to lead the Church across the threshold of the 2000^th anniversary of the incarnation and birth of Jesus in the Great Jubilee. He had a Marian Year in 1987 implicitly to mark the 2000^th anniversary of Mary’s Immaculate Conception and then had a three-year Trinitarian Preparation for the celebration of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000 during which St. John Paul II had us focus on the reality that God-with-us, Emmanuel, is still very much with us loving us, teaching us, shepherding us, blessing us.
  • When Pope Leo was elected last May 8, there was great attention to the fact that he was the first Pope ever from the United States of America, the first successor of Peter to have dedicated his life explicitly to the missions since Peter himself. But few noted that he seems in God’s providence, if his health remains vigorous, to be the man chosen to lead us to the great Jubilee of the Resurrection.
  • I was present in Rome for his election and first month of the papacy as part of EWTN’s coverage of the papal funeral, interregnum, conclave and election. We were on air for 29 days, in scaffolding at the top of the Via della Conciliazione, the long majestic boulevard leading from Rome to St. Peter’s. The day before, and day of, his inaugural Mass, we were on air as more than 100,000 members of Confraternities from all continents and more than 100 countries with prayer, music, enthusiasm came up the Via to St. Peter’s Square and Basilica as the end of an epic pilgrimage throughout Rome as part of the Jubilee of Confraternities during the Jubilee of Hope. God had providentially pre-arranged that the papacy that would lead us to the Jubilee of the Resurrection would celebrate its Mass of Inauguration with representatives of Catholic confraternities. I had the privilege to translate Pope Leo’s homily. The new Holy Father began his homily by addressing the Cardinals who elected him and the bishops present, then the many heads of state and their representatives, and then, “Greetings to the pilgrims who have come for the Jubilee of Confraternities!” He preached on love of God and Church unity, which he called the two dimensions of the mission entrusted to Peter [and his successors] by Jesus” and expressed his great desire for “a united Church, a sign of unity and communion, which becomes a leaven for a reconciled world,” to help us become God’s one family, in illo uno unum, one in the one Christ as his motto announced. And at the end of the Mass, after he led us into the prayer of the Regina Caeli to the Queen of Heaven, he welcomed the multitude of “pilgrims who have come from every continent for the Jubilee of Confraternities,” saying, “Dear Brothers and Sisters, I thank you for keeping the great heritage of popular piety alive.”
  • We should not miss what God was doing, uniting the Pope of the Great Jubilee of the Resurrection with members of confraternities across the globe, who do not just preserve as some type of relic or heirloom the traditions that have sprung up to honor Christ’s passion, death and resurrection, who have venerated the Mother of God and the saints, who have led so many in prayer, penance, and charity, but who keep that inheritance of the Gospel “alive,” living, dynamic and life-changing. The heritage he was referring to is the great inheritance of the Church’s tradition, passed along not just in catechetical texts and liturgy, but in the passionate forms of the incarnation of the Word that have arisen in the hearts and cultures of Catholics throughout the Middle Ages until today.
  • We also shouldn’t miss that he referred to these representatives as “pilgrims.” Indeed every Catholic is a pilgrim, part of the ecclesiam peregrinantem in terra, the pilgrim Church on earth, and the Journey to 2033 is in fact part of the Church’s great pilgrimage through life not ultimately toward Rome but toward the heavenly Jerusalem. As the Holy Father seeks to lead the Church on that Camino, he does so accompanied by the members of confraternities, by all those who make pilgrimages to Shrines and Sanctuaries across the globe, by all those who continue to respond to Jesus’ words, “Come, follow me!” How privileged we are to be making that trek with the 267^th Peter, with each other, and with our brothers and sisters across the globe.
• Evangelical spirit
  • Dennis has asked me to give three brief reflections on words that Pope Francis said in 2013 to members of confraternities who had come to be with him in Rome during the Year of Faith. Pope Francis said three things must mark the Church and confraternities in the Church: an evangelical spirit, an ecclesial spirit, and a missionary spirit. Over our time together I will take each of the three in turn. But ten years after those words, he welcomed the confraternities of Italy to the Vatican and he built on them, describing the fundamental dynamism contained in each one. He urged them to be inspired by the Holy Spirit to make their whole life a procession, like so many confraternities lead and participate in religious processions in the streets. “I would like, then, to invite you,” he said, “to structure your journey along three fundamental lines: evangelism, ecclesiality and missionary spirit. I would summarize this direction as follows: to walk in Christ’s footsteps; to walk together; to walk proclaiming the Gospel.” The three-fold spirit he is saying that Confraternities are called to live as a leaven for the whole Church are dynamic, are indeed part of the Church’s pilgrimage on earth. And we begin with evangelical spirit, which means “walking in Christ’s footsteps.”
  • Everything hinges on this relationship with Christ, begun in baptism, but meant to grow along the journey of our life. Pope Benedict in 2007 called confraternities “popular schools of lived faith and sources of holiness.” They are meant not to be cultural associations or custodians of sterile traditions, but must feature love of God, discipleship and leaving of the Gospel. In a superb talk on the New Evangelization during the Great Jubilee of 2000, the future Pope Benedict perceptively said, “A large part of today’s humanity does not find the Gospel in the permanent evangelization of the Church: That is to say, [they do not discover] the convincing response to the question: How to live? This is why, along with permanent and uninterrupted and never to be interrupted evangelization, we are searching for, a new evangelization, capable of being heard by that world that does not find access to ‘classic’ evangelization. … This is why we are obliged to look for new ways of bringing the Gospel to all.”
  • The first thing we need to do as we journey toward 2033 and seek to help the whole world join us on that journey, is to based on life far more on the One who announced to us, “I am the Way.”
  • We cannot take this relationship with God for granted. First, for ourselves: we cannot live on yesterday’s good habits; this period of preparation is a time of conversion and growth. But second, also for others: we cannot presume, even when they’re showing up for Church, praying the Rosary, doing works of charity, that they are really encountering the Lord Jesus. So many have simply drifted away from the practice of the faith because they were mouthing their prayers correctly but not really encountering God listening, they were going to Mass but treating the Eucharist as a holy “it” rather than meeting Jesus Christ, they were forensically auditing their soul in confession, but didn’t realize the priest was acting as an ambassador of Christ in his person, they were reading the words of Scripture without perceiving that it was the Word of God, and they were engaging their neighbor, sometimes even in beautiful works of charity, without grasping that they were caring for Christ in disguise.
  • As the great Aparecida document chaired by the future Pope Francis taught in 2007, everything in the transmission of the faith begins with a true encounter with God. From there flows conversion, and discipleship, and life in communion and finally mission. Many who have been raised in Christian families and even practiced the faith have not yet had that deep encounter with the living Lord. That’s what Pope Francis means by evangelical spirit. That spirit of the Gospel, to center one’s whole life on Christ, to meet him in prayer, the sacraments, the Word of God, penance and charity, is what members of confraternities and those who welcome pilgrims at Shrines are meant to manifest and help others to experience. Pope Francis urged, “Advance with determination along the path of holiness; do not rest content with a mediocre Christian life, but let your affiliation serve as a stimulus, above all for you yourselves, to an ever greater love of Jesus Christ.”
  • Someone who showed this evangelical spirit and helped millions of others to do so is my predecessor as National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in the United States who will be beatified here in St. Louis later this month. Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s whole life is a witness to evangelical spirit. He knew Jesus Christ personally — and not just about him — and he spent his life zealously trying to help others to know and love him too. His classic Life of Christ, his Way of the Cross, his Seven Last Words, all give powerful witness to the depth of his friendship and love with Jesus. More than anything, his witness of 60 years of daily Holy Hours show the consequences of his true evangelical spirit. Every day, no matter where he was in the world, he kept an appointment with Jesus. His personal encounter with Jesus was not just a once-in-a-lifetime event but a daily occurrence. And he became the greatest apostle in the history of the Church of the importance of a daily holy hour, a daily encounter. Anyone who knows his life grasps that the true source of his holiness was what he was allowing the Lord to do in him each day. And he would be urging us, as we make this journey toward Ottawa, toward Rome, and toward the heavenly Jerusalem, to make that journey explicitly with Jesus, by making the time each day to adore him, to listen to him, in the Blessed Sacrament, and, if possible, to receive him as our cibum viatorum, as the food of pilgrims we need to make the journey.

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