Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Mission Magazine Spring 2025 Edition
April 1, 2025
Dear Fellow Missionaries,
This April we will be entering into the most dramatic moments in the history of the world, Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection, which we will mark during Holy Week and the Easter Season.
We’ve all been made “witnesses of these things,” as Jesus himself told us after the Resurrection (Lk 24:48).
This month is, therefore, a time for us not just to unite ourselves intensely to Jesus as we enter liturgically into his new and eternal Passover, but to invite others to enter these sacred mysteries with us.
It’s also a time for us to unite ourselves to our brothers and sisters all across the globe, in a particular way to those in missionary territories where they may be celebrating Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter for the first time, or in the midst of persecution, or situations of war, great poverty, natural disaster.
The moving words the Church sings at the beginning of the Easter Vigil will resonate no matter where we celebrate: “This is the night that even now, throughout the world, sets Christian believers apart from worldly vices and from the gloom of sin, leading them to grace and joining them to his holy ones.”
As we think about “joining the holy ones,” we will have a new this month who is an inspiration to anyone involved in the Church’s missionary work.
Blessed Carlo Acutis will be canonized on April 27 in St. Peter’s Square. Carlo died of leukemia in 2006 at the young age of 15, but already by then he had manifested an incredible love for God Christ and a desire for everyone else, particularly his peers, to share that love.
Born in London in 1991 and raised in Milan, Carlo as a young boy became fascinated by the reality of Jesus’ real presence in the Holy Eucharist. His loving parents were not practicing the faith at the time, but thanks to the influence of a grandmother, a Polish nanny, and a priest at his Catholic school, he became in his few years on earth one of the greatest apostles of the Eucharist in the history of the Church.
He made his first Holy Communion at the age of 7 and thereafter sought to receive the Risen Lord Jesus every day in the Eucharist. He regularly made visits to the Blessed Sacrament and sought to live a truly Eucharistic life, which he called his “highway to heaven.”
It wasn’t enough for him, however, to have an intense personal relationship with Jesus. He also wanted everyone he knew to share that gift.
His contagious love for the Lord soon “infected” his parents.
He tried, at first unsuccessfully, to invite his friends and classmates to come to Church with him. Eventually, through talking to them about various Eucharistic miracles that have taken place in history, he was able to draw them to the even greater miracle that takes place each day on the altar: when not only the bread and wine change into Jesus’ body, blood, soul and divinity, but — unlike in what happened in Lanciano or Orvieto or other Eucharistic miracles — the Eucharistic Jesus hides himself the appearances of simple bread and wine.
At a young age he began to teach Catechism, to help those preparing for first Communion to develop a great hunger for Jesus, the Bread of Life.
But not even that was enough. He thought about the multitudes across the world who were living on some other path than the “highway to heaven.” So at 11, he taught himself computer programming and graphic design to build a website listing the “Eucharistic Miracles of the World,” so that his peers everywhere — his age, younger or older — would be able to make the journey from the Eucharistic miracles to the daily Eucharistic Miracle.
The Vatican was so impressed by his work that in 2004-05, during the Year of the Eucharist, it hosted an exhibition featuring his work right off St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican.
That exhibit now travels the world to inspire the Catholic people on every continent to deeper Eucharistic knowledge, faith, gratitude, amazement, love and life. His website remains active so that Catholic priests, teachers and faithful anywhere can study or download the exhibition and hopefully come to join him on the road that leads to eternal life.
Soon to be Saint Carlo teaches us various lessons relevant to the Church’s missionary work.
First, that young people can be great apostles of their peers and even of adults. That’s what we emphasize in the Missionary Childhood Association, in which “children help children” to receive the Kingdom of God with faith like the childlike Carlo.
Second, that the digital continent is a powerful tool to share the faith. Just like St. Paul crisscrossed the ancient world, so Carlo made the world his own digital Areopagus. Modern apostles need both in-person and cyberspatial zeal!
Third, that the goal of the Church’s missionary work is more than teaching all nations the words of the Gospel: it’s sharing the person of Jesus Christ, God-with-us, who remains with us in the Sacraments but especially in the Holy Eucharist.
Missionary work, moreover, is not just about “making converts” but, as St. Paul shows us, about building Churches, understood as communities of faith. That’s what the Eucharistic Jesus strives to do, making us “one body, one spirit in Christ,” as we pray in the Eucharistic prayer.
Finally, missionary work is about salvation, about sharing Jesus’ risen life in this world and forever, and about getting on the “highway to heaven” with the other members of the pilgrim Church on earth as we head toward that place that Jesus, through the holy days we celebrate this month, won for us.
100 years ago, on May 17, 1925, St. Therese of Lisieux was declared a saint by Pope Pius XI. She was already popular but few could have guessed that this 24-year old Carmelite would become one of the most beloved saints of the 20th century and, alongside St. Francis Xavier, be named co-patron of the Missions.
This month, the Church will be canonizing a person even younger, who already has become one of the most beloved saints of the 21st century. Because of his apostolic zeal in evangelizing through the digital continent, is it possible that he could become the third co-patron of the Church’s missionary work?
EWTN has asked me to help with their television coverage from the Vatican of Carlo’s canonization on April 27. So I hope to be able to share in the joy of that celebration with you via your television or livestream!
United in Christ’s Mission,
Monsignor Roger J. Landry
National Director