Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Interview with Father Boniface Hicks, OSB
We Are One Body Radio
March 18, 2025
The following is a Youtube generated transcript of the interview, with a few edits for transcription error:
HICKS: Hello, my name is Father Boniface Hicks. I’m a Benedictine priest and monk of St Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, Pennsylvania and am so grateful to have this opportunity to talk with Monsignor Roger Landry who is a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, although his assignments have been various and very interesting. He’ll tell us a little bit more about that. But so grateful to be with you Monsignor Landry as you share with us about your Journey of Faith. Thanks for taking the time.
LANDRY: Great to be with you, Father Boniface, and all who are tuning in to us.
HICKS: Let’s turn to Our Lady for a moment and ask for her prayers for us that we can focus on what the Lord wants us to focus on and prayers for our listeners that they can hear what the Lord wants to say in their hearts. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
LANDRY: Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
HICKS: Monsignor Landry can you give us just a little picture of yourself. How old you? How long you’ve been ordained? A little bit about your current assignment?
LANDRY: I am 56 years old. I’m a native of Lowell, Massachusetts, which was the epicenter of the American Industrial Revolution. I’m an identical twin. We were born first. Scot’s my twin brother’s name. I’m one of four. I have a younger brother, Greg, and a younger sister, Colleen. My parents, thanks be to God, Roger and Midge, are still alive and very faithful. I was ordained a priest in 1999 for the Diocese of Fall River, so last year, while I had the privilege to carry the Lord Jesus in The Blessed Sacrament across the country as part of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage I was able to celebrate my 25th anniversary en route and it really ties into the Eucharistic center of my life not to mention my priesthood.
HICKS: Tell us a little bit about your current assignment.
LANDRY: My current assignment is as National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies. There are four Pontifical Mission Societies. One is the Society for the Propagation of Faith, which many know of. There’s the Missionary Childhood Association, which helps children help other children in missionary territories across the globe. A third is the Society of St Peter the Apostle, which cares for seminarians and novices in missionary territories to make sure that they can get the formation they and the church need. Finally there’s the Missionary Union, in which we try to foster prayer for the missions especially among priests and religious, conscious that if priests and religious are really focused on the missions and praying for them like St. Therese, the co-patron of the missions did throughout her 24 years ,then the whole church will more easily be able to pray in union with them.
My predecessor in this position for 16 years was Archbishop Fulton J Sheen and so it’s quite an honor to be his successor. Most people would know of his work in the missions and so one of the responsibilities I have is to try to fill his big shoes of proclaiming a missionary spirituality and trying to help all American Catholics grasp as Pope Francis likes to say that we don’t have a mission but are a mission and then try to raise funds to make sure that the church in 1,124 missionary territories across the globe gets what it needs.
Last year, the Pontifical Mission Societies built about a thousand churches across the globe. We paid for the education of 41,000 seminarians and novices. We’ve built convents. We’ve built monasteries. We’ve built pastoral centers, food pantries, you name it. We try to help the church where she’s incapable of sustaining herself to be able to grow up and mature so that one day they are able to sustain herself and maybe send back missionaries to strengthen those who made it possible for them to grow in faith.
HICKS: Wow, what an awesome mission! To support the missions. It’s an extraordinary gift!
LANDRY: When we go back to my early days, I was kind of breastfed on missionary spirituality. My mom was president of a Legion of Mary praesidium, actually two praesidia, in my hometown. She was constantly going door to door trying to spread the faith and she was coming back each night and telling us, “This person opened the door and we had a beautiful conversation,” “That person slammed the door in our face,” “That person pretended as if he or she wasn’t in the home,” and so on. So from my earliest days, not only was I reading some of the stories about the great saint missionaries across the globe but I was seeing that missionary zeal really put into practice by my mom as she went door to door in the city of Lowell, Massachusetts with a partner trying to spread the treasure of our faith in a Marian Manner.
HICKS: Monsignor Landry, I just want to really emphasize that, because it’s so unusual to hear that. Our listeners might not even really register what you just said. Your mother went door to door, a Catholic woman went door to door, to promote the Catholic Faith through the Legion of Mary.
LANDRY: The Legion of Mary was founded in Ireland by a man named Frank Duff last century and it grew and it spread. My mother in one of the two parishes we grew up with really took some leadership. There were probably about 30 members of the Legion of Mary and each of them every week would get parts of various neighborhoods where they’d go door to door trying to pray and meet with the people. That’s just hard work. You’re not always received, but she just continuously went on out and then she came back and on our kitchen table — because our house was very small she would basically use the kitchen table as a desk — and she’d do the paperwork and take some notes and mark down various addresses. It was a little annoying for all of us because we just wanted to watch the television that was there in the kitchen as my mom was doing all her paperwork. Nevertheless, it became normal for me growing up to say that our faith isn’t just for us; our faith is a real gift that we want everybody to have. Because it’s not a thing: it’s a relationship with the Lord Jesus. As Pope Francis loves to say, when we’ve really met the Lord Jesus and his love for us, how could we possibly keep that for ourselves? So that type of missionary zeal that I saw in my mom became the coordinates with which I was growing in the faith.
HICKS: That’s amazing. I was just going to ask that. As a young boy, sometimes those things are really awkward: Mom does this weird and annoying thing — I’m sure there was some of that — but it sounds like there was also an attraction for you in that.
LANDRY: Faith was the oxygen we breathed at home. Actually my earliest memory is of praying the Rosary as a family. I think it was around my third birthday in which to try to draw a little attention as I prayed a Hail Mary, I said, “And blessed is the fruit of your womb, apple.” Everybody looked at me and my mom said, “Honey, apples are good. Jesus is better. Do we want good or do we want better?” And I said, “Better,” so she said, “Would you like to try it again?” So I prayed the Hail Mary the right way thereafter! But my earliest memory is of praying the Rosary as a family which we did every night. I learned that the Rosary wasn’t just an exercise.
I’m talking a lot about my mom, and I think she’ll be happy when she eventually listens. I want to work my dad in, and will, with his St Joseph spirituality, in a second. But once my mom was kind of hiding and praying in the bathroom. With four young kids sometimes just to escape for a little bit, she’d go into the bathroom and she’d sit down on the toilet not going to the bathroom but just sit down on the top of the lid so that she could pray. One day I opened up the door and there she was seated on the top of the lid, crying like crazy. As a as a young child, I said, “Mom, what’s wrong?,” and she said, “O, nothing honey, I’m just praying about Jesus’ being crowned with thorns.” She was praying the Third Sorrowful Mystery. Just seeing your mother praying in a way that would make her weep as she contemplated the mysteries of the Rosary taught me what the Rosary was about and it’s not just 53 Hail Marys with six Our Fathers and six Glory bes and a Creed and a Hail Holy Queen; it’s a real entrance into Mary’s own pondering of the Blessed Fruit of her womb in the greatest mysteries of his life.
So my mom made palpable for me that prayer was something we do, that God is real and that we’re able to talk to him, and that we’re able to love him in such a way that we can mourn over the way others had treated him centuries before. So that was the blessed environment in which God gave me the privilege to grow up.
HICKS: That is so beautiful. When did those things start to take hold in your heart or how did that develop in your own life, Monsignor Landry?
LANDRY: So prayer was a normal thing at home. We were taught our prayers. We prayed the Rosary. Each night before we went to bed we’d pray an Our Father, three Hail Marys and a glory be. My mother would sometimes say, “Anything you need to say thanks to God for? Anything you need to say sorry for? And what do you need his help for tomorrow?” These were the basic rudiments of what would call an Examen today as we examine our day at the end of the day. She would kind of walk us through that.
She would also take my identical twin brother Scot and me to daily mass when the weather was good. She’d push us in a two-child stroller. I remember one day when I was four and change, watching elderly Father Jon Cantwell who was the pastor of the parish, who was 73 going on 173 at the time — he would die, I think, not too long late. The poor guy had literally everything wrong with him, from leg issues to heart issues to lung issues, but he celebrated a really devout mass. By this point my parents had explained to me that we Catholics believe that after the special words the priest says at the altar, it’s no longer bread and wine at all but it’s really Jesus.
As I was listening to Father Cantwell say, “This is my body,” and at the time, “This is the cup of my blood,” I thought if I were big enough to climb up on the altar and peer into the Chalice I’d see human blood, what I would now call coagulates and scabs and things.Then I watched Father Cantwell as he weeble-wobbled his way down the sanctuary at the time of Holy Communion to give Jesus to whoever was old enough and lucky enough to be able to receive him. Again I was only halfway to my first Holy Communion at this point. Then after having distributed Holy Communion, he came over to the side altar where the Tabernacle was, which was directly in front of where we were kneeling, and he put the ciborium carrying the Hosts that hadn’t been distributed back into the Tabernacle. He did so in excruciating pain that I’ll never forget: he very slowly knelt all the way down and then putting his arms on the mensa or the table-like part of the altar, lifted himself up by the strength of his arms, closed the Tabernacle door and went back to the altar to purify the chalice.
I just kept staring at that door where he had just put Jesus back, recognizing that the Lord Jesus was behind that door. That was the day, still short of my fifth birthday, on which I said, “The priest has to be the luckiest guy in the whole world: capable of holding God in his hands and giving Him to others!” That was the day basically at four where I asked the Lord to give me this privilege to be able to do the same thing Father Cantwell was doing.
That desire never left me. But that desire was a great inspiration as I was growing because if eventually I was going to be a priest, I wanted to be a good priest. What’s a good priest? Well, a good priest is someone who prays. A good priest is someone who preaches in a way that can inspire, and so I’d always take mental notes in every homily I’d hear, saying to myself, “Well, I don’t want say as many aahs as that priest,” and, “I definitely want to tell good stories like that priest.” When I started to go to the Sacrament of Confession, I’d pay attention to the fact that priests would do it differently: some priests made you float off the roof of the confessional as you were departing; other priests would kind of make you feel worse than you would arrived. So I would tell myself I wanted to be like the first, not so much like the second.
I observed priests who were good with people, priests who were always present at the difficult moments, at wakes — it seemed like everybody was dying and I was going to a wake every week when we were growing up. All of that was just a great help from the Lord to give me an impetus from a very early age to look at the world, to look at everything I was doing, through the eyes of a future priest. So when I was eventually ordained 25 years later, I think I was ordained with 25 years of priestly experience. I was able to hit the ground really running.
HICKS: Wow that’s amazing that at such an early age you are already visualizing yourself as a priest, thinking about how you could be a better priest. You were all in pretty early on.
LANDRY: I’m grateful for that gift. Like anybody growing up, I wanted to be the starting catcher for the Boston Red Sox, I wanted to be a professional tennis player, a brain surgeon, President of the United States, litigator, all of these things, not to mention a husband and a dad. All of these good things were likewise attractive to me. But I never lost this vocational sense that the Lord Jesus might be calling me to help other people encounter him and so how is that really going to happen?
Because I had no desire at any point just to be a priest — I either wanted to be a holy priest or I didn’t want to be a priest at all — and so how does one get ready for that? Eventually I started to go to daily Mass. Eventually I’d go to regular confession. Eventually I got a spiritual director. I would read the lives of the Saints. I would struggle to live in the most moral way possible, in the most charitable way possible. All of these were helps along the way as I was trying to interiorize what a call to be a priest meant.
Then eventually, when I got to college and I recognized that the priesthood or any vocation in the church flows out of our prior vocation to be a saint — to be holy to be like God, to love like him, to be merciful like him etc. — that I started to take that call to holiness more seriously, trying to cut out from my life the things that didn’t belong and trying to add the things that should belong but I didn’t yet have, the virtues that were needed in order at least attempt to be all things to all people beautiful.
HICKS: I’m curious about two things, Monsignor. Tackle either or both or neither. As you’re going through this, your awareness of Jesus as a person, you mentioned a little bit earlier about our faith not being a thing but about being a relationship with the Lord Jesus. How did that develop? How did you became aware of his realness. I suppose you gave some hints of that along the way. Then I’m also curious about other people who supported you, your friends, your siblings, I suppose, but who else kind of echoed faith back to you maybe in addition to your family?
LANDRY: The fact that Jesus was a person rather than a concept or a thing was kind of the air that I breathed. Every time we said the Holy Name of Jesus in the Rosary, we would all bow our head together. When we would pray spontaneously to Jesus, we knew that we were talking to someone who he could hear us and that he was present. Every grace before meals we prayed we grasped that we were talking to God, we weren’t just saying holy words. So I grew with that awareness.
Eventually I started to go to Mass and be in the presence of the Lord Jesus. When I was a young child sometimes, we would go to Eucharistic adoration in another Parish in the city [St. Peter’s Parish in Lowell, MA] and there was the veneration of various relics that were put out. I will never forget being for an hour in the presence of Jesus in the monstrance and just recognizing that He was there. So it grew over the course of time. As I started to pray, I just always had a sense that when I said the Hail Mary, Mary was listening; when I said the Our Father, God the Father was listening; when I asked Jesus for help for whatever I needed, I had a sense that there was a person listening to me, the same way that anybody to whom I would speak like I’m speaking to you now would be listening. So that really grew.
In terms of people who helped, I’d say, first, my parents were huge influences. I’ve talked about my mom a lot. My dad I wouldn’t classify as particularly pious. He is a strong man but he prayed every day. If for my mom prayer was like a fish swimming in a deep sea, for my dad prayer it was a duty but it was a duty he did without complaint every day. When we would pray the Rosary as a family, if we were goofing off as young kids can sometimes do, it was my dad who would just look at us — and that was enough to get us to return to focus.
The other thing that my dad did — and we’re recording this interview the day before we celebrate the Solemnity of St Joseph — was that my dad was very much like St Joseph: a man not of many words but a man of hard work whose love language was his work and he taught me the value of hard work done for God. My dad, even the times he was sick, even the times he hated his job when we were growing up, he would have to drive over 50 miles each way to work under a foreman as a machinist who was always on his case, but my dad loved us so much that he just would leave at 4:10 in the morning in order to get to work and come back in the afternoon all for us. My twin brother and I and my younger brother and sister became good students because we just wanted to do our work as students as hard as my dad worked for us. I brought that spirituality likewise into the priesthood: I wanted to praise God and serve God and love God and love others through the type of work that I was doing. I learned that quiet, silent, we could also call Josephite, prayerful work from my dad.
And so those were those were the great influences growing up.
I had a godmother who had served six years as a nun and left before final vows who would always remind me of the things of God. My mom taught us how to read by reading all of these good children’s stories about Jesus. I remember reading for the first time. I think the first book I was ever able to read was about Zacchaeus climbing up into the tree in order to be able to see Jesus. As a short kid, I identified with him. But all of those biblical stories, Daniel in the Lions’ Den, you name it, were super influential in my recognizing that God is real.
Then when I began to get to know priests, that was massively important. The priest in my home parish [St. Michael’s, Lowell, MA] was Father Paul Bailey. God Rest him. He taught me priestly wisdom and I just wanted to receive as much as I could from him. Father Paul Sullivan was an athletic Irishman. I always just wanted to grow up and beat him in tennis. Eventually I played tennis for Harvard but just to try to grow as a tennis player in order to take out Father Sullivan on the tennis court was a huge inspiration to me. Who would have ever guessed that I would be a tennis player throughout high school and in various state tournaments and things and then play for the Harvard team when we were fourth in the country? The real impetus for that came because I truly admired a priest who played tennis.
There was another priest, Father Leonard O’Malley, who used to write his own music, little things that everybody could sing with the guitar in the church. He taught me the creativity of the faith, that we just didn’t have to do what others had given us before — as beautiful as that is — but sometimes we could with our own creativity, do something beautiful for God. I always loved his music because his music was always super prayerful, nothing to show off but something to bring us more deeply into Christ.
So the friendship with those priests helped. I had a chance to work in a rectory for five years from the seventh grade all the way through the time I graduated from high school. There were five or six priests living at the rectory at any given time and then we would host the deanery meetings and all the priests in the city of Lowell would come over once a month. So I pretty much got to know every flavor of priest and religious that existed in Lowell Massachusetts. Many of these guys were wonderful priests and I tried to learn what was most impressive really about each of these priests and copy it: I want to be as cheerful as Father Campbell, I want to be as wise as Father Bailey, I want to be as down to earth as Father Sullivan, I want to be as creative as Father O’Malley. I had a lot of teachers about looking at the world and especially obtaining a sense of the sacred from a priestly perspective.
HICKS: You have such a beautifully positive view, Monsignor. I love that. I love the idea of focusing on the positive qualities of each of those priests forming that composite that could provide inspiration for you. I feel like it’s common when people get a little bit more immersed in the church to experience a bit of disillusionment seeing some of the negative qualities, but it sounds like you were really able to take that positive approach and build something beautiful.
LANDRY: There’s no question that that was a grace. I hadn’t thought about it, because each of the priests whom I knew likewise had points where they were criticized regularly. One priest was a terrible preacher. Everybody would call the rectory asking what Masses he would have that weekend. At first I thought it was a compliment because they wanted to go to this priest’s Mass. I made the mistake as a 13-year-old of saying, “Everybody calls to ask what Masses you’re celebrating.” Father asked, “Is that true and what do you tell them?” There were others who could be snappy. Everybody had his strength and weaknesses but I was always fascinated by the fact that each of them was a sacred subject, each of them had the capacity to hold God and give him to others, each of them had the capacity to heal my sins and bring my soul back to its baptismal splendor. So how could I say that compared to all of that, he also has bad breath, is a little long winded, or those things. They never really equated to me.
Fortunately for me I was two years too young to be an altar boy at that parish when one of the most notoriously abusive priests in the Archdiocese of Boston [Father Joseph Birmingham] was assigned there. He was very popular. I don’t remember this guy because he would have been removed from my parish but there was there was clearly a negative side that would eventually come to the surface. There were other priests who I got to know who were eventually removed because of at least an accusation with regard to conduct totally unbecoming of a priest. But even when I look back at those men, I was likewise able to see that there was some good there and that gave me, I think, a little bit of a perspective of the way that God looks at you and me and all of us and he still pronounces us very good. Morally we might be very bad, but in who we are, blessed by God, made in his image and likeness, we are by our nature very good. So being able to grow and see those good qualities in people allowed me, I think, as a priest especially when I work with young people to be able to stir into a flame aparks of divine love that God has implanted in everyone we serve.
HICKS: Beautiful. Wow. So, tell us a little more, Monsignor, about how things grew from there as you graduated high school. You didn’t go straight into seminary, I guess.How did your faith continue to grow?
LANDRY: It was a very interesting experience applying to colleges because the priests whom I really looked up to were all trying to get me to go to Catholic colleges, to follow in some of the footsteps of the priests they most admired. But there was a seminarian who was staying with us in the parish and he had gone to Brown University and his older sister had gone to Harvard. I really liked this seminarian who eventually became Father Charlie Higgins of the Archdiocese of Boston. Father Charlie just said, “Roger, you’re going to be the valedictorian of your high school and Lowell high school is one of the biggest high schools in the state of Massachusetts. You could easily get into Harvard, and you should go to Harvard and Scot should go to Harvard, too.” I would have never thought about that on my own. Nobody in my extended family had gone to college by this point and so we said, “OK, he must know something more than we do.” So we applied. We got in. We went to Harvard. One of the priests who I really loved, who was super funny, was celebrating a memorial Mass for my grandfather who had died. He celebrated a beautiful Mass but at the very end of the Mass, he said, “It’s probably a good thing that old Joseph Emile died when he did, so that he didn’t live long enough to see both of his beloved grandsons go to Harvard to lose their faith.” [I never quite knew whether he was joking]. That was a little bit the background with which we went to Harvard.
Harvard was on at one level a challenge for my faith because in Lowell, Massachusetts growing up, pretty much everybody practiced something. You’re a Roman Catholic or you’re a Greek Orthodox — there were 10,000 faithful Greek Orthodox — and we had a lot of Jews, as well as some ome strong Protestant parishes. Pretty much everybody in a public school at that point was practicing something. Then I went to Harvard where there was some anti-Catholicism and a sort of aggressive secularism, living as if God didn’t exist. So I quickly needed to be able to come up with an explanation for the reason of the hope that we bear within as Christians, Christ Our Hope. I really needed to be able to articulate it better. So Harvard really put me in a circumstance where I was tested but my faith grew as a result of it.
At the time, unfortunately, the Catholic Student Center at Harvard was kind of overrun by people who were not walking the walk. There were some out-of-the-closet practicing homosexuals who were running the Student Center. There were lots of others who for example would pass you the bulletin at Sunday mass and then on Monday morning you’d be seeing them coming out of your next door neighbor’s room where they didn’t live. There were these types of inconsistency morally.
While I was there, thankfully, my roommate — it’s a funny story when you look back at it — was a self-professed atheist or pagan, but when he was trying to come up to Cambridge, Massachusetts before the first semester through friends of friends of friends in three different countries he ended up staying for the summer in the Opus Dei residence for men close to Harvard. They embraced him with open arms even though he didn’t believe anything. Then, after, when I first met him, he said, “I was at this place run by Opus Dei this summer. Have you ever heard of it? I said never heard of it. I didn’t even know like what it signified Opus Dei. I had by this point many years of Latin. I knew what the words meant — the work of God — but I didn’t know anything else.
One of the numeraries in Opus Dei who came to visit my roommate one day met me. We started talking. We both were Boston Bruins fans. He invited me up to a holy hour and a dinner the following Friday. I went and met the priest there, Father Dave Cavanagh, who was an ex-Harvard hockey player, a great athlete and lawyer. We hit it off immediately. And it was through going regularly to the Opus Dei Center at Harvard where I really grew in faith. Father Dave invited me to come see him every week for spiritual direction. There were some laymen there who would invite me to read some of John Paul II’s Love and Responsibility and Theology of the Body and various encyclicals. I began to take my faith much more seriously intellectually. I devoured books. I read the Lives of the Saints. I had wonderful conversations. My faith matured. My prayer life matured. I learned formally how to meditate on Sacred Scripture. Eventually the Lord brought me to contemplation in which I was able to rest in front of him.
Discernment was a very big deal there because even though I had a desire to be a priest from the time I was four, it was during my time at Harvard that I realized a priestly vocation isn’t the same thing as a desire. It’s a call from God. I needed to question whether God was actually calling me to be a priest or whether I just desired to be a priest. So for about two and a half years, I did some very serious discernment. I grew as a daily Massgoer. I helped us get Eucharistic adoration started on the Harvard campus in the new Catholic Center. I really took my apostolate seriously trying to bring friends to the Catholic faith and I had the joy of being able to accompany several of them to baptism and reception into the church. And so my college years really nourished my life as a disciple of Jesus and it also really stirred into a flame my own ardor to spread the faith to everybody, because in my Harvard classmates, I could see just how much they needed Jesus, often without knowing it. That prepared me to go from a place like Harvard out into a secularized world having already been tested in the crucible that Harvard can be.
HICKS: Wow you really faced the challenges and rose to them. What was that like for you internally? It sounds like you really rose to the occasion. Is there a certain kind of excitement about that? Do you like challenges like that? While your faith grew beautifully, and was really deeply formed, was that hard for you as a competitive athlete?
LANDRY: I always loved challenges. I always loved what it would take to try to win the championship, to try to improve each day. All of that has overflowed into my life in general likewise into my spiritual life.
Harvard was a challenge. I helped found a magazine while I was there, basically with eight other Catholics. It wasn’t explicitly from a Catholic perspective. It was just kind of street corner common sense. But we took on the big issues of the day. We took on political correctness at its beginning. We took on the predation that would occur in the gay movement there, which would take a whole bunch of nerds as freshman who had never dated and take them out at the time to what would be gay bars and try to immerse them in a lifestyle before they even knew what was happening. So we confronted that. We confronted racism. We confronted lots of other things that were there at Harvard.
As a result of the issue we did on homosexuality, I actually received death threats that were taken seriously by the Harvard Police and beyond. One person left a message on my answering machine — those who still remember that antiquated form of communication we call an answering machine — saying, “Roger, we’re going to be waiting outside of Mather 425 with an AIDS infected needle. If we get you, great; if we get one of your roommates, great, too, because then you’ll have to learn what we know about commiseration.” Likewise people plastered the campus with posters with my face on it, telling people to come up and confront me. That is enough of a challenge, but if you have an identical twin on campus, you start to worry about his face likewise all over campus! The whole experience of living the faith in the midst of opposition helped me to focus very much as a young disciple in college that I had signed up to follow a crucified savior who waves to us with a gloriously scarred hand, saying, “Follow me!” So we shouldn’t pretend that being faithful to him and following him and trying to spread love of him are going to get applause and accolades. Sometimes it’s going to bring suffering.
So it was during that time where I realized that the only way people couldn’t intimidate me is if I were already dead and risen, so I needed to take these difficult parts of our faith very seriously. I remember one interview with the Boston Globe which was about the whole controversies that had started at Harvard by Peninsula and we were talking a little bit about the death threats. The reporter asked me, “Do those threats make you afraid?” The reporter wrote afterward, “He paused for a second, thought seriously about it, and then said very tersely, ‘No!’ So I asked him, ‘Why not?,’ and he said, ‘Well, all people can do is kill me once.’”
It was this type of thing that I think formed me in in the gift of the Holy Spirit called fortitude, which doesn’t mean you have no fear but it means you do what you’re supposed to do despite your fears. That’s what I was doing from that time.
Along my priestly path I didn’t always get virtue from the figures in the church with whom I was interacting. I had tried to apply to become a seminarian for my home Archdiocese and I really never even was able to get an application. So there were different forms of suffering along the way, from corruption in certain aspects of the church, but I soldiered on because God had taught me during my college years that suffering is part of our discipleship, that despite the pains, the Lord himself is with you in that suffering bringing, far greater good out of it than the evil you’re enduring. So I’ve tried to live my priesthood in a courageous way. I’ve likewise tried to use the gift of the priesthood to encourage others likewise to hear Jesus say in the Gospel, “Be not afraid” and to act on that command
HICKS: Wow! In the midst of all of that apologetics work and advocacy, obviously thinking deeply and learning to articulate your faith as well in common sense language, really philosophically sound as well as theologically sound, did all of that strengthen your conviction about becoming a priest? How did your priestly vocation and discernment unfold?
LANDRY: It absolutely showed me the need for priests who were able to teach and inspire. There were a lot of Harvard kids who had never met a priest who was as smart as they were in terms of aptitude. Sometimes they’d be bored out of their mind. So I wanted in a sense to be able to serve everybody, including the people who wanted seriously to be challenged. Little did I know at the time that later I would be Catholic chaplain at Columbia University for a few years and all of these lessons I learned as an undergraduate would help me specifically in that ministry. Throughout, I was trying to serve everybody, from people like my parents who are hardworking blue-collar people — and I had various assignments like that working with the Portuguese immigrants etc. — all the way to many with PhDs and in very high octane professions. So my Harvard years helped me to see the need.
Then, second, it made me count the cost, so if you’re suffering for the basic sort of witness that a Christian is able to give, you have to ask is it all worth it. I was growing in this awareness that it’s very much worth it. I’d kind of hear Jesus say to me every once in a while in prayer, “What would you do, Roger, for me. I’ve been crucified for you. What are you willing to do for me? Are you willing to pick up your cross every day and follow me?” I would respond, “Help me, Lord, I want to! Help me to be faithful.” So it solidified my desire for a priestly vocation and the willingness to give everything in the priesthood.
Then the discernment was an arduous cross at the same time. I didn’t realize when I was praying as an undergrad for two and a half years about my discernment that my prayer was actually becoming egocentric. Even though I was praying two and a half hours a day, it was all kind of like that Toby Keith country music song, “I want to talk about me. I want to talk about I!…” It was, “Lord tell me what you want me to do Lord. I’ll do whatever you want. Just reveal to me what your plans are for my life.” Then, rather than focusing on the Lord Jesus, I was actually focusing on myself in the presence of the Lord Jesus. It was only when I was able to detach myself from that self-centered prayer that I had the ears to hear what the Lord himself would be asking. So the very conclusion of the discernment process was when I made a novena to Our Lady under the title of her Immaculate Heart with this prayer: “Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of your mother, I just ask you on April 3 [1992, which was the first Friday of April where I’d have a holy hour at the first Friday adoration that I’d helped to established] through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, please reveal to me what you are asking of me in life, whether you want me to be a priest or a garbage collector.” That was my prayer. I had to apply to medical school if I was actually going to go on to medical school so there was a little bit of urgency. That April 3, 1992, God gave me the answer — not during that holy hour because something happened that prevented my going that day when my beloved sister just happened to show up wanting my help in her taxes and I needed to go rescue her from Harvard Square — but later on that day when I was talking to my spiritual director. As we started going through the conversation, it became abundantly clear that the Lord had pulled away every other thing to which I was drawn and when I was talking directly to the Lord about that in the chapel where I was praying, he helped me to hear interiorly that he was giving me the answer on the day I had asked, but not according to my expectations, just so that I wouldn’t think that I was in control of the friendship.
So my vocation grew a lot during that time period. Even the suffering, the patience of waiting two and a half years to just have the Lord confirm my priestly vocation was ultimately good not only for the humility you need in a priestly vocation but also in my help giving spiritual direction to many others as they go through the same process of discerning what God is asking of them.
HICKS: Wow, thank you for sharing that. It’s very humbling to talk about the egocentrism that can develop, but it’s a great lesson for all of us that even when we think we’re asking about what the Lord wants, we can really be more focused on ourselves than on the heart of the Lord that we’re trying to listen to.
LANDRY: We see it a lot. It’s a common mistake people make. We try to help them through it. It is really good that they’re praying, but I’m sure, Father Boniface, you have encountered this thousands of times like I have. A lot of times when we’re taught to pray and we’re in the presence of the Lord, we bring all our petitions, “Give me … give me … give me,” when you try to help people. The highest form of prayer is actually praise, loving and adoring God simply because he’s lovable and adorable. Then it’s thanksgiving. Then it’s contrition. Then it’s intercession for the needs of others. Finally God wants to encourage our bringing our own needs to him. But we can’t always just start with ourselves. We start with God. Jesus, when he taught us to pray the Our Father, was teaching us that way. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be your name, your Kingdom come, your will be done. Then we turn to him as a Father, asking for him to give us what a Father wants to give a child: feed me, forgive me, protect me. This is all the way Jesus taught us to pray. His words and his prayers always begin with the word Abba or dad and so they’re always focused on God. Sometimes when we pray, we focus too much on ourselves. It’s good that we’re praying, but we need to be open to the graces of the Lord to take us away from looking at the mirror into the mirror of his own eyes.
HICKS: Beautiful. Monsignor Landry, we are coming to the end of our program. If I can just ask you briefly as we wrap up to give a little pitch for The Pontifical Mission Societies for which you are the National Director so that our listeners maybe might help find where they could support you and your efforts.
LANDRY: Thanks for that opportunity. The church in the US pays for 40 percent of the mission work that the church carries out all across the globe. When we hear the Lord Jesus tell us to go and make disciples and go proclaim the gospel to every creature he wants us to take that seriously. As Archbishop Fulton J Sheen, my predecessor, used to say, only some of us can crisscross the globe to go to the missions but all of us are called to be missionaries, to support the missions by our prayers and to the extent that God has blessed us with more than we need, with our financial sacrifices. The Pontifical Mission Societies built 1,000 churches last year where the same Jesus we’ve been talking about today is adored and loved. We supported 41,000 future priests and novices. There are only 407,000 priests in the world. If let’s just say half of the seminarians that we’re paying for end up coming we’re going to increase by a notable number the amount of people who are able to bring Jesus’ Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity from Heaven to the altar closest to you, as well as to forgive our souls and celebrate all the other sacraments. So I urge people who are listening today to visit pontificalmissions.org and see a little bit of the work that we’re doing to try to pass on to others, as of the greatest importance of all, the treasure of faith we’ve received. I can promise you that I will be a good steward of every penny you give, so that it doesn’t get wasted but it gets invested in such a way that maybe one time you’ll hear Jesus say to you, “I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me something to drink, longing forfFaith and you preached the gospel to me.” And we may ask, “Lord, when did we do any of this for you?” And I hope you’ll hear, “As often as you supported the missions, you were making it possible for hundreds if not thousands of people to come to know me. Enter into my eternal Kingdom!” That’s what I hope we do as we live out our missionary vocation one way or the other. So thanks for the opportunity to make that pitch, Father Boniface.
HICKS: And should our listeners go to pontificalmissions.org?
LANDRY: Pontificalmissions.org. And if anybody would like to get in touch with me after the program just send me an email at RLandry@pontificalmissions.org. I’d be grateful for the feedback and I’d be grateful to facilitate any type of help you’d like to give.
HICKS: Beautiful, Monsignor Roger Landry, it has been a joy to hear about your faith which grew in such a different way from mine. I’m just delighted to hear about somebody who had faith from the earliest years, the beautiful witness of your parents and their formative influence in your life and the way that your faith grew with a lot of your natural abilities being drawn into the mix. And being able to stand up for your faith at Harvard and stand up for against some of the real attacks against faith in our time. And I know that you mentioned being at Colombia. I know you served at the United Nations. You’ve just been in the in the midst of the fray in so many ways. But I also love what you started out with, that you were in a central leading role in the national Eucharistic Pilgrimages and I believe are coming out with a book or helping to produce some materials from that to help us experience all those beautiful Eucharistic pilgrimages that took place prior of the national Eucharistic Congress. Really, you’ve done such a beautiful work for the church in our time and I’m so grateful for all of that and grateful that you took the time to share some of these developments in your in your own Journey of Faith. Be assured of our prayers for you, for your work with the missions, and I hope our listeners will be generous in supporting you.
LANDRY: Thanks, Father Boniface, for giving me the privilege to be on with you, to give a little bit of gratitude publicly to the fidelity of my parents, and I just think when you hear a priest tell his own story, the famous 19th century French preacher Henri Lacordaire’s words always come to the fore. He said, “O Sacerdoce, quelle vie!” “O priesthood, what a life!” And the Lord the Lord blesses us so generously that way. So thanks, Father Boniface, it was real joy to be with you.
HICKS: Could you lead us in a prayer and offer a blessing as we conclude?
LANDRY: I’d be honored to.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
HICKS: Amen.
LANDRY: Heavenly Father, we can’t thank you enough for the gift of your Son, who came into our life so that we might have life and have it to the full. Please send the Holy Spirit to open us up ever more to receive the fullness of life he is and gives, so that united with him in this world we might pass over with him into your eternal embrace. We ask this in his name, who is Lord forever and ever.
HICKS: Amen.
LANDRY: The Lord be with you.
HICKS: And with your spirit.
LANDRY: And may the blessing of Almighty God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit come down upon you and remain with you forever.
HICKS: Amen.
Well again, Monsignor Roger Landry, thank you so much for taking the time great to talk with you. God bless you!