Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Augustine Institute, Florissant, Missouri
St. Louis Collaborator Summit for the PAC 27 Marian Conference
September 5, 2026
To listen to an audio recording of this third part of a three-part keynote, please click below:
The text that guided the talk was:
- Today, as you know, we celebrate the liturgical feast of St. Teresa of Calcutta, one of the great saints of modern times. While serving as a Sister of Loreto in Calcutta, she received her “call within a call” to become a Missionary of Charity and to assemble around her other such missionaries so that together they might be bring Christ’s light, satiate his infinite thirst for souls, and care for him in the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor. They became those great ambassadors of divine love across the globe, with over 5,000 sisters in 754 houses in 139 countries across the globe, including 50 houses in the United States and five in Canada. Their existence, raised up by the Lord 80 years ago next Thursday, is a sign of how the Church, by her nature, is called to be missionary, to bring Christ’s charity, to everyone created and redeemed by the love of God, with a special care for the lost, the least and the last.
- In this third part of the keynote, we turn to Pope Francis’ words that confraternities, ecclesial movements, and the Church, alongside an evangelical and an ecclesial spirit, are meant to be characterized likewise by a missionary spirit. By our baptism, we are called to holiness and mission, to be missionary disciples in communion. Our confirmation seals and strengthens those graces. We become, with the Holy Spirit, joint witnesses to Jesus, his words, his life, his death, his resurrection, his real presence still with us in the middle of the world.
- As we begin approaching 2033, we remember that in addition to marking the 2000th anniversary of Jesus’ public ministry and his suffering, crucifixion and triumphal resurrection on the third day, we are similarly celebrating his promise of the Holy Spirit, fulfilled on Pentecost.
- Some of you may know that there is a controversy among Biblical scholars as to whether the Last Supper happened on a Thursday, as Matthew, Mark and Luke indicate, or took place on a Tuesday, as St. John suggests. In the first, it would suggest that the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus would have taken place April 7-9, 30 AD; in the latter, the triduum would have occurred, April 3-5, 33 AD. I won’t get into the fascinating details involving the words of the evangelists and the lunar cycles of the Jewish calendar governing the celebration of Passover on the 14th of the month of Nisan. Church tradition has normally sided with 33 AD because we have thought that Jesus was born at the very beginning of the first year anno Domini and died at 33, but we now know that the monk Dionysius Exiguus, aka Dennis the Short, miscalculated in 531 the date of Jesus’ birth. He didn’t know then that Herod the Great, who sought to kill Jesus and all those boys under 2 in the region of Bethlehem, died for certain in the year 4 BC, which means that Jesus would have had to have been born in what we know calculate as 4-6 BC. So if Jesus died in 30 AD, he would have been 34-36 years of age; if in 33 AD, 37-39. Regardless, I go through these dates for two reasons. First, to help us take the year 2027 even more seriously than we might, because if Matthew, Mark and Luke are right, we will be marking next year the 2000th anniversary of Jesus’ public ministry. Second, to help us focus on the anniversary of Pentecost, the 2000th birthday of the Church, which would be either May 29, 2030 or May 25, 2033. While we may never know for sure the exact date, we do know the fact that it happened and that it happened on a real date in time. The birth of the Church on Pentecost is a sign that the Church is missionary by her nature. As St. Paul VI said, the Church doesn’t have a mission but is a mission. It also means that each Christian, as Pope Francis said in the Joy of the Gospel, must be able to say, “I am a mission on this earth. That is the reason why I’m here in this world.”
- That’s one of the reasons why Pope Francis, in his words to confraternities in 2013, underlined that if they are to be truly Catholic, they must be missionary. He said, “I would like to add a third expression which must distinguish you: missionary spirit. You have a specific and important mission, that of keeping alive the relationship between the faith and the cultures of the peoples to whom you belong. You do this through popular piety. When, for example, you carry the crucifix in procession with such great veneration and love for the Lord, you are not performing a simple outward act; you are pointing to the centrality of the Lord’s paschal mystery, his passion, death and resurrection which have redeemed us, and you are reminding yourselves first, as well as the community, that we have to follow Christ along the concrete path of our daily lives so that he can transform us. Likewise, when you express profound devotion for the Virgin Mary, you are pointing to the highest realization of the Christian life, the one who by her faith and obedience to God’s will, and by her meditation on the words and deeds of Jesus, is the Lord’s perfect disciple (cf. LG 53). You express this faith, born of hearing the word of God, in ways that engage the senses, the emotions and the symbols of the different cultures … In doing so you help to transmit it to others. … When you visit shrines, when you bring your family, your children, you are engaged in a real work of evangelization. This needs to continue. May you also be true evangelizers! May your initiatives be ‘bridges,’ means of bringing others to Christ, so as to journey together with him.” And in words that are particularly resonant on this memorial of St. Teresa of Calcutta, he concluded, “Each individual Christian and every community is missionary to the extent that they bring to others and live the Gospel, and testify to God’s love for all, especially those experiencing difficulties. Be missionaries of God’s love and tenderness! Be missionaries of God’s mercy, which always forgives us, always awaits us and loves us dearly.
- A decade later, he underlined that the dynamic nature of this missionary call within the pilgrim Church on earth. Following upon his saying that evangelical spirit means walking with Christ and ecclesial spirit walking together with others, he added: “This brings us to the third dimension of your journey: to walk proclaiming the Gospel, bearing witness to your faith and taking care of your brothers and sisters, especially in the new forms of poverty of our time. … In this regard, the history of the Confraternities has a great charismatic heritage. Do not let this heritage go to waste! Keep alive the charism of service and mission, responding with creativity and courage to the needs of our time.”
- To walk proclaiming the Gospel is what it means to live with a missionary spirit, something that is supposed to characterize each of our paths following in the footsteps of Jesus the Way. First, we have to be walking, moving, growing, not remaining static. Second we need to be walking and talking at the same time, entering into conversation like Jesus did with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, and announcing the presence of Christ not just verbally but with our body language, by our clothing, by our whole life and bearing.
- When Pope Leo was elected on May 8 last year, he spoke to the reality of this missionary spirit. In his first words from the balcony on the façade of St. Peter, he made precisely the point that his predecessor emphasized. “I thank my brother Cardinals,” he said, “who have chosen me to be the Successor of Peter and to walk together with you as a Church, … ever seeking to act as men and women faithful to Jesus Christ, in order to proclaim the Gospel without fear, to be missionaries. … Together, we must look for ways to be a missionary Church.” He is the first missionary to be elected Pope — someone who gone far afield from his native place, as he did for 22 years in Peru — since Christ chose Peter. It’s highly significant that this Pope, chosen by God it seems to lead the Church into the celebration of the Great Jubilee of 2033, is a missionary in his core as he seeks to walk together with us proclaiming the Gospel without fear as missionaries within the missionary Church.
- On this point, with leaders of Catholic confraternities, shrines, movements, and apostolates, I would like to make an important clarification. When the Church speaks about mission and missionary spirituality, it is saying much more than just we’re called to share the faith with others. St. John Paul II, in his beautiful 1990 encyclical on The Mission of the Redeemer, distinguished between three different forms of sharing the faith. One he called ordinary pastoral care of the faithful, by which he meant helping those who are practicing the faith to grow in holiness, allowing the seed of the Gospel to penetrate far more deeply into the soil of their life so that they might bear fruit. The second he called the new evangelization, which means sharing the faith anew with those who have been baptized but either drifted or chose to give up the practice of the faith. The third, he said, is mission proper, what the Church has always called the missio ad gentes, the mission to proclaim the Gospel to all nations, to every creature, to those who do not yet know Christ. St. John Paul II called us all to have the mind and heart of missionaries in this stricter sense of the term, to calibrate the way we think and the way we love to the full dimension of Christ’s saving love, not to reduce or restrict it to nearer zip codes, or national boundaries, or linguistic groups. Sometimes we can become so focused on the new evangelization that we forget about those who have never even heard the saving name of Jesus. Out of the 8.1 billion people alive, only 2.6 billion have been baptized. That means 5.5 billion people — 2000 years after the resurrection — are not Christian, have no personal relationship with Jesus, the Resurrection and the Life, the Good Shepherd, the Way, the Truth, the Light of the World. In the late 19th century, one of the young missionary priests in Africa whom St. Therese had spiritually adopted, asked how it was possible that, then, 18 centuries after Pentecost, so many had yet to hear the Gospel, the Little Flower, with the wisdom that led to her become a doctor of the Church even though she had never even attended high school, simply said because of the lack of zeal among Christians. St. John Paul II said in Redemptoris Missio said that if we’re ever going to do the new evangelization and pastoral care of the faithful well, we must give priority above all to the mission to those who don’t know Christ. “Without the mission ad gentes,” he said, “the Church’s very missionary dimension would be deprived of its essential meaning and of the very activity that exemplifies it.” If we have the heart and mind of missionaries, caring for everyone, including in the most distant areas, then that zeal will influence the way we treat and try to bring Christ to all our friendships, to our parish life, to our confraternities, associations and apostolates. But if the pillar of mission is not first, then it will turn down the fire and lower the temperature in every other aspect. To bring to everything the love like Teresa of Calcutta and the zeal of Francis Xavier, we must prioritize bringing the faith to everyone, including those in far distant places.
- This is something that characterized the life of Archbishop Fulton Sheen, for whose beatification we’re planning for here in St. Louis in just 19 days. He said, “My greatest love has always been for the missions of the Church.” And he showed it, dedicating 16 years of his life as the National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies and trying to pass on that missionary zeal to American Catholics, helping them to pray for the missions through the World Mission Rosary, to know about the missions through two magazines he founded and three columns he’d write a week, and to support the missions. In his tenure, he raised $200 million ($2.1 billion in today’s money) to build Churches, schools, seminaries, convents and help dioceses pay their bills and survive, donating $10 million of his own media earnings and bequeathing 40 percent of his estate, including copyrights to his books and audios, to the Society of the Propagation of the Faith. His greatest love was for the missions ad gentes and he proved it.
- As we continue our journey toward 2033, it’s time for a new Pentecost, and soon-to-be Blessed Fulton Sheen, together with St. Teresa of Calcutta, St. Francis Xavier and St. Therese, will be intercessors praying for us to live with the apostolic fire that gave birth to the Church that characterized their whole lives. Christ has indeed come to light the world on fire and continues to long for it to be blazing! The Holy Spirit has come down as tongues of fire so that the apostles, and indeed every member of the Church, can give witness to Christ with ardent love. That’s what the celebrations leading up to and during 2033 are supposed to ignite. And as St. Catherine of Siena once wrote, “If you are who you should be, you will set … the whole world ablaze.”
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