Fr. Roger Landry
St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church, North Pickerington, Ohio
Mass for the Priest Himself on the Anniversary of His Ordination
Readings for the Votive Mass of the Holy Eucharist
June 26, 2024
1 Kings 19:4-8, Ps 116, 1 Cor 11:23-26, Mk 14:12-16.22-26
To listen to an audio recording of the homily, please click below:
The following text guided the homily:
We proclaim in the heart of every Mass, after we have lifted up our hearts to the Lord, that it is “truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give [God] thanks.”
Today is a day of special thanksgiving as the Seton Route of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage has come here to this beautiful parish dedicated to God though her intercession.
As part of the Eucharistic Revival, it’s a day of special thanksgiving to God for the awesome gift of Jesus Christ, who remains with us until the end of time, and even within us, in the Sacrament of the Altar.
And it’s a day to thank God for the gift of the priesthood, through which Christ gives us himself in the Eucharist, forgives us our sins in the Sacrament of Penance, and seeks to give us his life to overflowing.
Today I give thanks to God for the 25th anniversary of my priestly ordination, which took place at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Fall River by then Bishop, now Cardinal, Sean O’Malley, OFM Cap., who has remained a friend, spiritual father and priestly model for me.
I give thanks to God for the gift of the Church in heaven and on earth for having nourished my vocation as a Christian and a priest and for all the saints, priests, religious, consecrated, spiritual directors and directees, parishioners and faithful who have encouraged me, formed me and let me serve them in God’s name.
I thank God for the gift of the domestic Church in which I was raised, for my mom and dad who are present here today who first taught me to pray and to love God with all my heart and strength, for my twin brother Scot, my brother Greg, my sister Colleen, my in-laws, nieces and nephews, all of whom have formed the most important seminary and Christian formation house I ever attended, namely, home.
I thank the Lord for so many friends, priests, religious and lay, who have nourished my life and priesthood and opened up their homes and lives to me, many of whom have made the sacrifice to travel to be here today and many more who are watching on the parish’s superb livestream.
Among those friends, I’d like to mention my many fellow pilgrims with whom I have been blessed to journey over the past quarter century. My priesthood has been filled with pilgrimages to the Holy Land, to Rome and various parts of Italy, to the great shrines of Christian Europe, to World Youth Days and so much more. Many of those fellow spiritual travelers have continued our mutual journey here.
I would like to single out and express my gratitude to God that I can celebrate this silver jubilee with my fellow pilgrims on the Seton Route of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage: Natalie, Zoe, Amarayni, Marina, Christoph, Dominic, Father Justin, Brother Lazarus and the other CFRs who have joined us each week, Mother Mary Maximilian, Sisters Mary Fatima, Theresa Marie, and Miriam Christi, Beth Neer and Jan Pearson. It’s been a real honor to travel with them over the last 40 days of this life-changing adventure with the Lord and I hope to have the privilege to continue to accompany them not just over the next 25 days but I hope 25 years into eternity.
I’d like to say a special word of thanks to Bishop Earl Fernandes, Liz Christy and the Diocese of Columbus, to Father Leo Connolly and the parishioners of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Parish, for their overwhelming Christian hospitality and generosity in welcoming the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage and for pulling out all the stops for my twenty-fifth anniversary, treating me as if I were a native son of the Diocese and the parish. What a great grace it is that in divine providence I am able to celebrate this Mass of Thanksgiving as a Seton Route pilgrim here in this beautiful Church built for the Eucharist and placed under the prayers of this great Eucharistic convert, saint and intercessor, whose first-class relic my fellow pilgrims and I have been privileged to take turns wearing over the course of our journey.
In short, thank you to everyone who has come tonight to adore and thank the Lord together with me for the gift of 25 years of the priestly life.
Please permit me to single out one more person, Father Tad Pacholczyk, my classmate from the North American College, who was ordained a priest with me 25 years ago today in Fall River, who forsook a celebration of his own generously to come here to celebrate with all of us. In addition to being a faithful priest, Father Tad is also one of the universal Church’s top specialists in bioethics, whose work has guided countless people trying to understand and live according to Church teachings. Congratulations, Father Tad! Ad multos gloriososque annos!
Throughout this National Eucharistic pilgrimage, I’ve had the privilege to pray about and preach upon the dynamic nature of the Christian life. The Church, Christ’s Mystical Body and Bride, is, as Eucharistic Prayer III proclaims, a “pilgrim Church on earth.” The Christian summons, as St. John wrote, is to “walk as [Jesus] walked” (1 Jn 2:6), to hear him say to us, as he once said to a paralyzed man, “Rise and walk” (Lk 9:5), to respond to his summons, “Come to me,” to “Follow Me” and to “go” sent out by him to the lost sheep everywhere, proclaiming the Gospel, teaching others to do what Christ has taught us, and to remember and remind others that he is with us always until the end of time.
This pilgrimage of Christian life is in fact a Eucharistic procession, because Christ himself accompanies us each day — on both sunny and rainy ones — in the Holy Eucharist, as he strives as our Good Shepherd to lead us to the verdant pastures where he has prepared an eternal banquet for us and wants to make our cup overflow. In the first reading, we see how God sought to strengthen the Prophet Elijah for his 40-day journey through the desert with some hearth cakes and water brought by an angel. The Lord gives us so much more — his own Body and Blood — to strengthen us as our weekly, even daily, viaticum for the pilgrimage of life. The National Eucharist Pilgrimage, the boldest and longest Eucharistic Procession in the 2,000-year history of the Church, is meant to be a reminder of the pilgrim nature of the Church and of Christian existence and help all U.S. Catholics revive the dynamism of growth in Eucharistic faith, amazement, gratitude, love and life.
As I’ve looked back with gratitude on my 25 years as a priest and my 54 years as a Christian, I can see how the Eucharistic Lord Jesus has been there at every pivotal moment of my life, calling me to deeper and deeper communion with him in the most Blessed Sacrament. Please permit me to trace some of the major steps on the Eucharistic pilgrimage of my life, which I offer in grateful witness to God’s goodness and in the hope that it might help provoke others to thank the Lord for similar Eucharistic interventions in theirs.
The first major station on my Eucharistic journey happened 50 years ago this year. I come from a home with a mom who has always sought to align her life to that of Our Lady through her work in the Legion of Mary and a dad who was as strong, manly, hard-working and loving like St. Joseph. I’m convinced that I was able to give a wholehearted yes to my vocation as a priest because I come from a family in which loving God and giving him your best and your all was cultivated. My earliest memory is of praying the Rosary as a family, as we did every night. My mom, who has always been a daily Mass goer, one morning when I was four, brought Scot and me to daily Mass at St. Michael’s in Lowell, Massachusetts. We were seated in the first pew because we were short and to avoid distractions. My parents had taught us that the Eucharist wasn’t bread but Jesus. That morning Mass, as our pastor, an elderly Father Jon Cantwell, pronounced the words of consecration, I thought if I were big enough to climb up on the altar and peer into the chalice, I’d see what looked like human blood. Then I beheld with amazement Father Cantwell carefully weeble-wobble down the marble steps of the sanctuary to give the Lord Jesus to those, like my mom, who were old enough and lucky enough to receive him. Afterward Fr. Cantwell came over to the side altar where the tabernacle was, in front of our pew, to put the ciborium containing the hosts in the tabernacle, genuflect with great difficulty and shut the door, as he returned to the altar for the purification of the sacred vessels. I just kept staring at the tabernacle door knowing that Jesus was behind it. I remember saying to him within, “Jesus, the priest must be the luckiest person in the whole world, capable of holding you in his hands and giving you to others!” It’s then that I asked Jesus to make me a priest. That was 50 years ago. From that point forward, amazement at the priesthood and what the priest is able to do on behalf of God for others never waned. Over the course of time, of course I was also attracted to lots of other things, to being a doctor, lawyer, catcher for the Red Sox, professional tennis player, husband and dad, pro-life difference maker and more, but the desire to be a priest, and my wonder at the gift and mystery of the priesthood, never left me. It led me to be an altar boy for a decade, to work at a Catholic rectory assisting priests throughout junior high and high school and to try to live in a way morally consistent with Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. By the time I was ordained 25 years later, I already had a quarter century’s experience of looking at the world through the eyes of a priestly vocation, which I think God has been able to put to some use.
The second major Eucharistic station on the pilgrimage of my life happened a few weeks into my freshman year in college. On my own for the first time, responsible for my decisions, I pondered who I really wanted to be and what I should prioritize. I asked myself a fateful question: “Roger, is there anything more important you could do on a Monday than receive God inside? A Tuesday? Wednesday through Saturday?” By God’s grace, I recognized that, no, there’s nothing more important that anyone could do than to live out the mystery of the Annunciation each day and receive the same Jesus Christ within us as she received at Nazareth. I made a commitment to going to daily Mass. And obviously assisted by the mercy of God in the Sacrament of Confession, I’ve kept that commitment over the course of the last 13,059 days. It’s been a way in which I have been able to live what Jesus told us in tonight’s Gospel: “Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.” And I give thanks that day by day, communion by communion, I have been drawing my life from the Eucharistic Lord as the source, summit, root and center of my existence, as the Lord Jesus has been trying to do his work within me, to help me experience that life, to conform me more and more to his Eucharistic image, and to help me become a means by which to help many others come to live Eucharistic lives, too.
The third stage also happened in college when a priest, who became my first spiritual director, helped me to see that a desire for the priesthood didn’t necessarily mean I was being called to priesthood. That led to be intense two-and-a-half-year period of prayer in which I sought to hear what God was asking of me in life and to beg for the grace to do whatever he desired. I would pray a couple of hours a day in front of the Blessed Sacrament at St. Paul’s Church in Cambridge, at the Opus Dei chapel close to campus, and at various shrines in Boston. I helped to start Eucharistic adoration on first Fridays at the Catholic Student Center at Harvard. It was there that I had asked God, on April 3, 1992, to tell me what he wanted of me, making a novena in preparation. Fifteen minutes before I was supposed to adore, I got a call from my sister Colleen, who was in Harvard Square waiting for my brother who was supposed to help her with her taxes. Scot had forgotten and so I had to go get my 18 year-old sister and miss the holy hour. Later that night, however, after receiving spiritual direction and praying before the Lord at Elmbrook University Center, the Lord gratefully confirmed for me that he actually was calling me to be a priest, filling me with a conviction and a peace that have never wavered, despite the sometimes common, sometimes unique contradictions that God permits to happen when one follows his path. I give thanks to God for giving me a great love for Eucharistic adoration and prayer before him in the Blessed Sacrament and for having given me the chance to build or have chapels in the rectories of all the parishes I was assigned in the Diocese of Fall River to make this prayer easier as the Lord seeks to confirm me in the vocation he in Eucharistic prayer revealed.
There have been multiple other moments of greater Eucharistic awareness.
As a transitional deacon in the Vatican, I’ll never forget holding the ciborium full of hosts to distribute as St. John Paul II said the words of consecration over them.
I’ll never forget my first Mass. I’m seldom nervous but I was overwhelmed that day as I heard the words of consecration being said in my voice. I think I was at the point of spacing out if it weren’t for the help of so many brother priests behind me, which brought me to my senses and helped me to finish with awe the echo of the most important words ever enunciated. I’ve never lost the amazement of Jesus’ hijacking my unique New England phonetics to bring himself from heaven to the altar.
Today I have the chance to say those words for the 11,984th time, as I try to pray them like I did at my first Mass, as I hope to do in every Mass as if it were my only or my last. St. Paul wrote with conviction and affection to the first Christians in Corinth, as we heard in tonight’s epistle, “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread, and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’” I, too, seek to pass on to you as of the greatest importance what I, too, and the whole Church has received, not just so that we can remember Jesus in our minds, but so that Jesus himself can be actualized in our midst as he gives us himself.
I’d like to share one more memory, one more important station in my Eucharistic pilgrimage. It’s of my only deliberate liturgical abuse, for which I hope the Lord Jesus will be merciful to me!
It took place 80 days after I was ordained a priest. With two priest classmates from the North American College, we made a thanksgiving pilgrimage to the Holy Land. We went to the Franciscan booking office that reserves Masses at the great shrines in Jerusalem and beyond to ask whether it might be possible for us, as newly ordained priests, to celebrate Mass in the tomb of Jesus.
That was our main and sole objective, conscious that such reservations were normally made months in advance and basically begging for a miracle.
The 80-something year-old friar asked in Italian, “Siete tutti sacerdotini?,” “You’re all baby priests?” I said we were. Then he said, “No, non è possible celebrare una messa nel sepolcro di Cristo.” “No, it’s not possible to celebrate a Mass in Christ’s tomb.” But he had curiously stressed the word “una” or one. Then he startled giggling with his bold body. And with incredible generosity he said, “You must each celebrate a Mass in the tomb!” Then he booked us three straight days very early in the morning. Then he asked if we would like to celebrate Mass at the Church of the Last Supper on Thursday, on Calvary on Friday, in Nazareth where the Annunciation took place on Saturday, at the Mount of Transfiguration on Sunday, and in Bethlehem the following Tuesday. It was an extraordinary gift.
Because he told me I was the leader, he booked me to celebrate the first Mass inside the tomb of Jesus. The Mass was at 4:30 am. It was just the three of us. After we prayed the words, “Take this, all of you and eat of it, for this is my body, which will be given up for you,” we genuflected. Then I turned to Father Sam Martin and Father Blaise Berg, both of whom are celebrating their silver jubilees today in the Dioceses of LaCrosse, Wisconsin, and Sacramento, and said, “Do you realize we have just put the risen body of the Lord Jesus back into the empty tomb?” Rather than being startled by my liturgical innovation, they both smiled as we just adored the Lord there for a while before proceeding to the consecration of the Precious Blood, after which we again stopped for a lengthy time to adore.
I’ve had the privilege on my 14 pilgrimages to the Holy Land to celebrate Mass in the tomb more than 25 times. The experience of being the instrument by which the Risen Jesus returns to the place from which he rose triumphant from the grave always fills me with wonder and has influenced the way I celebrate every Mass, in various languages, in shrines, sanctuaries, cathedrals, basilicas, outdoor chapels, my home in Massachusetts, hotel rooms, and even twice quietly and discreetly during lengthy flights on airplanes as everyone else was asleep.
At every Mass, I am able to receive the same Lord Jesus within me whom I have brought to the empty tomb. At every Mass, I have had the joy to place him within others — now so many hundreds of thousands of people over the last 25 years — as they’ve come for Holy Communion. At tonight’s Mass, I am so happy to be able to give him to you, as the greatest possible gift any person could ever give.
Every time I give the Risen Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of the Savior of the World to people I know and love and to people he knows and loves, I grow in the conviction he gave me as a four year-old, that the priest really is the luckiest man in the world.
These last 40 days as I’ve journeyed on this Eucharistic pilgrimage, with some days holding Jesus for hours two inches from my nose, at other times adoring him in beautiful churches with hundreds of others like we’ve done at St. Joseph’s in Somerset, at St. Francis de Sales in Newark and here earlier today, and even for lengthy trips in the specially outfit Tabor or stand in the Eucharistic Pilgrimage Van, I’ve been able to grow in my gratitude for the Eucharistic dimension of priestly life.
The Eucharist is the very heart and purpose of the priesthood.
It’s to give Jesus to others that a priest freely lays down his freedom in a promise of obedience to his bishop and the bishops’ successors, whoever they may be.
It’s to give others the Eucharist that a priest promises to live a simple life, forsaking sometimes lucrative careers to give you the Pearl of Great Price worth far more than all earthly treasures combined.
It’s to give others the Eucharist that a priest forsakes the great blessings of the Sacrament of Marriage and a family of his own, as in the early Church, based on precedents in Judaism, priests who were married before ordination needed to go without conjugal relations for three days before Mass. Over the course of time, the desire for daily Mass led to perpetual continence of married priests and then to the law of priestly celibate chastity. Every celibate priest today proclaims by the fact of his ordination that he prioritizes your being able to receive Jesus every day in Holy Communion more than he does the beauty of human marital and familial love. Priests are flawed human beings and obviously make many mistakes, but every priest has made this choice to prioritize your having access to the Eucharistic Lord. As St. Teresa of Calcutta never ceased saying, “No priest, no Eucharist.” That’s why we need to be grateful for everyone of the 404,000 priests who offer Christ to us. That’s why we need to pray with persevering ardor to the Harvest Master for young men to hear the call to be hardworking priestly laborers in the Lord’s vineyard.
But even though the priest gives up a lot, he of course gains so much more. Through obedience, he learns true freedom; through simplicity of life, how to value the treasure buried in the field. Through chaste celibacy for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, how to enter into Christ’s spousal love for the Church and to experience over time the joys, and sometimes the anguish, of a true spiritual fatherhood.
The great 20th century Dominican Preacher Father Henri Lacordaire once summarized the priesthood in the following eloquent words:
“To live in the midst of the world without wishing its pleasures; to be a member of each family, yet belonging to none;to share all suffering; to penetrate all secrets; to heal all wounds; to go from men to God and offer Him their prayers; to return from God to men to bring pardon and hope; to have a heart of fire for charity, and a heart of bronze for chastity; to teach and to pardon, console and bless always. My God, what a life, and it is yours, O priest of Jesus Christ!”
That has indeed been my life for the last 25 years.
I am so grateful to God for having given me a priestly vocation.
I am so grateful to have been able to share it with you, for at least a day, and for some of you, for every one of the 9,133 days since Bishop O’Malley imposed hands on me.
As I prepare once again, with my brother priests, to go up to the altar of God, to make a pilgrimage to the Lord who perpetually rejuvenates his priests and faithful each day at the Mass, I make my own anew the words of tonight’s Psalm, “How can I repay the Lord for all the good done for me? I will raise the cup of salvation and call on the Lord’s name!”
What an incredible gift it is to raise that chalice!
What an awesome privilege it is to call upon that name!
What a mind-blowing reality it is for us as creatures to receive the Savior himself in holy communion!
What an astonishing honor it is for a creature to hold his Creator, a sinner his Savior, a sheep his Shepherd, and to give him to others!
But this is the gift God makes possible for us in the Holy Eucharist and in the priesthood.
Let us, therefore, with holy awe approach the Lord tonight anew as he seeks to strengthen us for the Eucharistic Pilgrimage of earthly life, as we commit to journey with him and with each other to the heavenly banquet where this Eucharistic banquet will find its fulfillment and where our thanksgiving and joy will know no end.
To watch a video of the Mass, please click below. The homily begins at 47:30.
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