Msgr. Roger J. Landry
St. John Paul II National Shrine, Washington, DC
Recorded October 24, 2025
Aired December 7, 2025 on the 35th Anniversary of the Publication of Redemptoris Missio
To view the interview, please click below:
The YouTube generated transcript for the interview is:
Grattan Brown: Hello, my name is Grattan Brown. I’m the director of mission and ministry here at the St. John Paul II National Shrine. We’re conducting interviews about St. John Paul II’s encyclical and major papal writings. And today we’re honored to have Monsignor Roger J. Landry to discuss John Paul II’s encyclical Redemptoris on the permanent validity of the church’s missionary mandate. Monsignor Landry is a priest of the Diocese of Fall River Massachusetts and currently the national director of The Pontifical Mission Societies in the United States. The Pontifical Mission Societies is a ministry of the pope to provide moral and financial support from the church’s missionary activity throughout the world. Monsignor Landry studied in Rome during the pontificate of St. John Paul II, met St. John Paul II about 11 times and was in his presence many more. a graduate of Harvard College and the Pontifical North American College. He has been a commentator for EWTN’s coverage of the conclaves that elected Pope Francis and Pope Leo as well as the funerals of Pope Benedict and Pope Francis. Appears regularly on television, radio, and podcasts. He’s the author of Plan of Life: Habits to Help You Grow Holier and Closer to God. His homilies and retreat talks and many other resources are available for free at catholic preaching.com. Welcome, Father Landry.
Monsignor Landry: Great to be with you, Gratton. I’m looking forward to our conversation.
Brown: Yeah, likewise. We’re so happy you’re here. Let’s hear a little bit about you. Um, you and I were both young when John Paul was elected pope. When did John Paul II first appear in, you know, on your radar screen, in your mind? What did you think of him?
Landry: So, the night of his election, I was just an 8-year-old boy. We were watching the news in order to be able to see it. It was after he had been elected. We weren’t waiting for the for the white smoke to come on out. But I remember with my twin brother and with my mother. My dad wasn’t there at the time he was coming back from work looking and seeing this new holy father coming out which was new for me. I mean it was like you were getting a new dad like you were getting a new grandfather. I just couldn’t fathom as an eight-year-old that St. Paul 6th had died, and St. John Paul II was elected. But that was the first thing. The next year he came to the United States of America, and we were supposed to go to Boston Common. I was growing up in Lowell Massachusetts for the big mass with Holy Father, but there were absolutely torrential downpours, almost apocalyptic storms. And my parents thought that it was just going to be too messy with four young kids to go to Boston Common. But we were affixed the entire time to television quite dry as we listened to St. John Paul II preach the gospel right in what we growing up in Massachusetts would call the hub of the universe and he brought the message particularly the rich young man to Boston common and I just was fascinated that huge multitudes would go out in the rain to welcome him to the United States. that was the first part of his visit in 1979 to the US. And so those images helped me to recognize that the pope was a really big deal, somebody whose influence in our faith. And when we were going to our parishes before and after they were talking about the papal visit, talking about what it meant and so the significance of the successor of St. Peter, in his case the 264th, on the world scene was embedded in my memory from the time I was a little boy.
Brown: And what about after that moment? Um, where did you see him? Was it the assassination attempt? Was it later on in Rome? Where does he make the where are your best memories of John Paul?
Landry: St. John Paul II was one of my real heroes at his assassination attempt right around the time where President Reagan had his own assassination attempt. I began to realize that leadership sometimes cost and cost a lot. And so he became even more heroic in my eye with the way that he survived, the way he forgave his assassin met Ali Agca. Um, and I kept paying attention to him while I was a high schooler. When I when I became an undergraduate, there were some members of Opus Dei at Harvard who had a little sort of study circle on the documents of the Holy Father. That was where there was a huge upgrade for me. Yeah, that’s where I read his love and responsibility for the first time. That’s where I read his theology, the body. That’s where I was bored out of my mind reading Solicitudo Rei Socialis, which really does require work out. That’s where I read Redemptoris Missio for the first time, which is what we’re talking about today. That’s where in the early 90s, well ’89 leading into 90s, we would have had the liberation of the countries behind the iron curtain. All of that was growing. I saw him in person for the first time in 1990 when I went on a pilgrimage during my sophomore year in college to Rome for Holy Week and he had a special reception for the young people in town. There were about 3,000 of us there. I was really close to him in the way we were seated in the Cortile San Damaso in the Vatican. So, I was able to watch him in between. I was able to see how human he was. By this point, he was a mythic figure for me at the same time. But he was so human. There was there were a few comedic acts, and his full-scale gap was unforgettable. I mean, he was almost rolling over with his laughter. And so then it grew. He came to the United States in 1995. That’s when I had already been sent to Rome. But I followed very carefully everything that he was saying and those were the times where I had the privilege to meet him so many times and be in his presence in St. Peter’s Basilica, St. Peter Square and other places around Rome.
Brown: And so what about the more personal meetings being in his presence meeting him and meet a small group of people?
Landry: So the first time I had the chance to meet him personally was with my identical twin brother Scot who was a first-year seminarian in Rome with me and I had written a letter for two people from Texas whose family had paid for the excavations underneath St. Peter’s Basilica what we call the Scavi. Monsignor Dziwisz at the time, now Cardinal Dziwisz, the personal secretary of John Paul II or his staff misread the letter. So the day this couple was flying back to Houston, I got a call from the switchboard saying that this couple is able to come to the mass the following morning. And I said, I don’t know what to say. And I panic with panic looked at the letter to see if I had made the mistake. It was actually their mistake. And I said, “Well, they’re on a flight, but the there are two open spots. Could I suggest two other people go?” And the Maltese sister at the switchboard simply said, “Whom do you want to propose to Monsignor Dziwisz?” And I said, “How about my identical twin brother and me were first year seminarians at the North American College.” She said, “I’ll get back to you.” She called back about an hour later and said, “Show up at the bronze doors the following morning where the Swiss guard protect the apostolic palace.” Scott and I went there. We prayed with him before mass. We were able to attend that mass and then after his private masses, he would always have the guests wait for him in his library all around the periphery of the books. Scott and I, for whatever reason, were last in the line. And everybody was looking at us. I mean, we were identical twins with full black cassock, same glass frames. We both had hair at the time that was combed in the same direction. And Monsignor Dziwisz in particular kept looking as he got closer to see the twins. And when John Paul II came on up, he said to us in Italian, “Siete veramente gemelli, you guys really are twins.” Then he said, “Giocati sul vostro rettore?, Do you play tricks on your rector?” who was the then Monsignor Dziwisz Timothy Dolan, now Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York. And Scott and I didn’t know to whom he had addressed the question because he kept darting his eyes between the two of our faces to see what points of discordance he might discover. And it’s funny the way real history happened. Scot’s Italian wasn’t very good. Mine wasn’t much better. It would have been easy for us to just say C because we did play tricks on the Raptor and Cardinal Dolan. He incorporated us in playing tricks on other Cardinals. We’ll save those stories. But do you play tricks on your rector? Scott and I just didn’t say Si! Yes. We didn’t just repeat his language. Si, giocchiamo su lui. Yes, we play tricks on him. We both said paraphrases change of words in total stereo at exactly the same time, Si sempre lo facciamo! We’re always doing it. [Laughter] I looked at him. I couldn’t believe that he would even say it that way. He looked at me. We thought it funny. We turned to see John Paul II to see what his reaction was. And he wasn’t there. Again, he had collapsed full over laughing uncontrollably. Everybody in the library was laughing uncontrollably. He gets up. He looks at us again. He kills over a second time. He couldn’t stop laughing. And then he arose and slapped us on both sides of the cheeks on the outside. And he said, “Bravi Americani, you your Americans are great.” And that was the first time. And from that point forward, even though my twin brother Scot didn’t return for a second theology year, and he’s married with kids now, John Paul II was always asking, “How is your brother? How is your identical twin?” And from that point forward, he had a nickname for me. He’d call me il Gemello Americano, the American twin. Perfect. And so that was the first time. I had 10 other times to meet him, all of which I really treasure. I’m sure. What a beautiful insight into the man as well. That personal touch and that ability to remember people. He’d always remember I when I had the opportunity to introduce my parents to them on their 30th anniversary. We were kneeling in front of him. They gave us three minutes at the end of an audience with a Polish cultural group and I had written and said that they were celebrating their anniversary. Could they receive a special blessing? And neither of my parents could talk. They were both crying in front of John Paul II. And he turned to me and said in Italian, “Sei già ordinato?, are you already ordained. I said yes. And so after he had blessed my mother and father he said, Ed adesso una benedizione per l’altro padre della famiglia!, and now a blessing for the other father of the family. And he was tender when I was about to return home to preach the gospel in the Diocese of Fall River. He said what will you be doing? And I said I’m going to be a parochial vicar at a Portuguese-speaking parish and I’m going to be a chaplain at a high school. Would you have any advice? He in Italian, if you if they know you love them, they will follow. If they don’t know you love them, they won’t. And just the clarity of it. I mean, I’ve never forgotten obviously that lesson and tried to act on it. Last time I met him was a strange occurrence actually. I led a lot of pilgrimages back from the United States to Rome and I would regularly each September lead a pilgrimage for the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion Morality out of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Each year would ask for an opportunity at least to get our photo with the Holy Father. Each year we’d get a polite no. We did it anyway. Father Robert Sirico was the co-founder and president of the acting institute took a television gig with Rai Uno the main national television station because he thought that the answer was automatically going to be no and then they said yes so I was leading the group not father so and then Archbishop James Harvey now Cardinal James Harvey who native in Milwaukee who prized himself in a good way of knowing all the details of what’s going on with Americans in particular in Rome. He was about to introduce our group and now I present to you Holy Father, Father Roger Landry and a group of pilgrims from the Acton Institute as we were surrounding his cheer for a group photo with the successor St. Peter. And as soon as John Paul II saw me, this was late September 2004, 7 months before he would die, he said, “Gemello Americano!” He was deep in the throes of Parkinson’s disease. And Archbishop Harvey said, “Voi vi conoscete?, You guys know each other?” And John Paul II said, “Si, ci conosciamo, yes, we know each other.” And then I knelt down as we were taking the photos. And while the photos were being clicked, I felt somebody’s hand on my head. And I was convinced that that was one of the pilgrims on the group who earlier in the pilgrimage thought it was funny to show up to a reception with cardinals in a suit coat, shorts, and sandals. So this guy didn’t really understand context and everything else. And I was convinced it was this guy’s hand on my head. I tried to fake a smile even though I was an interior volcano as this type of mischief was taking place in the presence of the successor St. a future, you name it. And after the photos were taken and there was this sign, tutt’aposto, everything’s okay. I turned around to give my old high school chaplain’s stare down. And instead, when I turned around, I noticed that the hand on my head was attached to a white cassock who could only be one person. And this was St. John Paul II in the throes of Parkinson’s disease. And for him to do that meant he had to reach over like that. And yet he did it. And like I should have thought about how I would approach it, but in my shock, I simply said, “What did that mean, Holiness? And he said in response, “Un giorno, saprai!,” “one day you’ll know!” I always thought that it would lead to the resurrection of my dead hair follicles. That miracle posthumously hasn’t occurred. But to have the successor of St. Peter impose a hand on you in the sacra of St. Peter Square. I never sort of took that lightly and I’ve since prayed to God through St. John Paul II’s intercession for a double portion of his zeal just like Elisha had asked God from Elijah.
Brown: What a great combination. His game plan, make sure you know they that you love them. Yeah. And then a portion of his zeal. Godspeed with all of those blessings. And let’s talk about Redemptoris Missio and John Paul II’s vision for the missionary work of the church. It’s an encyclical. So for our listeners, an encyclical is a letter from the pope to the church at large. It’s called an encyclical because it circulates through all the bishops. And you can imagine back before they had internet and even printing presses handwritten copy going from bishop to bishop to bishop. This one on the church’s missionary work published in 1990. Let’s talk about first some of the big questions that were in the air that he was responding to. We are what about almost 30 years after Vatican II’s deliberations and so what were some of the controversies what were some of the questions that John Paul II is responding to and maybe more importantly what is are some of things he’s identifying as the focal points for the church’s effort, approaching the third millennium, let’s put it that way.
Landry: The Second Vatican Council’s main thrust was to repropose our faith in the modern age. No teachings were changing, but we recognized people were changing after all of the horrors of the 20th century, two world wars, the genocidal campaigns on different continents, the rise of the isms, particularly materialism and atheism and the whole rest. The Second Vatican Councilwas aiming to take the deposit of faith and propose it in a compelling way in response to these modern questions and in Ad Gentes literally to the nations. The fathers of the Second Vatican Councilwanted to help the church universal proclaim the gospel more effectively to everyone. That was the aim of the council for a new missionary age. But what we started to see in the late 60s and early 70s is rather than bringing hordes of new Christians into the church in some areas that was happening especially in Africa the church was explosively growing but it wasn’t really happening in Asia and in the northern hemisphere we were losing Catholics. We were hemorrhaging them almost. So St. Paul VI in 1975 for the 10th anniversary of Ad Gentes the Vatican II’s document on the missions gave us Evangelii Nuntiandi on announcing the gospel in the modern age and what he tried to do is to help the church grasp that everything the church does is meant to be part of the mission that the church doesn’t have a mission the church is a mission it’s the continuation with the Lord’s own trust of what Jesus himself had ignited through the incarnation, through his hidden life, his public ministry, his passion, death, resurrection, ascension, and the sending of the Holy Spirit. That’s who the church is. Everything is meant to be part of the continuation of that mission. So, it was one of the most beautiful documents the church has ever produced. Pope Francis said it was his favorite document in church history. That’s the type of impact it had in the church. But once you started to say everything was missionary, then you started to equate almost everything that the church does as an equally important part of that mission. And so care for the horizontal questions of human life human development in terms of an economic level in terms of jobs in terms of various aspects of Catholic social teaching were starting in many places to supplant the proclamation of Jesus Christ as the universal savior. Likewise after the Second Vatican Council the church was engaging much more in interreligious dialogue. And so many in the church were wondering, well, now that we’re talking in conversation with our Jewish elder brothers and sisters, with Muslims, with Buddhists, with Hindus, you name it, do we need to evangelize anymore? I mean, isn’t interreligious dialogue replacing the type of missionary zeal we would have seen in St. Francis Xavier and the waves of extraordinary saintly missionaries across the last 500 years. And so, St. John Paul II was looking at all of that and for the 25th anniversary of Ad Gentes he wrote Redemptoris Missio on the permanent validity of the church’s whole missionary thrust and so what he wanted to say there is yes everything is part of the church’s mission but we can’t dumb down the term mission to just mean everything that the church is doing. He says there’s always going to be a primacy of the church’s proclamation to those who don’t yet know Jesus. At the time there were three billion people in the world. Two billion weren’t Christian. Now of course there are 8.1 billion people in the world and 5.5 billion are not Christian. The vast majority of the world has no personal relationship with Jesus Christ. And that’s got to be our priority. Jesus said, “Go to every nation and proclaim the gospel to every creature.” And so, we’ve got to take that very seriously. And John Paul II wanted to bring us back there. He made some important distinctions. He said that there’s basically three aspects of the church’s missionary work. The first is to those who have never really been evangelized, never heard the saving name of Jesus, never been taught the truths of the faith. That we call mission Ad Gentes to the nations. That’s mission proper. Second, he says we’re always in a state of learning our faith better, allowing the seeds of the gospel to sink so much more deeply within us. That’s part of evangelization. When we baptize somebody, that’s the beginning. It’s not the end. And we call that pastoral care of the faithful. That happens every day in parishes all across the globe in which we’re trying to help people in flesh. the saving mysteries that are entrusted to us in the sacraments, the holy word of God, so that they become living commentary. That’s pastoral care of the faithful. And then the third, which is very relevant here in the United States, and it was 35 years ago when John Paul II gave us Redemptoris Missio, is what we call the new evangelization or the re-evangelization. those who have been baptized, those who have heard the gospel before, those who have had some relationship with Jesus but either drifted away from the practice of the faith or chose to depart from the faith because of a scandal or because of some other reason. The church likewise wants to bring them back because Jesus died for a hundred out of a hundred and if he had to leave the 99 in search of the one, how can we be a faithful follower of Jesus if we’re not willing to do the same? So the first thing of Redemptoris Missio was John Paul II wanted us to focus on the mission to the nations because he said if we don’t get that right every other aspect of the church which is missionary is likewise going to be impacted by indifference or lukewarmness. So if we do get that zeal for bringing everybody to Jesus, including those we haven’t met, then everyone we have met and those who are our neighbors, those who are members of our family, we’re going to be much more on fire to share the treasure of the faith with them, too. That’s the first big thing. The second huge thing he was responding to was the dumbing down of the church’s mission just to what we could call human promotion. Just trying to sort of implement the millennial development goals of the United Nations at the time. Trying to lift people out of extreme poverty. Trying to promote the cause of women and areas of misogyny. Trying to care for our planet. You name it. All of these things which are good in in in themselves when they’re not changed by ideology, but like things that are totally fine in themselves are not the same thing as mission. And so, particularly in Latin America, you had what was called the problem of liberation theology that people were talking about the kingdom of God in a totally horizontal way, even sometimes without mentioning the saving name of Jesus. because what they thought was the church’s real mission is to overturn the various hegemonies and dictatorships throughout the entire region. No, what Jesus came for was not just to get a new government in a particular country. Jesus came as a liberating Messiah against the kingdom of the evil one in order to establish a kingdom that starts here and that lasts forever. What he called the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven. And we always have to get that vertical dimension first, John Paul II says, and then let that relationship we have with God impact the way we’re going to love our neighbor with all of those questions. But if we don’t get love of God first, we’re not even going to get love of neighbor adequately and in its right place. And so that was the second great question he was responding to the church’s mission first and foremost includes the proclamation of Jesus as the savior of the human race and that he’s summoning each of us to a life-changing friendship to follow him all the way to God the Father’s eternal embrace by the power of the Holy Spirit and that had been lost in the intervening 25 years from the end of the Second Vatican Council. And he wanted to reignite that missionary fire.
Brown: I noticed how he takes one after the other Christ, savior of humanity through the church, kingdom both here and the everlasting kingdom, especially the Holy Spirit. I think that the Holy Spirit section in Redemptoris Missio made me think in a way of his homily in his first pilgrimage to Poland where he goes back and he says, “May the Holy Spirit descend upon the earth, upon the land, upon this land.” And he knew that the communist authorities were hearing him say, “The Holy Spirit is with this people and with this land even when you’re not,” and the Polish people hearing the Holy Spirit is with us has gotten us through these centuries and will get us through again. And that’s supposed to be for every country on the planet.
Landry: Exactly. And the Holy Spirit is the protagonist of the church’s whole mission. That’s why it really didn’t begin even though Jesus had sent out the 12 and then the 72. Yeah. and had given the great commission of the 500 with him on the mountain side. It didn’t really happen until 10 days later when the Holy Spirit came down as tongues of fire and strong driving wind on the 12 on the 11 well the 12 apostles St. Matias had been elected by that time on the blessed mother and all the members of the church that were huddling around our lady in the upper room. And the Holy Spirit could have come down in any form. There’s no coincidence though. It’s not accidental that the Holy Spirit first came down as tongues of fire. We use tongues to proclaim to speak and fire symbolizes ardor. The Holy Spirit’s coming down to do in us what he did in the first apostle and St. Peter burst through the then closed doors of the upper room and proclaimed in such a powerful way this Galilean fisherman with a thick accent that 3,000 converted that very day then strong driving wind. Jesus was asked by Nicodemus early in his public ministry about baptism essentially when Jesus was saying that we had to be born a new from above. And how can a person enter again into his mom’s womb and be born again? And Jesus said the spirit blows where he wills. You don’t know where he comes from or where he goes. And he was describing our cooperation with the spirit. And the Holy Spirit was coming down like a strong driving wind, asking us to put up the sails of the bark of Peter, the church, to blow us wherever he wills. And that is something blowing us not just a few inches. Yeah. That is blowing us a few continents away. And the Holy Spirit has never ceased to blow with category six hurricane force.
Brown: Yeah. and perhaps blowing ahead of us so that by the time we get there we discover the work that that the Holy Spirit has already been doing.
Landry: And John Paul II was an extraordinary sail that was put up to that Holy Spirit coming down upon him with a tongue of fire and likewise as that strong driving wind. He said when he was in Mexico City in 1992 that he defined his entire papacy as one of a missionary pope of evangelization. He saw himself truly as the successor of the Galilean fisherman who was made a fisher of men. And he spent his papacy traveling 129 trips, 104 different countries, three times the distance of a round trip to the moon in order to say I’m just the Vicar of Christ. Christ is the one whom I proclaim by my words, by all my body language, by the entirety of the church, which is his body and bride. And we want you to be part of this body, bride, family. He used various other images there. And that’s essentially what he likewise says in Redemptoris Missio that the church’s missionary thrust is not just to make converts one by one. That’s only where it starts. But just like we see in St. Paul, St. Francis Xavier. The church exists to found communities, real places in which Jesus is welcomed, listened to, loved, followed, where he continues to act in us going forward. So, real communities in communion with him and with communion with everybody else. And that’s the type of church that St. John Paul II was trying to catalyze precisely by his reminding us that the first work of Christ’s body, the church is mission. And in all of those pilgrimages around the world, he met with not only Catholics but members of other religions perhaps and certainly he was a witness to those who had abandoned religion, no religion at all. And it makes me think of World Youth Day in Denver where we kept hearing such a secularized place. You know, it’s we’re not going to get we’re not going to get much zeal there, but it was overflowing. I was lucky enough to be present.
Brown: Same. In August 1993 when he called us the heralds of the dawn.
Landry: And he really wanted us, particularly young people, to take up the church’s mission. Those words were incredibly inspiring to me. I entered seminary later that month. I was already planning to go to seminary, but that was the great gift of God to turn up the flame within me. And St. John Paul II did that everywhere. Every audience. There’s something that went beyond his words. He was a powerful preacher because of his heroism, not necessarily because of his eloquence, but his body language was always eloquent. And like this 264th Peter dressed in white crisscrossing the globe. He was a sign, not just a symbol. A sign has some type of intrinsic relationship to what it’s pointing to. Whereas a symbol is arbitrary, but he was a sign that this historical figure called Peter was real. that he was a successor not of a character in a fable but a crucial protagonist in real history. And if Peter existed, then what does that say about Jesus? And if Peter existed and he died in Rome and St. John Paul II would celebrate mass literally on top of his bones where the first Christian buried him after he was crucified upside down by Nero in 64 AD. If all of that were true and John Paul II is the living not just successor of Peter but the heir of all that the Lord had entrusted as our inheritance then that’s why people get chills up their spine when they meet the successor of St. Peter as I did as so many did when they met St. John Paul II because he was by who he is even before he opened up his mouth or acted a living signpost pointing to the fact that God loved us so much that he entered our world in order so that we could enter into his eternal milieu where life would be received to the full. That’s why St. John Paul II laid down his life. He was first and foremost a faithful disciple of Jesus. But that fidelity led to his becoming an ardent apostle whose work through this great writing Redemptoris Missio continues 35 years later.
Brown: Can you say a little bit more about how John Paul John Paul’s work his writing about the holy spirit in Redemptoris Missio forms an idea of missionary spirituality. This is so important for us because it’s not only are we sent out to do a job to proclaim the gospel to every creature, but we have to do it in a way that’s consistent with what we’re announcing.
Landry: We remember when Jesus first sent out the twelve apostles and then the 72 lay people, the lay disciples, that he didn’t just give them words on their lips. He didn’t just tell them what not to pack. But he packaged them in a particular way that if for example they were going to be proclaiming that God cares about us that they were trusting in God’s providence by not worrying about the tomorrow and packing a second tunic and a walking stick and a money bag that if they were going to be proclaiming the love of neighbor that flows from love of God. That’s why he wasn’t sending them out one by one. How can you love a neighbor if you’re not walking with a neighbor? Likewise, how can you forgive and become merciful as God the Father is merciful? unless you have to forgive your traveling partner as doubtless the apostles did. And so there’s always a spirituality, a packaging for that message, an envelope for the word that’s being proclaimed. And that’s the huge advantage of Redemptoris Missio over Evangelii Nuntiandi that Paul VI had given us 15 years before because he finishes in paragraphs 87 and 91 with an extraordinary treatise on the spirituality of any disciple called to be an apostle. That spirituality obviously begins with the Holy Spirit. There’s no authentic Christian spirituality if it’s not living according to the spirit being docile to the Holy Spirit’s inspirations wherever he blows and the way he wants us burning with his sacred fire. That’s the first step. Second step is he says we’ve got to have a real communion with Jesus Christ. We’re not talking about Jesus. We’re allowing Jesus in a sense to talk through us that we’ve got a profound communion that’s nourished by our prayer, that’s nourished by our trying to incarnate the word of God inside of us. So that having conceived the word through our ears, we might become 39 months pregnant, and we can’t keep that word within, but we have to give it to the light, we have to share it with others. So communion with Christ is second. The third is real charity for others. We can’t claim we love our neighbor. If we’re going to hold back the greatest treasure we’ve ever received, which is the gift of God in our life, the full revelation that Jesus in fleshed and proclaimed to us and sent the whole church out to echo that real charity leads there. Fourth is a great love for the church. There’s always a temptation for us to say yes to Jesus and no to his wife, no to his mystical body as if Jesus can somehow be decapitated. That’s false. We’re called, as John Paul II repeated in other places, to love the church just like Jesus loved the church. And so, we can’t proclaim Christ without bringing people into that communion that is the church. Fifth step, and there are only six, we’re almost there. Fifth step was holiness. That for somebody to proclaim the gospel, well, they have to show a little bit of the image of God who is holy, holy, holy, working through them. If we’re a hypocrite, no matter how eloquent we are, if we’re not trying to walk the talk, people are eventually going to find that as a stumbling block, as a scandal. that in order to be able to be a credible preacher, we know that we’re not going to be the blessed mother, that we’re not going to be right now necessarily as holy as St. John Paul II or St. Teresa of Calcutta. But we have to be striving for it. It’s not just the technical art of delivering a message, but it’s showing through our body language first, through the way that we live, through our witness that the gospel is first received through the eyes before it’s able to be heard exodus, as St. Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, through the ears, by hearing. And then the last aspect of this missionary spirituality is devotion to our lady as mother of the church. that she is queen of the apostles and that she’s praying for us just like she prayed with the first apostles awaiting the outpouring of the Holy Spirit so that we might through the communion of saints at the top of which she stands through the communion of saints we might receive all the merits that everybody in the church is acquiring today praying to the harvest master for our work taking in his harvest but throughout all of time prior and after for the effectiveness even of this video we’re recording today. That’s what our lady is praying for. She shows us how to be docile to the Holy Spirit, how to have a full communion with Jesus. She shows us the real burning love of neighbor. She shows us how to be in communion with the church because she’s the model of the church. She shows us the real path of holiness. And so those are the four aspects of an authentic Catholic and Christian spirituality that St. John Paul II hopes will become your and my way of life.
Brown: Let’s talk a little bit about how it has become and maybe hasn’t become the way of life since John Paul II’s death. What’s the legacy of Redemptoris Missio?
Landry: So Pope Benedict did absolutely take up that legacy as did Pope Francis. They emphasized other aspects of the church’s mission each in their own turn. Pope Benedict in his first homily given in Latin in the Sistine Chapel the day after he was elected talked about the re-evangelization of Europe in particular that was a burning need for him and he in 2010 founded the Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization. He thought that the church’s mission work to the nations was getting some attention, and it was working in certain places. But what wasn’t working was this third part of what St. John Paul II had given us Redemptoris Missio for all the baptized who were wandering away from the faith. Many of the countries in Europe the practice of the faith was 3 to 5%. And so he really wanted to focus the proclaim the reproposal of the gospel to those in Europe. And so he gave us a year of faith in which he was particularly asking all those in the upper hemisphere to return to the great gift of the faith that we once lived. When Pope Francis was elected, he was elected because of a speech he gave on March 7th, 2013, six days before he became the 266th Peter in which he said the next pope, he didn’t know that he was going to be giving his own job description, but the next pope has to be someone who from the prayer and contemplation of Jesus Christ is able to go out to the existential periphery to all the margins of life with the sweet joy of evangelizing. So Pope Francis did two things. First, he wanted us to say who are on the peripheries, who are the least, the lost, and the last. Let’s prioritize them and try to bring them to the center. That focus from Argentina, from the ends of the world, as well as to those who are spiritually poor, not just materially poor. That was the first fingerprint of Pope Francis on the legacy that was coming from the second Vatican Council. The second was that we have to do that with joy. He gave us his exhortation Evangelii Gaudium that it’s supposed to be a gospel of joy that we’re proclaiming that Jesus who came into the world so that his joy might be in us and our joy might be complete wants us to proclaim the gospel with joy. If we profess the gospel in a dry way or we profess it with various vices be for example we’ve got a temper and we’re snapping at people or we’re literally trying to scare the hell out of people choose Christ or go to hell be eternally self-alienated. We’re not going to be effective. And so he said we’ve got to proclaim with joy. We’ve got to be people who recognize Jesus triumphed over sin and death. He has risen from the dead and he’s walking with us at our side. He’s not a distant figure. He’s if we’re in the state of grace through the sacraments, he’s living within us. Every day therefore is like Easter Sunday. And like sometimes when I’m struggling on a given day, bad news of this one problem, maybe a headache or anything else, I always filter it through saying if Mary Magdalene were to bust through that door right now and say, “Can’t find the body. He’s risen from the dead. How would that change that particular struggle?” And every time I do that exercise; it’s like a particular exam point for me. Every time I do that exercise, I recognize it would change it entirely. Yeah. whatever hills we think we’re facing; they’re like mole hills compared toto the extraordinary news of the resurrection. And so Pope Francis really wanted us to focus on the source of our joy, which is our relationship with Jesus, and then communicate that joy to others because that’s what’s going to help everybody recognize that we are not following Jesus to loveless life. Yeah. Not toward emptiness, not toward darkness, but we are following him to the fulfillment of everything for which he has made us long in this world and the next. And when we show that joy, especially when we’re suffering, especially when we’re being persecuted, especially as so many of the greatest missionaries have shown, even when they’re being tortured and murdered for our faith, when we show the joy, even then, the world and the devil can’t extinguish it. And so that’s the inheritance. And now we’ve got Pope Leo the 14th. Yes. The first missionary since St. Peter to lead the church. Um, we’ve had every pope in between has had an apostolic dimension to his character. They’re a successor of the fishermen from Galilee. But St. Peter before he was pope had already been carrying out the mission to proclaim the gospel to those who didn’t know Jesus. In between, we’ve never had someone who’s been a missionary to all the nations until we got to Father Robert Francis Prevost, who for 22 years was a missionary priest and bishop in Peru, in the Archdiocese of Trujillo and the Diocese of Chiclayo, and who for 12 years crisscrossed the world to strengthen the faith of his fellow Augustinian missionaries. He arrived in the papacy the most traveled pope of all time, having traveled to well beyond five dozen countries, trying to share our faith. And he brings that missionary spirituality to the chair of Peter. And so for World Mission Sunday earlier this year, he became the first pope of all time to record a message for World Mission Sunday in which he was pondering his own time as a missionary priest and bishop in Chiclayo and asking you and me and everybody watching us in fact the whole world, help me help missionaries everywhere. And so he is a living enfleshment of what St. John Paul II wrote about in Redemptoris Missio and I think St. John Paul II at Jesus’ eternal right side in heaven is praying hard for him and praying hard for all of us to take up that mantle the successor of St. Peter is putting in our hands.
Brown: Yeah, that’s so hopeful so hopeful for the spread of the gospel throughout the world. For the last part of our conversation, let’s talk a bit about The Pontifical Mission Societies. They are a collection of societies that go back into the 19th century, I believe, when they were founded. So long predate Vatican II, never mind John Paul II. How does the legacy of John Paul II affect The Pontifical Mission Societies today and what they might continue how they might continue to support Pope Leo? It would be good to give just a very brief history of the societies because they put into effect what St. John Paul II was writing about in Redemptoris Missio especially with regard to the laity.
Landry: So Jesus gave us the great commission at the end of each of the gospels really for us to go to the whole world and the church lived that. Then a few things happened. the great schism in 1054 between east and west between orthodoxy and Catholicism. Then the Protestant Reformation in 1517 and particularly the discovery of the new world where vast continents with lots of people were discovered who were not known before. And so how are you going to handle that type of mission? At the time, Spain and Portugal were fighting over what we would now call South and Central America. And you couldn’t allow the evangelization of all the people in Latin America to be settled politically by these two powers. And so in 1622, which was the year in which St. Francis Xavier, the greatest missionary after St. Paul was canonized, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith was founded in Rome to coordinate the whole church’s missionary growth. 200 years after that, there was a young French girl in Lyons, France, named Pauline Jaricot, now blessed Pauline Jaricot, whose brother Phileas wanted to become a missionary. He died before he could become a missionary. But she said, “What can I do to support missionaries everywhere?” She knew, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know it, that they really struggled and needed prayers, and they likewise needed financial support. So in her father’s factory, she got ten women together to pray every day at least a Hail Mary for the missions. and once a week to collect one sou in French, basically one penny a week in this group of 10, and then she asked each of the 10 in the group to found another group where they were one out of 10 and within a few years there were 3,000 of these groups in France of women praying every day for the missions and taking up a collection the first time they dispersed funds in 1825 those funds came to three places. First place was the Diocese of Louisiana in the Two Floridas which at the time under the crown of Spain stretched all the way from the Florida Keys through what would become the Louisiana Purchase all the way up to the Canadian border north of Montana. The second it went to the Diocese of Bardstown, Kentucky, which is one of the four dioceses split off from Baltimore in 1808 that’s now been suppressed. But most of the money came here to the United States and then some of it went for the evangelization of China. Not too long ago, I was in St. Louis where you go to the Basilica of the Old Cathedral of St. Louis, literally right next to the Golden Arch. And that cathedral was paid for by the Society of the Propagation of the Faith in 1834 just after the Diocese of St. Louis split off from the Archdiocese of New Orleans. And so the Society of the Propagation of the Faith now stretches all across the globe. It became a Pontifical Society a hundred years after its founding in 1922 when Pope Benedict XV brought the Society of the Propagation of the Faith under his supervision in Rome together with two other societies both formed by zealous French people. In 1843 a French bishop Charles de Forbin-Janson wanted to do something similar to Pauline Jaricot for children helping children all across the globe, that there were so many children dying without knowing Jesus. So with her guidance he founded what was called then the Holy Childhood Association. We call it the Missionary Childhood Association now. And that likewise became pontifical in 1922. The third was founded in 1889 by a young woman Jeanne Bigard and her mother. They knew a French bishop in Nagasaki, Japan. and he wrote them a letter saying, “Listen, I’ve got a nice problem. I’ve got 50 seminarians in this house that I’m preparing to be priests, but I’ve got 300 wanting to become priests and I don’t have the ability to house them and educate them. Could you help?” I just want to highlight in parenthesis that the real goal of the church’s mission work is to take churches that are too young, too poor, and too persecuted to be self-sustaining and make them self-sustaining. And one of the great ways they become self-sustaining is when they have their own indigenous clergy so that the missionaries can move someplace else and they’ve now got their priests raised in their own soil, drinking their own water, knowing their culture, etc. And so it was great that there in Nagasaki had so many Japanese who wanted to become priests in the late 1880s. And so what Jeanne Bigard and Stephanie her mom did was they sold their house. They sent all the proceeds to the seminary. They lived much more simply. And then they realized there was a far greater need. So they started to spawn what we now call the Society of St. Peter the Apostle which helps form indigenous clergy in the 1,130 missionary territories and dioceses all across the globe. The Society that became a Pontifical Society in 1922 as well. The Society of the Propagation of the Faith, just one figure, we build about a thousand churches a year. Missionary Childhood Association basically pays for catechists to teach the faith everywhere to the tune of about $20 million US every year. And the Society of St. Peter the Apostle any given year there are 200,000 seminarians in the world both in theology years their last four years of study or as well as what we call minor seminary in preparation for that time there are 200,000 total the society of St. Peter the Apostle pays the full amount of all their education housing for 82,500 of them. So, two out of every five seminarians in the world are paid for by the Society of St. Peter the Apostle. So, those are the three Pontifical societies that became Pontifical in 1922 on the 300th anniversary of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. And then in 1916, Blessed Paolo Manna formed the Pontifical Missionary Union originally for clergy and religious. Now it’s just Pontifical Union, which works to stimulate priests and religious to be truly on fire for the missions so that they’re able to form the whole church to be missionary, which is what we are. And what they do to in pursuit of that objective is they have all these programs to form priests, religious and now lay people with the heart of missionaries. And so that was founded by Blessed Paul Manna in 1916. in 1954 that became Pontifical. So you had four different societies all Pontifical, all help in the missions, all under what’s now called the Dicastery for Evangelization in Rome. the successor of the Congregation for the Evangelization of People and the original Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. And a little over 20 years ago, all four of these societies started to be run by one president over in Rome for the international situation. And then in every country like the United States, the national director becomes the national director of all four. So I’m running all four of these societies now. It’s a lot of responsibility, but it’s extremely fun. And each of these four has a little bit of a different focus that complements the others for the success of the missions worldwide.
Brown: The one for the children is so beautiful. Can you say just a little bit more about how that actually looks across the globe?
Landry: So what it looks like across the globe is every Diocese that’s a missionary Diocese is able to appeal to Rome for help in one of two ways. what we call an ordinary subsidy, which means normal operating expenses, and then extraordinary subsidies when they need to build a new school, when they need to build a catechetical center, when they’ve got to pay more catechists than would come through the Society of the Propagation of the Faith, which does pay some catechists’ salaries. When you’re in a parish that has 110 worship sites, like in the Archdiocese Diocese of Juba, South Sudan for example, the priest has got to travel to 110 different worship sites. And so how does the faith get really passed on? It gets passed by full-time catechists. But in order for them to be able to survive and feed their own kids, they need at least a little bit of a salary. And so that’s cared for by the Missionary Childhood Association. Dioceses appeal through Rome for the help they need to pass on the faith to young kids. It’s for programs for those under 14. And we’re not only passing on the treasure of our faith to them, but we’re asking them to become missionaries in two ways. First, to pray for the missions, especially for children in other countries, and then to sacrifice for the missions. Kids aren’t able to sacrifice huge sums, but like the widow with her mite praised by Jesus in the Gospel, they’re able to give something. And sometimes they here in the United States with entrepreneurial creativity, they start raising money, little fundraisers in order to be able to send. Here in the United States, we have ways to try to help young people get to know their faith better and become more missionary. Just last night I was dealing with somebody who works for us who’s designed an extraordinary board game, kind of like Risk if you remember that when we were kids, with a map of all the missionary territories with ways to become a full church with the various steps in each of those countries which is the way that everybody basically wins in this game. Then I can’t wait to start Jeopardy! mission competitions across the country that will be remunerated because I’m convinced that if you give young people texts and a real goal that they might be able to win a $10,000 scholarship to a good Catholic school or to help their family if they’re homeschooled or something else like this and get them really to learn the great missionaries, their histories, everything else, some of the great documents like Redemptoris Missio and everything else that that’s going to be a way to form future leaders in the missions here in the US but perhaps future mission missionaries and those who as moms and dads might really promote the missionary spirituality of their kids. When you look at all the great missionaries, it kind of started and there are lots of families watching us today. They started by reading the Annals of the Propagation of the Faith with their kids before we had all these devices where kids could lose their attention. Every night they’d read the dramatic stories of the lives of the saints. And so the greatest female missionary in US Catholic history, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, she read that as a child before her parents left her an orphan girl and she wanted to become a missionary to China. And that’s when Pope Leo XIII said no, not to the east but to the west and came to New York and the rest is salvation history in our country. And so she’s one of many the North American martyrs who again brought the gospel to Canada in the northeastern United States. All of the martyrs in Auriesville, St. Isaac Jogues, St. Rene Goupil, St. Jean de la Lande, they were all more or less breastfed on the nutrition well digested by the church based on their writings in the Jesuit relations and the annals of the propagation of the faith. And so I’m really hoping to incite that in the US. That’s one of the ways my missionary creativity is heading.
Brown: And I want to plug a little material for that Jeopardy! game. Learn about John Paul II’s pilgrimages all over the world. There are 104 of them. There’s plenty of material there and for your kids in every part of the world. 104 is small but we will add it and start expanding
Landry: Especially John Paul II’s visit to the United States because he always came as a pilgrim pope of evangelization, and he came to fan into a flame the young faith we still have but now with Pope Leo our faith has matured even after just 250 years of our country we’ve produced a successor of St. Peter. And that’s not only a great honor for him and for the Augustinians and for Chicago, but he is he’s now the most famous American Catholic of all time, even more famous than my predecessor, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, for whose beatification we continue to pray. Pope Leo is going to be remembered forever. And for him to succeed in his papacy, he needs all of us in the US to respond to God’s grace to upgrade our involvement in the faith. He’s asking us to help him do his job with regard to the missions in particular, which is what he said on October 13th earlier this year in his video message for World Mission Sunday to help him help the mission. Now’s the time for us to respond to that call as he’s received that burning torch of the Holy Spirit from St. John Paul II through Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis.
Brown: It’s got to look like a daunting job looking out across the world seeing everything there is to be done. I’ll give you one more one more question. Where might be your priorities? You’ve got missionaries who not only want to proclaim the gospel and introduce people to Jesus but also you know help with basic human needs. We talked a little bit earlier about human development, that’s not it, but it’s also not nothing, it’s important it’s the Christian call to help the poor and you’re not when you’re doing so you’re not proselytizing, you’re giving a witness and you hope they respond. And there are those three areas you outlined before. There’s the those who have not heard the gospel, those who are already being pastored and living in community, and those who those cultures and peoples who’ve wandered away from the faith. I’m sure we could go on making distinctions about, you know, where the missionary call and what it’s supposed to do, but time and resources are always limited. So you have to make hard decisions. From your perch now as national director of The Pontifical Mission Societies maybe where do you see the most urgent needs or the greatest impact that we might have let’s say let’s just give it a time next five years or so.
Landry: So the church as a whole has already made that decision for me even before I became the national director of the Pontifical Mission Societies. The real priority of the church is sharing the gift of our faith with those who have never met Jesus. Huge stakes on that one. It is possible to be saved without an explicit relationship with Jesus, but it’s so much harder. Jesus had come to bring all that God had entrusted to the Jews to fulfillment. We need to share that fulfillment with our elder brothers and sisters in the faith. Likewise with Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, secular atheists, everybody. 100 out of a hundred is Jesus’ priority. Some people already have a relationship with Jesus. Others haven’t yet heard him. And time’s running out on their life here. That was one of the reasons why St. Francis Xavier in a great letter he sent to St. Ignatius, his former roommate and the founder of the Jesuits, he said, “Would that I could go back to my university in Paris and scream at the top of my lungs, would that your charity match your learning?” Do you realize how many people are dying without knowing Jesus Christ because of you that you’re just not taking it seriously enough? And so if we get mission to all 8.1 billion, especially those 5.5 billion who don’t yet know Jesus, it’s going to transform us so that our interactions with everybody else, those who have been baptized but drifted away from the faith or even those who are practicing the faith but not doing it with maximal love, etc. All of that’s going to be dramatically impacted by it. When we look at how we spend the money that comes on in the real priorities in the Society of the Propagation of the Faith is strengthening the churches to be able to do their job. So many of them are so poor to build a church in Bangladesh costs $10,000. You can’t build a church in the US without several million. And there are some who are looking at this program right now who would have the capacity. might be a sacrifice, but they could build a whole church in Bangladesh where a couple thousand people would be able to have a tabernacle with Jesus in their village where they’d be able to learn their faith and really be transformed. Some people watching us might be able to build more than one chapel. But just think about that scale. The vast majority of priests in the missionary territories, they survive. The only money they get are the mass stipends that they get from places like the United States, from parishes, for example, where if you’re trying to get a mass for a deceased loved one, you can’t because all the masses are booked for the next year. You send them to the missions. The reality is most of the priests in the missions can’t get one mass stipend for the 365 days of the year. They’re lucky if they get mass stipends for one month of the year. So like that would be anywhere from $150 to $300 is all they get for the entire year. And they don’t even keep all of that money because they have so many poor families and you got to pay the plumber for something in your church or the electrician or something’s destroyed by a natural disaster. And so the poverty is real. They’re still incredibly joyful. But imagine what could happen if somebody who has a million-dollar bonus in the United States just says what if I gave that to the medieval mission societies for Bangladesh. Maybe they could build 100 churches in that country in the next year, and I guarantee you we could think about how many people would be impacted that way. So building churches for the Society of the Propagation of the Faith for the missionary childhood association being able to up the number of catechists who are able to bring the gift of our faith to young children always urgent. With the Society of St. Peter the Apostle the needs are growing. Thanks be to God. In Africa there are more vocations than they have room for. And we know that the investment of previous generations in the church in Africa has come back to help us. So many dioceses have now missionary priests from Nigeria or Uganda or Kenya or other places where thanks be to God our ancestors in the faith were generous and world mission Sunday collection or through the medieval mission society. We were able to pay for them to study and now the fruits of that investment are coming back so that we’re able to receive Jesus and Holy Communion and we’re able to keep some of the churches open. What you know, every grandparent cares about what’s going to happen when their kids are growing up in the faith. Well, if you want to ensure that they’re going to have priests to serve them, the biggest bang for your buck is through the Society of St. Peter the Apostle. Because to train a seminary in the United States costs between 40 and 50,000 per capita. To train a seminary in Africa, $700. Just think about that investment. And then, finally, for missionary formation, one of the things we have to do way better in the US compared to other places is other countries much poorer than we do a do a greater job in forming people as missionaries. I love being an American and like in two of the three societies that I’ve mentioned that make collections, we are number one by far in generosity and I thank all American Catholics for your generosity that makes that possible. But we need to be number one in missionary formation. We’re growing up in a place in which we’ve got the Augustine Institute, we’ve got Word on Fire, we’ve got Ascension Press, we’ve got Dynamic Catholic, all of these places formed by lay people in order to pass on the gift of our faith. Word on fire is likewise formed by Bishop Robert Barron. But we’re the best in the history of the church in communicating the gift of our faith to others. And so on the missionary side, we need to be numero uno across the world. And that’s one of the things that I’m trying to do so that you know in many of our parishes, Grattan, when the missionary comes to preach the missionary co-op during the summer or when we have the World Mission Sunday collection on the second to last Sunday in October. Americans give and they give generously. But I think many Americans give out of charity, which is not a bad reason. But we’re called to give out of missionary identity. As Fulton J Sheen, my predecessor, used to say, because we’re missionaries by our baptism, we either have to go to the missions or we have to send to the missions. We have to send our prayers and our sufferings, but we also have to send our contributions because that’s who we are. in the same way that people immigrate to the United States to earn a living to be able to send remittances back home to care for their families. So we Americans, if we’re here, we have to think about our family all across the globe and out of that familial sense, strengthen them as they take their baby steps in the faith. Because just as the United States now has a pope after our 250 years, so we’re expecting the missionary countries to produce not just future holy fathers, but future holy men and women, the saints of the 21st, 22nd centuries, and beyond. And we Americans right now have a chance to fertilize that fruitful soil for a harvest that will endure forever.
Brown: Yeah, that’s beautiful. And a couple of really beautiful points you made. One, imagine the great commission actually fulfilled. You know, all of those what is it 8.1 billion people actually in a relationship with Christ? And then also, what other country than the United States are all of the other countries of the world so well represented with all the immigration that we’ve drawn to our shores over what 250 plus years really. We’ll put it that way. Anything else you’d like to leave our visitors with?
Landry: I’d just like to say thank you. St. John Paul II’s whole papacy can be summarized by his being a faithful follower of Jesus. That was what his successor Cardinal Ratzinger preached at his funeral. But as we’ve been talking about today, likewise by his being an extraordinary apostle. He as the 264th Peter crisscrossed the globe to carry out the mission Jesus gave to the first pope at the seashore of Galilee. Don’t be afraid, he said. Put out into the deep and lower your nets for a catch. I am making you a fisher of men. And so we are all part of that worldwide fishing expedition. We’re all in Peter’s boat. And in that boat, we’re not just basically enjoying a nice day on the lake. We’ve been sent on out to cast the nets into deep water. On the Sea of Galilee, you caught fish in darkness, in shallow water, not in broad daylight, in the deep. But because of faith, Peter put out and he had the biggest draft of fish in his life. St. John Paul II at the beginning of this third Christian millennium chose those words of Jesus to Peter, put out into the deep as the motto for these thousand years of Christianity that we’re now just 25 years into. Together, we’re being sent into the deep seas to cast the net with the same confidence with which St. Peter did, St. John Paul II did and great saintly missionaries throughout the centuries have done. So this is our task. I can’t wait to do it with you, Grattan.
Brown: Amen. Thank you, Monsignor Landry, for a great discussion.