The Courage to Defend the Faith, 17th Friday (II), July 31, 2026

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Defending the Faith Conference, Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio
Friday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Ignatius of Loyola
July 31, 2026
Jer 26:1-9, Ps 69, Mt 13:54-58

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• At the beginning of this conference dedicating to Defending the Faith, the Church providentially gives us, in the three readings from the Word of God and the prayers and person of St. Ignatius of Loyola, a nutritious four course meal to strengthen us in the virtue of courage we will need to persevere faithfully, joyfully, serenely, intrepidly and fruitfully in that defense. We asked God the Father in the Collect or opening prayer of the Mass to give us the help he knows we need to imitate St. Ignatius in “fighting the good fight” of faith on earth so that we may merit with him an imperishable crown in heaven. Let’s see together how the Lord wants to prepare us to fight that fight, finish the race of human life, and keep, defend and pass on the treasure of that faith.
• The first, big and obvious lesson today is that sharing the faith, and defending it, will seldom be easy. In the Gospel, we see that it wasn’t easy for Jesus. After a lengthy journey in which he worked several stupendous miracles and preached and taught with an authority that astonished and amazed many of those who heard him, he returned to his hometown synagogue of Nazareth to announce that the long-awaited Kingdom of God, the fulfillment of the prophecies about the coming of the Messiah as son of David, was at hand. Immediately before his return, he had given us eight parables about the Kingdom of God and the response to it, and we see in his interactions in his hometown illustrations of all of those parables. As he sowed the Word of God in language and in his person, he encountered some with fruitful soil, like in his Mother and foster-father, but in far more he found superficial rocky soil that immediately responded to his words with astonishment before quickly turning to doubts and worse, as well as those with hardened soil who couldn’t believe that someone who grew up among them not only could possess great wisdom and work mighty deeds, but be the messiah to whom those words and deeds pointed. They were the ones who would see but not understand, hear but not listen. Among the Nazarenes there were wheat and weeds growing side-by-side, good and bad fish caught in the same net. There were some who were willing to sell all they had to obtain the pearl of great price and the buried treasure who is God and others who didn’t recognize the value of that Pearl and Treasure speaking to them live in their own synagogue. There were some with the faith of mustard seeds that would grow large and others whose small faith would actually shrink, for to the one who had more would be given and to the one who had not, even what he had would be taken away. There would be some who, hearing Jesus, would become like the head of the household taking from the storeroom of treasures things both old and new and others who would joylessly draw from that storeroom only what was stale. All of this would be seen when Jesus returned home. At first, he was received with astonishment, but that soon passed to offense, and as we know from St. Luke’s account, it would then turn to homicidal thoughts and attempted murder as they sought to toss him off of a Nazarene cliff. “A prophet is not without honor except in his native place and in his own house,” Jesus would say, foretelling the opposition, the suffering, the rejection and sometimes even the martyrdom of God’s ambassadors and defenders. St. John’s words in his prologue, “He came to his own, but his own did not receive him,” can be applied not only to the Light incarnate who was rejected by those who preferred darkness, but in some way to every prophet, every apologist, every defender. And sometimes the greatest resistance modern apostles will face will come from their family, their circle of childhood friends, their neighbors, even sometimes their parish or group of fellow believers. Jesus promised us later that whatever they did to him, they will do to us. That we will have some welcome us and others oppose and reject us. But that everything will lead to our being able to give witness, and sometimes the most compelling testimony we will give is fidelity when we suffer opposition, ridicule and even persecution and death. Sometimes our greatest defense may be to imitate Christ on Golgotha. This is what we learn from the martyrs. This is what we learn from the saints.
• We see this challenging, grown-up truth on display in today’s first reading as God sent the Prophet Jeremiah to the Temple to proclaim a message of conversion and extend an offer of mercy. Jeremiah said to the people of Judah assembled in the house of God that if they would listen and turn back, each from his evil way, God would not allow them to suffer the consequences of the destructive choices they were making, but “if you disobey me, not living according to the law I placed before you and not listening to the words of my servants the prophets, whom I send you constantly though you do not obey them, I will treat this house like Shiloh, and make this the city to which all the nations of the earth shall refer when cursing one another.” Shiloh, you may remember, was where the Ark of the Covenant had been kept for 369 years until the Philistines captured it. Now that Ark was in the Temple and God was telling them that just as Shiloh lost the Ark and was eventually destroyed, the same thing could happen to the Temple in Jerusalem, and Jerusalem, the Holy City, rather than being a word of spiritual aspiration, could become a word worse than Sodom and Gomorrah. Upon hearing those words, “the priests and the prophets” — the leaders of the people, those who were expected holy, to be closest to God — grabbed hold of Jeremiah and said words that foretold what would be heard in Pilate’s praetorium 639 years later: “You must be put to death!” In order to suppress the message, they would extinguish the messenger. In God’s house, where his glory abided, his ambassador and his word were not only unwelcome but marked for extermination.
• We learn from what happened in the lives of Jesus, Jeremiah and so many of the other prophets and apostles two key lessons. The first is always to be listening to those God sends, especially if they’re people we know whom we might be tempted to dismiss because we think we know their history, like those in Nazareth had categorized and conquered Jesus. God will send us plenty of prophets, some of whom will preach in pulpits, some of whom will give us fraternal corrections, others of whom will come to us in manifold ways. We should never think we’re “fully formed” and no longer need to heed what God might be saying to us through those we encounter, especially the true prophets who come in God’s name. The second is that, in living and spreading the faith, we must always be prepared for rejection. This was very hard for the young Jeremiah initially to accept. He didn’t know why God had chosen and sent him out just to be rejected, imprisoned, beaten, publicly mocked and thrown into a muddy cistern to die. But God consoled, encouraged and strengthened him for his mission. Jesus is strengthening us, and, like Jeremiah, and like Jesus, we need to be ready to give witness out of season, because as Jesus ultimately says, they’re not rejecting us but him and the One who sent him. Rejection is never easy as a human phenomenon but it is a means for greater union with Jesus, for witness to our faith in him, and ultimately to show others that Jesus and his Gospel are treasures worth suffering for and that the conversion and salvation of others, even those who oppose us, are worth dying for.
• Today we celebrate the feast of someone who shows us how to heed God’s message of conversion given through the prophets and the saints and to persevere through rejection for God’s greater glory. Until he was 30, Iñigo Lopez, the future St. Ignatius of Loyola, vainly sought worldly treasures and honor on the battlefield. But then, in the Battle of Pamplona in 1521, he had his right leg shattered by a cannonball. While he was convalescing, because there were no books on knights’ tales and romances in his castle, he was left only with Sacred Scripture and a Spanish book on the lives of the saints. He quickly was pierced by his own shallowness in compared to the substance of Christ and the saints. He was particularly moved by the saints’ valor and heroism, especially in the face of opposition to the Gospel. He grasped that they were fighting the good fight in the battle that counted most. He thought that they had sought and seized the most valuable treasure and achieved the only honor that would ultimately last. And he asked one of the most important questions in the history of hagiography: “Why if I should do what Saint Francis [of Assisi] or Saint Dominic did?” He knew that they were men just like him, but men who said yes to God, men who gave God permission to employ them for what he needed most. There would have been hundreds of other saints he could have named from the preceding 1,500 years, but I think it’s important to notice that among all the saints whose stories were told in the various books lying around the castle, he chose Francis and Dominic, the two 13th century mendicants who not only extravagantly gave up so much of what the world treasured in order to obtain a much more valuable fortune but who formed bands of brothers who joined themselves to them to help the entire world rediscover those hidden riches. Francis and Dominic, and the religious families they founded, were those who suffered a great deal from among the family and friends, from among many of those in the Church at the time, for their radical style of life that to the lukewarm and worldly seemed so fanatical. Francis’ father thought he had lost his mind. The great Dominican Thomas Aquinas’ parents locked him in the dungeon in their castle because he wanted to become a member of the Order of Preachers rather than a Benedictine. Inspired by the total commitment of the saints, Ignatius made the commitment to serve the true King and sacrifice everything to seize his kingdom. His transformation was arduous. The price was steep. He spent nine months in a cave in Manresa praying, turning his wish into a firm will, allowing God to do the difficult work of melting his worldly ways into clay that could be reformed. The interior struggles he went through as he pondered his sinfulness and Christ’s beauty eventually became his famous Spiritual Exercises, the most popular and influential retreat manual in history. That was just the start. He knew he would need an education to be of much use, so, in his 30s, in a move that would bring on him great ridicule, he literally returned to grammar school with young boys to learn Latin before going for advanced degrees in universities. It was at the famous University of Paris that he met the other first Jesuits, including his roommates, the future St. Francis Xavier and St. Peter Favre, and helped them to become truly courageous disciples, as together they formed the nucleus that God would use to help to call the whole Church back to fidelity after the scandals that led to the Protestant Reformation. The Company or Society of Jesus then formed and sent out waves of teachers and missionaries all across the globe, many of whom, like the North American Martyrs in the United States and Canada, gave the supreme witness to Christ for God’s greater glory. St. Ignatius’ famous Suscipeshows us the spirituality of a prophet and the spirituality of so many of the great Jesuit heroes across the centuries: “Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding and my entire will, all I have and call my own. You have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. Everything is yours; do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace. That is enough for me.” He knew that the Lord’s love and grace are sufficient and are a greater treasure than all of the world’s accolades. He knew that the Lord’s love and grace were worth all of the sufferings he and his spiritual brothers and sons might endure.
• Today on his feast day, it’s important for us to ask ourselves, “What if I should do what Saint Francis and Saint Dominic and Saint Ignatius have done?” Each of them had 46 chromosomes, just like us. Each of them had recourse to the power coming from the Sacraments of Baptism, the Holy Eucharist, and confession, just like us. Each of them had access to the lives of the saints and the Word of God, just like we do. But none of them frankly was blessed like we are to have access to resources like the St. Paul Center, the Augustine Institute, Word on Fire, or Ascension Press and Dynamic Catholic, like we do. Today God wants to fill us with courage to dare to do what they did, without fear of the cost or sufferings. God wants us to make the choice that will help us to become true defenders of the faith, in just in terms of apologetic competence, but also in terms of existential witness and example. One of the climaxes of St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercisesis his meditation on the two standards or banners. He has us imagine we’re on a big battlefield and on one side there is the flag of Christ and on the other the standard of Satan. We have to choose one or the other. Christ, he notes, is offering us a life of poverty, humility, self-denial, the Cross, and everything the Cross signifies. Satan is offering us all the vanity and pleasures of the world. We’re offered two ways of life, two treasures, essentially two gods, one true and the other of our own making. We have to choose. The whole of the Spiritual Exercises is meant to help us to choose Christ and to persevere in that choice. To choose Christ is to choose to heed his word and to be willing to endure rejection on account of his name. To stand under his banner is to stand under the Cross and to join the long line of heroes— Jeremiah, Elijah, Peter, Paul, Ignatius, Francis Xavier, Thomas More, Stanley, Mary, Agnes, Agatha, Lucy, Cecilia, Perpetua, Felicity, Joan of Arc, Teresia Benedicta and so many others — who have followed Christ to and through the Cross into eternal life. While the details will change between our life and the life of the saints who have gone before us, God’s grace is indeed sufficient for each of us to imitate their fidelity, fight the good fight, finish the race and keep and defend the faith until the end.
• Today at Mass, we are given the literally awesome privilege to receive the same Jesus into this Fieldhouse as who entered the Nazareth synagogue. In fact we’re able to do even more, and receive within under sacramental form the same Jesus whom Mary received within her womb. Rather than calling for his death like those in ancient Nazareth, today we welcome lovingly the Author of Life. Like the temple in Shiloh or the Temple of Jerusalem, we will not just house the Ark of the Covenant but because an Ark of the New and Eternal Covenant, containing within the world’s greatest treasure. And so we pray here with words that Saint Iñigo Lopez used to pray in his Thanksgiving each day, the words he placed at the beginning of the Spiritual Exercises, humbly asking God to give us the help he knows we need to do in our own circumstances what Ignatius did in his. “Soul of Christ, sanctify me. Body of Christ, save me. Water from the side of Christ, wash me. Passion of Christ, [into which we enter in the Mass] strengthen me. Good Jesus, hear me. Within the wounds, shelter me. From turning away, keep me. From the evil one, protect me. At the hour of my death, call me. Into your presence lead me to praise you with all your saints forever and ever. Amen.”

The readings for today’s Mass were: