The Kingdom, Conversion and Blessed Solanus, 17th Thursday (II), July 30, 2026

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Christ the King Chapel, Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio
Thursday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Blessed Solanus Casey
July 30, 2026
Jer 18:1-6, Ps 146, Mt 13:47-53

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• During this Applied Biblical Studies Conference focused on the Gospel of Matthew, how providential it is that we have a chance at daily Mass to ponder the last two of eight images of the kingdom in this 13th chapter of his Gospel, the Parable of the Dragnet and the Parable of the Head of the Household. These are not only a great preparation for Curtis Mitch’s first workshop this afternoon but contain for us fundamental lessons about God’s saving will and the response of our human will. They also are an excellent prism with which to peer into the life of Blessed Solanus Casey, the humble Capuchin from Wisconsin whom the Church celebrates today on the 69^thanniversary of his death.
• In the image of the Kingdom of heaven as a dragnet thrown into the sea, we can see two great lessons: The kingdom seeks to draw everyone in, but not everyone is fit for the kingdom. The net will collect fish of every kind, but the good (literally the “beautiful” in Greek) will be retained and the bad (literally the “rotten”) will be thrown away after the haul. So there is a universal will for salvation but there’s also a response necessary, a judgment to be made, and not everyone will make it. In Jesus’ first homily, he reminded us that the presence of the kingdom requires conversion on our part. As St. Matthew records for us in his fourth chapter, Jesus said, “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (4:17). In his eighteenth chapter, he records Jesus reminding us, “Unless you convert and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven” (18:3). We ponder today and every Thursday in the third Luminous Mystery of the Holy Rosary “The Proclamation of the Kingdom of God and the Call to Conversion.” Upon meeting Christ the King, as we see in several of the vocation stories St. Matthew records, some people do change their lives, turn around and follow Jesus, but others do not. All are caught, but not all are fit. This is one of the points Jesus makes several times in St. Matthew’s Gospel: in the 8^thchapter, in Jesus’ words after healing at a distance the Centurion’s servant, when Jesus said that many will come from the east and west to enter the kingdom, but many of the children will be cast into the outer darkness; in the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds in the 13^th Chapter, where the two will be separated and the weeds burned; in the Parable of the Wedding banquet in the 22^nd chapter, about those summoned to the banquet who refuse to come or arrive improperly dressed; and most memorably in the Parable of the Sheep and Goats in the 25^thChapter, where the goats on his left will sadly depart from him into the eternal fire. The eternal Son of God has taken on our humanity, entered our world, gave his life as a ransom to save us all, and wills all of us to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth, but there are great stakes to our having been made free in his image and likeness. By his help, we need to respond with faith and live according to what God has revealed to us, to make him and his kingdom the precious pearl or hidden treasure worth giving our life to gain forever. Even though he has made us ontologically very good, we can become morally bad, or as St. Matthew calls us, ethically “rotten,” corrupt or hollowed out through structured without or in opposition to God. “There are only two kinds of people in the end,” C.S. Lewis once famously wrote. “Those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in hell choose it.” Hell exists not despite God’s love but precisely because of it, to honor the desires of those who don’t want to live in loving communion with Him and others. It is the state, as the Catechism calls it, of “definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed.” It is the tragic possibility of human freedom for those who, in voluntarily choosing sin, separate themselves from God and others.
• Jesus, however, preached this Parable of the Dragnet not as an image of predestination or even to try to motivate us by scaring the hell out of us. He preached it for the same reason he said what he did after the healing of the Centurion’s servant and gave the Parables of the Weeds and Wheat, the Banquet and the Last Judgment: to bring us to conversion, to awaken us and everyone to the fact that just because we’re in the Church doesn’t mean necessarily that eternal life with him is guaranteed. It’s not enough to practice the faith on the outside. We have to be living it on the inside. God gives us a consoling image of the type of conversion to which he is calling us in today’s first reading. He sends Jeremiah to see the work of the potter, fashioning and refashioning the clay and says that that is what he wants to do in us. He wants to form us, and re-form us, more and more into his image and likeness. Even if we’re not happy with who we are right now, even if we know he’s not happy, the potter’s wheel is still spinning and God with his master hand wants to shape us more and more into the persons he created us to be.
• At the end of today’s Gospel, at the end of this chapter focused on parables of the Kingdom, Jesus asks the disciples and us, “Have you understood all these things?” The Greek means, “Have you put all of these things together?,” indicating that we’re summoned to put the new truths Jesus has taught together as the pieces of a mosaic with the other tesserae he has given us. It’s not enough merely to hear Jesus’ parables and ponder the images. It’s not enough for us to have him solve the riddle of the images used in the parable. It’s to grasp the truths pointed to by Jesus’ unforgettable illustrations using similes from daily life in such a way that it helps us to seize the kingdom wholeheartedly. All of them are meant to form a whole that helps us live properly in the kingdom. This is what it means to apply our Biblical studies. Jesus mentions in the last parable of the chapter that the scribe instructed in the Kingdom is like the head of his household who takes from his storeroom both old and new. When we truly convert to Christ, it’s not like we lose whatever was authentic in our lives before, but find the fulfillment of everything good before. For the scribes, the scholars of the Old Testament, once they learned about the Kingdom, about Jesus’ fulfilling their messianic hopes, they were able to take from their storeroom of prayer and study both “new and old” to live by and help others to live by. They were able to take from Jeremiah’s image, for example, and see what Jesus the Potter was doing for them in their hearing. The Lord wants to transform us in the same way. He doesn’t throw out our own experiences, but reforms them in the new clay pot that he continually seeks to perfect in us with our consent and cooperation.
• We see in Blessed Solanus Casey an illustration of someone who understood these things, someone who brought from his storeroom so much from the Gospels, from the Old and New Testaments, as well as from rich human wisdom and put them all together, someone who was a good fish who in creative ways cast out the Church’s dragnet far and wide. Baptized Bernard, the future blessed came from a humble, large, hard-working Irish farming family in Oak Grove, Wisconsin, and worked as a logger, electric street car operator, prison guard and hospital orderly before entering high school seminary at the old age of 21. He was not exceptionally gifted in terms of academic talents — he struggled to learn German — and for that reason was ordained as a simplex priest, capable of celebrating Mass but not preaching (except very rarely) or hearing confessions. It would have been very easy for him to complain, to focus on what he couldn’t do, but instead he focused on what he could and cast his nets into the deep. For most of his religious life, he was a porter, welcoming people to the Capuchin monasteries — in Yonkers, lower East Manhattan, Harlem, Brooklyn, Huntington (Indiana) and for many years in Detroit — listening to their problems, answering their questions and needs, praying for and with them. Huge numbers of people would come to see him and leave changed as the Divine Potter used him to reform them profoundly. Welcoming them, Blessed Solanus helped them similarly to welcome with faith in divine providence whatever God sent. “O what God must have ahead of us,” he would say, “if we only leave all to his planning.” That’s what it means to live with trust in the Potter, something he himself modeled. “I look on my whole life as giving,” he said, “and I want to give and give until there is nothing left of me.” As he lay dying, 53 years to the hour of his first Mass, his last words were a Eucharistic oblation, “I give my soul to Jesus Christ,” a fitting valedictory of trust for someone who like we prayed in the Psalm sought to praise the Lord all his life, sing praise to him while he lived, who put his trust not in princes or human beings or earthly plans, but in the Lord who made heaven and earth. He once wrote about the three things that mark “saintly characters.” They are “eagerness for the glory of God, touchiness about the interests of Jesus, and anxiety for the salvation of souls.” With great zeal for God and concern for Jesus’ deepest hungers, he labored always for the salvation of souls, trying to help fish become good and beautiful and stay for their lifetime in the net of the Church.
• Today as we approach the Master Potter in this Mass, he wants to help us to “put things together” in such a way that our life will change. This is the way the Potter makes us ever more fit to contain the treasure he places in our earthen vessels. This is the “ever new” that he wants to combine with everything else he from his divine storehouse of graces has given us up until now. We know that the choice between the good and the bad fish, between the beautiful and the rotten, takes place according to a very straightforward criterion. The Jews weren’t spending all-nighters on the Sea of Galilee trying to catch fish for aquaria. The good or beautiful fish that are saved are those that are fit for eating, who are capable of making themselves a holocaust for others. To use the famous acrostic of the early Church, in which the Greek word for fish, ichthus, was understood to signify by its letters “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior,” the good and beautiful fish are those who, like Jesus, are able to say, “This is my body … given for you,” given to nourish you, given to help you live. The rotten fish are those who have been corrupted by interior selfishness, who by their own choices have made themselves unfit for this type of total service. To live in the kingdom means to imitate the King, like Blessed Solanus, in humbly serving all his subjects, giving oneself totally for others, losing one’s life for the sake of advancing the Kingdom so as to save it. The Mass is in fact the greatest storehouse of all, from which we can draw so much good. The Eucharist is where Jesus wants to put us together with him and with each other, to make us “beautiful” fish and fishers of men, casting with Blessed Solanus, in every way possible, the dragnet that hopes to bring all to Christ.

The readings for today’s Mass were: