The Testimony We Have Within Ourselves, Memorial of Blessed Pauline-Marie Jaricot, January 9, 2026

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of The Pontifical Mission Societies, New York
Friday after Epiphany
Memorial of Pauline-Marie Jaricot, Foundress of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith
January 9, 2026
1 John 5:5-13, Ps 147, Lk 5:12-16

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

The following is a transcript of the homily: 

• On this feast of Blessed Pauline Jericho, it’s helpful for us to look at the readings that the Church gives us through a missionary lens.
• Jesus cured the leper in the Gospel. He knew he wanted to be cleansed, and he knew with faith that Jesus could cleanse him, so he went up to Jesus and fell down before him. Those were already massive acts of faith, considering a leper was ostracized and had to stay at least 50 feet from everybody ringing a bell and shouting at the top of his lungs, “Unclean! Unclean!” But he had confidence that Jesus himself wouldn’t run away, that Jesus wouldn’t castigate him. And so Jesus, seeing this man before him, did something for which we can still hear the shrieks across millennia. He reached out, touched the leper and said, “I do will it! Be made clean!”
• Jesus has come into the world. He has willed to make us clean. That’s what it means to call him savior. We need cleansing. Without Jesus, we die estranged from God. We die in our sins, original and personal. We need that cleansing. In summary of all of salvation, Jesus, the Lamb of God who came to take away our sins, came and touched the human race. He took on our own humanity to cleanse it from within. This is His will.
• Because Jesus did not want to be boxed in simply as a free doctor who could cure us of our illnesses but then watch us to return to our former life living without him, because he didn’t want word of him spreading too fast, with people categorizing him other than who he really was and proclaiming that he was doing things other than his most important things, he ordered the healed man who has just received this incredible gift not to say anything about the miracle but simply to do what the mosaic law prescribed after a healing. The man had received the miracle because he had extraordinary faith. He was somebody who already grasped who Jesus was, and knew that Jesus had the power to cleanse leprosy by his word. He knew that Jesus’ words meant something, and that if Jesus said something, it should be done. But when Jesus ordered him not to tell anyone, he instead told everyone, and the reports spread all around so that Jesus needed to escape from people in order to be able to pray, because everybody was coming for horizontal miracles rather than the greater vertical miracle of faith. We always need to pay attention to this. We go to Jesus with faith, with needs, we receive from him so many gifts including the miracles of the sacraments. When Jesus, however, tells us to do something, do we do it, or do we decide to do our own thing?. Eventually, once Jesus has saved us on the Cross, he’s going to give a totally different command. Rather than say, “Make sure you don’t tell anyone anything,” he’s going to say, “Go to the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature.” He’s not going to say “Proclaim the Gospel if you feel like it, … if you’re in a good mood or had a good night’s rest,” but without condition, “Go and proclaim the Gospel to everyone.” And the key of our faith is whether we strive to do that or whether we, parallel to the healed leper, go about doing our own thing, even though we have faith.
• In today’s first reading, St. John, who did have faith, and who was, as we see in the window behind us among the other apostles, carrying out that his work as an apostle, catechizing the early community of the church, specifically about the incredible gifts that God has given us in order to help our apostolic mission. He begins today by saying, “Who’s the victor over the world?” We should never forget. Pauline Jaricot never forgot. We are the disciples of the one who has conquered sin and death! We’re on the eternally winning team, provided that we don’t do our own thing, but we accept Jesus’ coaching.
• Then St. John talks about the triple witness of the Holy Spirit, of water and blood. Let’s think about what this means. The Holy Spirit has been sent for mission to testify, not only to Jesus, but to testify through us about Jesus. The water obviously refers to baptism. We’re going to be celebrating the Baptism the Lord on Sunday. Jesus, right after his baptism, went out to proclaim the Gospel, calling everyone to “repent and believe.” What’s the blood? It’s the Eucharist, Jesus’ precious blood poured out for sinners that we’re able to consume, the witness that Jesus wouldn’t stop at anything in order to save us, and that flowing with his own blood within us, we now become capable of a similar testimony. St John says, “Whoever believes in the Son of God has this testimony within himself.” We have within the testimony of the Holy Spirit. We have within the testimony of water, the sacrament of Baptism. We have within the extraordinary gift of Jesus himself and the Holy Eucharist. And we shouldn’t receive those incredible gifts in vain. St. John then specifies even further what this mission of the Holy Spirit, Baptism and the Eucharist are all about. “This is the testimony. God gave us eternal life. And this life is in His Son. Whoever possesses the Son has life. Whoever does not possess the Son of God does not have life.” So we have to possess the Son. We celebrated on Sunday the memorial of St Elizabeth Ann Seton, a convert from Episcopalianism, a native of the city of New York. When she finally converted in March of 1805, and received Jesus for the first time in Holy Communion, she said, “I possess him, and he possesses me.” There’s a mutual belonging that takes place in Holy Communion. In order to have eternal life, any one of us needs to have that mutual belonging. It’s not enough to be a good person. It’s not enough to be a Muslim who plays five times a day toward Mecca. It’s not enough to follow the teachings of Buddha. We’ve got to have Jesus’ life within. That’s why St Francis Xavier left Spain to go to four different countries to try to spread the faith. That’s what St Therese was praying for throughout her years in the Carmel of Lisieux and now the Carmel of the Heavenly Jerusalem. It’s what blessed Pauline was praying for and working for.
• Now we know that Jesus who founded the sacraments, he who sent the Holy Spirit, is in himself bound by the sacraments. He is able to save somebody who isn’t baptized, by somehow communicating the effects of baptism. But we can never know that, and that’s what spurs our work, because 5.5 out of the 8.1 billion people on the planet don’t have Christian faith yet and many of those who do don’t really live it. They’re not living with the life of God within and, therefore, their salvation is at risk. People are dying everywhere without really knowing Jesus. That’s ultimately what has spawned all for the Pontifical Mission Societies. It’s what spurred on Blessed Pauline Jaricot.
• She was a 17 year old girl who was vain. She was practicing the faith. She was a decent Catholic. She wasn’t committing mortal sins. But she worried too much about what clothes she was wearing or what makeup and going to dances and other things. She went to church one day, and the priest in her parish preached a homily against vanity, and she felt deeply convicted because she was living a vain life. She was putting her treasure in things that were passing and fleeting, things that didn’t really matter. Who cares if you wear makeup? Who ultimately cares whether you’re dressed as a rich girl or a poor girl? And so she changed, and she began really to live her faith. The first thing that touched her was the impiety of so many of her fellow French men and women, boys and girls. This was only a couple decades after the French Revolution, which had devastated faith in France and tried to force down everybody’s throat a secular ideal. Many were coming back to the faith, but many weren’t, and so she put together a group of girls to do reparation for all the sins that people were committing, praying for their conversion. It was out of that group that eventually came the Society of the Propagation of the Faith. She had a dream about two lamps. One lamp was full and one lamp was empty, and the oil from the full lamp was flowing into the empty lamp. The way that she interpreted that dream was that the empty lamp was France and the full lamp from which the oil was coming was missionary territories, especially China and the United States. What her hope for the re-evangelization of her own country was that the faith of those she would build up across the globe would come back to nourish the faith of the French. So that’s why she founded the Society of the Propagation of the Faith. That’s why she got these groups of 10, and then hundreds, and then thousands, together in order to try to help the missions praying for them each day an Our Father, a Hail Mary, and a simple prayer, “St Francis Xavier, pray for us.” And then to sacrifice a penny a week. The Society was built on the contributions ultimately of the poor. Those sacrifices were all accumulated and most of the first disbursements came to the United States of America, to the Diocese Louisiana and the two Floridas, and to the Diocese of Bardstown, Kentucky, both of which had French bishops. The Lord, over the course of these last 204 years, has been able to build something beautiful to help the Church with her give this tri-fold witness, together with the Holy Spirit flowing from our baptism, strengthened by the Eucharist, that in Christ, whom we’re about to receive, there really is the fullness of life.
• Blessed Pauline was able to do that because, like the wise virgin in Jesus’ parable, her lamp was full of oil, constantly burning for the Lord, and that’s where everything starts. The type of faith that yearns for Jesus and therefore yearns to spread that yearning, the type of faith who comes to Him saying, “You can make me clean!,” the type of faith that does what he says and takes him seriously when he says, “Go to the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature!” Through the intercession of Blessed Pauline, let’s continue that holy work.

The readings for the Mass were: 

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