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The missionary work of the Church will be successful if it is paying attention to two things at once: the Word of God and the culture of those to be evangelized, says the newly named national director of The Pontifical Mission Societies USA.
Fr. Roger Landry, who was named to the post last week, has had to learn that lesson as a priest, particularly in his first years after ordination 25 years ago, when he served as a high school chaplain.
The lesson has been affirmed many times since, in various roles and situations Fr. Landry has found himself in – as editor of the newspaper of his Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts; as a commentator on EWTN; as an Attaché to the Holy See’s Permanent Observer Mission to the United Nations; as the Catholic chaplain at Columbia University; and during his 65-day walk across the United States, accompanying young pilgrims to the National Eucharistic Congress.
As he wraps up his last semester at Columbia and prepares to jump into full-time work with the Pontifical Mission Societies (TPMS), he looks forward to visiting missions that TPMS supports in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
TPMS USA is a consortium of four closely-aligned societies that promote a missionary life among Catholics in the United States, instilling a missionary consciousness and spirituality, encouraging people to pray for, sacrifice for, and support the missions, Fr. Landry said.
The four components are the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, which promotes and supports the missions through the annual World Mission Sunday collection in October and the sponsoring of missionary priests abroad to speak about their work to congregations in the US; the Society of St. Peter the Apostle, which promotes a missionary identity and work among the clergy; the Missionary Childhood Association, which encourages young people in the US to support young people in other countries; and the Missionary Union of Priests and Religious, whose aim is to increase awareness of the Church’s worldwide mission among people engaged in pastoral ministry.
Lifetime of preparation
Asked how his varied background has prepared him for his new role, Fr. Landry said that his priesthood itself is the primary preparation.
“A priest is by definition a missionary,” he told Aleteia. “He has been chosen by the Lord, has spent time with the Lord, and then he’s been sent out to proclaim the Gospel.”
But in particular, his service as chaplain on the Seton Route of this summer’s National Eucharistic Pilgrimage also was good preparation.
“We were taking Jesus out of the churches and into the world he’s redeemed, and we were very conscious that as Eucharistic pilgrims we were Eucharistic missionaries, trying to take what we believe is the greatest treasure to meet everybody who was coming,” Fr. Landry said. “Sometimes you’re going to meet Catholics, many times you’re going to meet fallen-away Catholics, sometimes you’re going to meet people who are just ‘What’s that?’ and you’re going to need to explain it.”
But looking back to when he was a newly ordained priest, too, he found that he was already thinking with the mind of a missionary. Working with teenagers, who had a different mindset and vocabulary, he said,
“I needed to develop a capacity to propose Jesus in a way that would be attractive. And I think that that’s what missionaries are always seeking to do, starting with the categories of those who are listening and trying to show how Jesus is the answer to the questions that are there.”
Fr. Landry also said the board of TPMS felt that his work in the media was an asset.
“I hope to spend a good deal of time trying to get the word out first about how, as Pope Francis describes, we don’t have a mission, but we are a mission, both as individuals and as a Church,” he said.
Asked about what is needed for effective missionary work today, he answered that there are two things:
“The most important thing that’s needed is real faith,” the priest said. “All things are possible for those who believe, Jesus says. And so we have to have faith in multiple ways. We first have to believe what we’re transmitting, but then second, we have to believe in its power, that it’s made for others.”
“Look at the soil sample”
He noted that the Gospel reading for Mass on the day his appointment was announced (incidentally, the feast of St. Teresa of Calcutta, a missionary whose faith brought her through 50 years of interior darkness) was when Jesus told St. Peter to “put out into the deep” and lower his nets for a catch.
It was, Fr. Landry said, the “prelude to his being declared a fisher of men or a missionary.”
“Fish were caught in the Sea of Galilee in shallow water at nighttime, and Jesus was sending them out to deep water in broad daylight. But Peter had enough trust in the Lord that despite his fatigue, he put out in the deep and caught the biggest catch of his life. That type of faith, that type of boldness that flows from faith, that type of love for others that will lead one to sacrifice so many of the pleasures of home in order to go, sometimes to very out-of-the way places, living in situations that could never be described as comfortable, that has to come from a faith overflowing in love.”
The second thing necessary for successful mission work is to “look at the soil sample,” Fr. Landry continued.
“Jesus tells the parable of the sower and the seed, in which there were three ineffective soil samples,” he said. “One was stubborn or hardened, another was rocky or superficial. The third was thorny or distracted. If we’re going to be planting the seeds of the Gospel in any context, we have to know where the stubbornness is, where the superficialities are, and particularly where the worldly cares and anxieties that can choke the growth of the seed.
“And so we have to know the culture. We have to know the people, we have to know their questions, and we have to be able to explain how Jesus wants to meet them in those questions and eventually take them step by step to where he wishes to lead them,” he continued.
A double listening
Fr. Landry confessed that he sometimes worries that one of two things occurs in the proclamation the Gospel: “one, that we do it in the same ways that it was done in yesteryear, even though many of the questions have changed, and second, that we try to water it down so much that it’s no longer appealing to the people in this day because we don’t think they would be able to respond to the challenges that generations in the past have.
“The key for us is to have a double listening — a real, effective listening to the Word of God, not just as a static series of books, but to listen to the One who speaks to us in prayer, one ear on the Lord and one on the people to whom you’re trying to bring the Word of God in all its meaning,” he continued. “If we’re not listening to this second group and basic questions that they would have, we’re not going to be effective missionaries either. And so we can’t just do what used to be done in ages where it was once effective, but at the same time, we can’t water it down, as if people can’t accept some of the more challenging aspects of the Gospel today.”
And today we celebrate...