Msgr. Roger J. Landry

Leonine Forum NYC Chapter, IESE Business School

Thursday of the 25th Week of Ordinary Time, Year I

Votive Mass of the Holy Spirit

September 25, 2025

Hg 1:1-8, Ps 149, Lk 9:7-9

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click here: 

The following points were attempted in the homily:

• As we begin the Leonine Forum together with this Mass of the Holy Spirit, we focus straight out on the way the Lord wants to build us up this year by helping us to build our life on him.


• We are now in the midst of three weeks of focus in the first reading on the post-exilic writings during which the Church has us ponder, if there are no proper feasts, on three days of Ezra, two days of Haggai, three days of Zechariah, two days of Nehemiah, two days of Baruch, three days of Jonah, one day of Malachi and two days of Joel.  These post-exilic writings focus essentially on two things: first, the rebuilding of the temple and, second, the way of holiness so that there is never again an exile from God. Since today is one of only two days in two years we will listen liturgically to Haggai, let’s ask the Holy Spirit who inspired him to help us to listen well to the message God wants us to get through him. The way we’re supposed to hear with ears to hear is to link what is said about rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem to Jesus’ resurrection (the True Temple), to the temple that is the Church, and to the temple that is meant to be each of us together with Jesus.


• In today’s passage from Haggai, we see how the Lord sent the prophet to wake up the people of God whom the Lord had freed from exile. It was happening during the time of King Darius, the son of Cyrus. As we’ve seen over the last three days from the Book of Ezra, Cyrus had allowed the Jews to return and helped them to start rebuilding the Temple and Darius refunded all of their sacrifices. But the Jews did not finish the job. They built something quickly and temporarily on the Temple Mount, but then started to prioritize their own affairs. They were saying, “The time has not yet come to rebuild the House of the Lord.” They were delaying the things of God for their own affairs, while constructing their own luxurious paneled houses. Haggai, speaking for the Lord said, “Is it time for you to dwell in your own paneled houses, while this house [of God] lies in ruins?” He then went on to say that they would never find fulfillment in sowing, eating, drinking, clothing, or money making. The forceful appeal of the Lord was “Consider your ways!” He told them to go get timber and begin to build the house of the Lord “that I may take pleasure in it and receive my glory.” That might seem like an egocentric statement, but it’s not. The Lord takes pleasure in loving us — we prayed in the Psalm, “The Lord takes delight in his people” — and his glory is, as St. Ireneus would say at the end of the second century, “man fully alive” through the vision of God. God wanted a house of God built so that we would fittingly worship him, because it is through such worship that he builds us into a holy temple. It starts, however, with proper zeal. Before the first temple was built, we saw in King David an opposite attitude to that of the post-exilic Jews. King David was eaten alive by the fact that he was living in a palace while the ark of the Covenant, the sign of God’s presence, was in a tent. He wanted to build a fitting temple, but God, through the prophet Nathan, replied that He instead would build a temple for David. That temple was obviously David’s own descendant according to the flesh and God’s own Son, Jesus. We’re all called, however, to have the same zeal to build a house of the Lord because that’s the way the Lord in fact makes us his temple. In the Gospel, Herod was curious to meet Jesus, but Jesus will never be able to build a temple for him to dwell within us by curiosity. There needs to be a true relationship, a union, with the Lord, a hunger for mutual indwelling, something that Herod never had.


• The Holy Spirit has been sent among us to help us build our whole life on Jesus the Cornerstone, so that we, in fact, can become a true temple of God’s presence. In Catholic Social Teaching, in the whole Christian life, we begin with two truths: the truth of God and our having been created in God’s image and likeness. The summit of human life is when we can not only become like God but have God dwell within us. That’s what happens in the sacramental life. It begins in baptism and intensifies every Holy Communion, when we receive within ourselves what the Blessed Fruit of Mary’s womb who dwelled within her for nine months. Starting from this awesome reality of human dignity, we strive as Catholics to build the Kingdom of God, a civilization of love, a culture of life, peace, justice, solidarity, virtue and more. Everything begins here. But we have to take responsibility. We have to consider our ways. We have to begin with our own conversion and build ourselves on Christ and then, together, to go out as salt, light and leaven and transform culture.


• The Lord Jesus, the Cornerstone, comes from heaven to the altar to make us his holy temple. He invites us each day to build our life wisely on the rock of his Word and even more on him who is the Word-made-flesh. Let’s ask the Holy Spirit’s help for our joint labors this year so that the Holy Spirit may enkindle in us the fire of his love and through us renew the face of the earth.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading 1

HG 1:1-8

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