I’m Monsignor Roger Landry, National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies. It’s August 9th. I’m recording this at the North American College in Rome, the place where American seminarians are sent in order to prepare to be sent home to serve us in the United States as priests.
Today in the Gospel there’s a scene in which a dad exasperated comes up to Jesus and asks him to exorcize his son who was constantly attempting to commit suicide by running into fire or drowning himself. The father had already brought his son to the nine apostles who weren’t with Jesus at the transfiguration but they weren’t able to expunge the demon. And so Jesus somewhat exasperated said, “Oh faithless and perverse generation, bring him to me.” And Jesus worked that exorcism.
After he said to the disciples that they weren’t able to work that miraculous deed because their faith was too little. He said if we have faith the size of a mustard seed we can transplant mountain ranges into the sea. Jesus was using very graphic language there, but the real question is, what’s the level of our faith? Do we have faith? In St. Mark’s version of the scene he said some demons are cast out only by prayer and fasting. To have faith to pray as if lives depend on it because they do. To have faith to pray in the body, which is what fasting is, hungering for what God hungers way beyond our own material needs.
Someone who had this type of faith is the great saint the church celebrates today. St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, known in life as St. Edith Stein. She was a Jewish convert who reading St. Teresa of Ávila’s life recognized this is the truth and wanted to enter into the true relationship with that truth with a personal name, Jesus. She gave her life with her sister Rosa in the concentration camp during World War II when the Nazis rounded her up in response to the heroic statement of the Dutch bishops against Nazism. She said, “We are going to suffer for our people.” She knew that she was continuing to make up in her own flesh what was lacking in her of Christ’s sufferings for the sake of the Church. She was a bride on the cross together with Jesus.
Through her intercession, we pray for all missionaries that their faith may be great, and for the whole Church that our faith might sustain them so that together we can move the mountains of disbelief and bring everybody one day to the heavenly Jerusalem, the celestial mountain where Jesus
awaits us together with St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross and all the saints. God bless you.
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