Fr. Roger J. Landry

National Assembly of the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious

Basilica of the Old Cathedral of St. Louis, Saint Louis, Missouri

Friday of the 24th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

September 19, 2025

1 Tim 6:2-12, Ps 49, Lk 8:1-3

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• As we enter together more deeply in this National Assembly into the reality of our being pilgrims of hope and witnesses even now of the life of the world to come, and celebrate this special votive Mass for the Holy Year of Hope, we are providentially given today’s readings, which teach us three crucial lessons of this journey of hope together with Christ Jesus our hope (1 Tim 1:1).


• The first lesson is about the initial proclamation of hope that Christ came into the world to give. In today’s short Gospel, we see Jesus’ peripatetic preaching, journeying from one town to another preaching and proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom. This was a snapshot of his ordinary life, what occupied most of his days. He was announcing the kingdom and inviting people to enter. In the midst of all of their sufferings, hardships and up-until-then centuries of unfilled hopes awaiting the Messiah, awaiting God’s saving interaction in history, he was proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom of God. He was helping them to see that Sacred Scripture was being fulfilled in their hearing, inviting them to strive to enter through the narrow gate, encouraging them to buy the treasure buried in a field and selling everything they have for the precious pearl of the kingdom. The Kingdom of God, as Pope Benedict loved to say, is God. It means that God is present and the ultimate criterion of life. And that God had taken our humanity and was journeying in their streets inviting them to come, follow him.


• The second lesson is that he wasn’t preaching and proclaiming the Gospel alone. He was accompanied first by those whom he had chosen to be with him so that he might then send them out (Mk 3:14 ). These twelve disciples whom he named and formed as apostles, he had already bestowed his power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases and had sent them to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal the sick and they went out on their first missionary journey, journeying from village to village, proclaiming the good news and curing diseases everywhere. Today we see Jesus taking out these apostolic year novices on his own missionary journey.


• But they were not the only ones with Jesus. St. Luke adds a very important detail. He said that some women were accompanying Jesus and the apostles, women who had received Jesus’ healing power — they had “been cured of evil spirits and infirmities” — and wanted to spend their life, with faith and constancy, assisting him to heal others and raise them up. Three get named — Mary Magdalene, Joanna, the wife of Herod Antipas’ epitropos or money man Chuza, and Susanna — but Luke also says “and many others,” who “provided for them out of their resources.” They couldn’t preach; that was unheard of in Judaism and Jewish culture, but rather that lament what they couldn’t do, they were doing all they can to make possible, and share in, the preaching and proclamation of the Kingdom of God. These women were the ones who, to some degree, were making possible Jesus’ and the apostles’ preaching, so that Jesus everyday wouldn’t have to multiply loaves and fish, so that they wouldn’t have to appall the hypersensitive Scribes and the Pharisees by plucking heads of grain while walking through the fields. Like the widow with her two lepta placed in the Temple treasury, these three-plus-many women were giving all they had to help Jesus and the apostles proclaim, manifest and bring the Kingdom of God that was at hand. They were the ones who were providing drink to lubricate Jesus’ and the apostles’ vocal cords. They were the ones who were making sure that they would have the necessary bread within their bodies to be able to preach that man doesn’t live on bread alone but on every word that comes from God’s mouth. This was not a group of bored do-gooders who figured that these wandering 13 men would be lost without their feminine genius and maternal practicality. Having received much from the mercy of Jesus, like the woman we met yesterday in Simon the Pharisee’s house, they loved much, and they wanted to give Jesus and his mission all the love, time and the material goods they could. They’re a model for all of us in making the choice to serve God rather than mammon and to use whatever resources we have for the building up of the kingdom. They are witnesses of the first beatitude, showing us true poverty in spirit, for theirs, their treasure, was the kingdom of God.


• We are here in this historical Basilica of St. Louis, the first Cathedral west of the Mississippi, the seat of what was once known as the Rome of the West. In the 1700s, the French-Canadian Catholic settlers who had arrived with and after the great Jesuit missionary Father Jacques Marquette were part of the Diocese of Havana Cuba. After the American Revolution, Pope Pius VI established the Diocese of Louisiana and the Two Floridas, based in New Orleans, a vast jurisdiction that went from the Florida Keys all the way through the territory of what would become in 1803 the Louisiana Purchase to the Canadian border. For reasons of personal safety, the Bishop of the Diocese at the time, Bishop Louis Dubourg moved here for nine years from 1815-24. When he was given Bishop Joseph Rosati as an auxiliary, Dubourg moved back to Louisiana and kept Rosati here. Two years later, Pope Leo XII split the vast Diocese into two and made Rosati the first bishop of St. Louis. He then set out to build a Cathedral, the very Church that we’re in. And how did he do it? With the help of women, who, like those named in the Gospel, provided for the Church out of their resources. Most of the resources came from the Society of the Propagation of the Faith, which had just been founded by Blessed Pauline Jaricot in Lyons, France a few years before. Wanting to help the missions in Florida and China, she got together circles of ten women at a time, first in her father’s factory and then all over France, who would pray every day for the missions and contribute one sou or penny a week. As the circles expanded so did the support. The first contributions of the Society came to care for the Diocese of Louisiana and the Two Floridas and the Diocese of Bardstown, Kentucky. When Bishop Rosati wanted to build this Cathedral, he appealed to her and that solicitation did not go in vain. The women of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith generously donated from their weekly collection of sous the equivalent of a vast sum that made this building possible.


• In every age the Church is built not just on the work of missionaries, and preachers, and bishops and priests, but on the sacrifices, contributions, the prayers and financial sacrifices of women like those in the Gospel. And so important for the growth of the Church in the United States and across the globe has been the inestimable contribution of religious women. During Bishop Dubourg’s brief stay here, he made the extremely consequential move of inviting the Society of the Sacred Heart in France to open schools here and soon thereafter St. Rose Philippine Duchesne arrived with other sisters and helped build the Church and make it strong. Later he invited the Sisters of Loreto. Rosati in his first day invited the Daughters of Charity. The Rome of the West wasn’t built in a day, but it grew strong and fast thanks to the total dedication to Christ and his kingdom of these heroic religious women. And that’s an image of the way of how the Church was built in the United States, through the dedicated labors of so many congregations of women religious, preaching and proclaiming the reality of the Kingdom of God in the school, college and university classrooms, at bedsides, in orphanages, in food pantries and more. The Church Christ established is not just grammatically feminine in every language that gives nouns a gender. It’s Marian before it’s Petrine. Before Jesus was able to say, “This is my Body given for you,” Mary said, “This is my body, given for you.” This Basilica is a living reminder of the sturdy feminine infrastructure of the Church, stretching back beyond the apostolic age to the scene we see in today’s Gospel. This Basilica has been since 1834 a station on the pilgrim Church’s journey, where generations of Catholics have been spiritually nourished and filled with hope as they’ve made their journey not just westward but simultaneously upward toward the heavenly Jerusalem.


• The third lesson of hope from today’s readings is about teaching. St. Paul writes the young St. Timothy urging him at the beginning of today’s first reading, “Teach and urge these things.” He reminded him that there were many teaching “something different” that did “not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ,” whose so-called “religious teaching” was “conceited, understanding nothing,” and led to “arguments, verbal disputes, envy, rivalry, insults, evil suspicions and mutual friction among people with corrupted minds … deprived of truth.” Among thos