Father Roger Landry appointed national director of the Pontifical Mission Societies USA

CNA Staff, Sep 5, 2024 / 15:56 pm (CNA).

Father Roger Landry was announced Thursday as the new national director of the Pontifical Mission Societies USA (TPMS-USA), the pope’s ministry that supports Catholic missionary activity through moral support, prayer, and financial contributions.

Landry, a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, who currently serves as chaplain at Columbia University in New York, is well known as a Catholic preacher, writer, retreat leader, and pilgrimage guide. He also served a seven-year stint working with the Holy See at the United Nations and was appointed by Pope Francis in 2016 as a permanent Missionary of Mercy.

“From the time I was a little child, I have loved the mission of the Church. I would go to bed reading about the great missionaries who gave their lives to spread the faith, so today I am overjoyed at the possibility of helping all those on the front lines through The Pontifical Mission Societies USA,” Landry said in a statement accompanying the announcement.

“As Pope Francis has regularly reminded us, the Church doesn’t just have a mission; the Church is a mission, and each of us, as disciples of Jesus Christ, we too don’t just have a mission; we are a mission on this Earth.”

The Pontifical Mission Societies USA, which is funded in large part by a special collection at Catholic parishes each October, include the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, the Society of St. Peter the Apostle, the Missionary Childhood Association (MCA), and the Missionary Union of Priests and Religious.

The societies support missionary activity by building churches, helping to form present and future priests and religious, sustaining fledgling missionary dioceses, and erecting schools and catechetical centers.

Landry’s appointment as director will be effective in January 2025, TPMS-USA says.

In a Thursday op-ed for the National Catholic Register, Landry said he was approached to serve as the new national director while helping to lead the recent National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, an unprecedented effort to process Christ in the Eucharist thousands of miles as a witness to the Catholic faith. Landry was the only priest who walked the entirety of one of the four cross-country pilgrimage routes, traversing the roughly 1,500-mile eastern Seton Route with the Eucharistic Lord and a cadre of young pilgrims.

Landry said Thursday that Cardinal Luis Tagle, pro-prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelization, verbally confirmed his new appointment at the beginning of the National Eucharistic Congress, which took place in July in Indianapolis. Landry said it was fitting that Tagle preached at the final Mass of the Congress on the connection between the Eucharist and mission.

“To live a Catholic life, he emphasized, is to live a Eucharistic life, and a Eucharistic life is a missionary life. We’re called to imitate Jesus’ Eucharistic self-giving and make our life, in communion with his, a gift for others,” Landry wrote.

“There’s a connection between the ‘Amen’ we give to Jesus when we receive him in holy Communion and the ‘Amen’ we say to God’s blessing at the end of Mass, as we are sent out to announce the Gospel of the Lord.”

Landry noted that he is taking the helm of the TPMS-USA at a time in which, 2,000 years after Christ’s ascension, only three out of 10 people in the world are Christian and just three out of 20 are Catholic.

“The whole world has become again what it was in the first days of the Church: a vast missionary territory. There’s a need for diligent laborers to take in that harvest — for everyone to take seriously and act on Jesus’ command, ‘Go, make disciples,’” Landry wrote.

“I’m honored to have been called to do that work full time. I hope to count on you as a willing collaborator, as, following the example and with the intercession of St. Teresa of Calcutta, we seek from our encounter with Jesus’ infinite love in the holy Eucharist to become, like her and her sisters, his love in the world.”

Landry succeeds Monsignor Kieran Harrington, who resigned as national director in February amid allegations of inappropriate behavior with an adult, to which he later admitted. Father Anthony Andreassi, CO, has been serving as interim director.

“The Board of Directors is thrilled to welcome Father Roger J. Landry as the new national director of The Pontifical Mission Societies,” said Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, president of the TPMS-USA Board of Directors.

“His commitment to the mission of the Church and his extensive experience make him the ideal leader to guide TPMS-USA in its efforts to support the global mission of evangelization, particularly where the message of the Gospel has only recently been introduced, where the Church is materially poor and cannot sustain itself, and also where our brothers in the faith are persecuted.”