Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Mount Alvernia Retreat Center, Wappinger Falls, New York
“Living by Faith in the Love God has for us”
Retreat Conference for Manhattan College Alumni
September 26, 2025
To listen to the conference, please click below: 
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The following was the outline of the talk: 

* Introduction

* Theme of the Retreat: “So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them” (1 Jn 4:16).
* John’s whole approach to evangelization was to focus on the love of God.
* Story of St. Jerome. “Little children love one another”
* Not enough to know “of” the love God has for us. Have to know it personally. To experience it.
* But we realize that it can seem too good to be true. That’s why we have to believe in it. We have to stake our life on it. Even if we don’t “feel” it, we have to live it.
* We have a communion with God from the day of our Baptism, but we are able to experience communion with God ultimately through love, because God is love.
* What Jesus said during the Last Supper:

* Just as the Father loves me, so I love you. We have to recognize we’re loved and in fact lovable. If we don’t love ourselves it’s going to be hard for us to believe in the love God has for us.
* Live on in my love. We can’t run away from it. We have to know and believe it.
* You will live in my love if you keep my commandments, just like I have kept the Father’s commandments and live in his love. The commandments train us to love. This is the path for us to experience it.
* Love one another as I have loved you.

* Jesus doesn’t ask us to love him as he has loved us, but love one another as he has loved us.
* Peter after the Resurrection. His love for Jesus would be shown in the way he fed and tended Jesus’ sheep and lambs.
* John: if we say we love God but don’t love our neighbor, we are a liar and the love of God is not in us.


* Therese’s vocation, to be love in the heart of the Church. We all have a similar vocation. In order for us to love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength and our neighbor as ourselves, we have to begin with the love of God. “In this is love,” St. John will say elsewhere, “not that we have loved God but that he has loved us and given himself as an expiation for our sins.”


* Various ways God reveals his love for us. Know and believe in him loving us in these ways.

* Baptism

* See what love the Father has bestowed on us in letting us be called children of God.
* Divine Filiation.
* God the Father: “This is my son/daughter, in whom I am well pleased.”
* Most important day of our life
* Sin wiped away. Temple of God. Incorporated into the Church
* The joy of a Chinese convert at Columbia. Weiling Kong. Art. Baptism. She knew what it meant. She knew it could mean suffering. But she came and you couldn’t wipe the smile off her face for years.
* Another convert, a law school student. Claire Addinquy. Secular France. Faith of her grandmother. Finally she could act on it. Extraordinary joy worth selling everything to obtain.
* A third, Marin Minamaya. Several Guinness world records. Knew the consequences and how to change and made immediate changes. Asked if she might sing at her baptism. O Lord, I am not worthy.
* Each felt the love of the call of God to be his daughter. They believed in it. They chose.
* In the early Church, the first Christians needed to wait until that value became so strong that they would be willing to suf...