Daily Gospel Reflection for February 19, 2026

The last line of today’s reading (“What profit is there for one to gain the whole world yet lose or forfeit himself?”) reminded me of something I’d heard in Rome last July for the Jubilee of Digital Missionaries and Catholic Influencers. During our two-day conference, they stressed the importance of spreading the Gospel in the digital world without giving thought to how many likes, comments, or followers it brought us. If we care about what we can “gain” through our digital discipleship, then we run the danger of gaining the world yet losing ourselves.

 

Perhaps you don’t think of yourself as a digital missionary or Catholic influencer, so you feel you are safe from this particular temptation. However, when we attended Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica, Cardinal Tagle made it clear that all of us are called to be digital missionaries and influencers. All of us are influenced by those around us, and in turn we influence the people we encounter. It’s not about whether or not we influence people or whether or not we should be evangelizing online. Rather, the important thing now is to think about how we can best do it.

 

Being a missionary nowadays doesn’t mean you have to travel to a foreign land and learn a new language. We can pick up our cross, as Jesus asks us to do in today’s reading, and share the joy of the Gospel with the people we encounter in person and online. If we do this authentically without concern of how many “likes” it gets us, then we are following Jesus’s reminder to not lose ourselves by trying to gain the whole world.