Fr Bernard Healy
The Notebook
Pope Francis has me worried! At a recent Public Audience he reminded preachers to prepare homilies well and told us that they “should not last more than 10 minutes, please”. Whatever conclusions my congregation might reach about how well-prepared my homilies are (I try, honestly!), long-windedness on a Sunday morning gives parishioners the chance of denouncing me to Rome on the evidence of their stopwatches!
I also wonder about priests from different parts of Africa who told me that their people would feel “undernourished” if they didn’t get at least 30 minutes of preaching every Sunday. Were they actually hearing this from their congregations or was it was wishful thinking on their behalf?
Under-prepared
The Pope’s point about preparation is on point. When I am under-prepared, I preach for too long. Benjamin Franklin once wrote: “I have already made this paper too long, for which I must crave pardon, not having now time to make it shorter.”
To cut away all distractions from the main point, and to steer away from cliché and favourite hobbyhorses takes work. Reaching clarity about the meaning of the liturgy and the Sunday readings demands an amount of prayer and study too. Pope Francis has put some effort into encouraging preachers to do their job well – his 2013 exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel) covers the topic extensively.
However, the Sunday homily doesn’t just concern preachers. Pope Francis’s time limit for homilists made for an easy headline, but it is subtle clericalism to think that this is the full story. He also pointed out that the attitude of the listeners can help or hinder the preacher’s work. Those listening are told to help themselves “by paying proper attention, that is, assuming the right interior disposition, without subjective pretexts, knowing that every preacher has merits and limitations”.
One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was to approach every Mass with the certainty that God had something especially for me in the scriptures, in the homily and in the reception of the Eucharist. Listening with the hope that the Holy Spirit will have something for me is a lot better than fearing, or even expecting, that I will be bored. A homily should, Pope Francis says (Evangelii Gaudium 142), be “quasi-sacramental”; we should expect the power of Holy Spirit to be present almost as much as we expect Christ to be present in the Eucharist. If I expect the Holy Spirit to be in the words of the preacher and if I pray to find the Spirit there, then I stand a far better chance of coming away from Mass nourished.
Congregation
Both preacher and congregation should dare to have high ambitions for the homily. The preacher should know he is not trying to speak for himself or to entertain, but has the task of helping the people to an understanding of the Good News which he himself is captivated by.
As one Fr Joseph Ratzinger wrote in 1961, “such preaching means that a bit of Pentecost comes to pass, in that people understand one another, find they are being addressed in the word of another, and, indeed, hear God’s Word in the word of a man”. If preachers and people aim for that, then maybe we might get a lot more out of our ten minutes.
Bishop Kevin McNamara of Kerry (1976-84) insisted that priests should preach every Sunday. It is said of one popular priest that having read the Gospel of the Beatitudes he turned to his congregation in perplexity. “The Bishop has written a letter telling me to give a sermon every week, but you’ve just heard the best sermon ever given, so I don’t know what I’m supposed to add!” He then blessed himself and sat down.
Certainly the worst homily I’ve ever heard was one I overheard in a Roman city-centre church. The Gospel contained that line when Christ declares John the Baptist the greatest born of woman, so the homilist spent 10 minutes at this noontime weekday Mass (a congregation mostly of Italian grandmothers) that this meant that we should have more respect for St John the Baptist than for Our Lady! As an example of a message that respects neither the biblical texts, the teaching of the Church and the faith of the People of God, it would be hard to top that! I hope that the congregation forcefully manifested the ‘sensus fidelium’ to him after Mass in the form of a good dressing-down.