Photo: Daniel Ibañez/CNA A new analysis from the Pew Research Centre shows that many Catholic priests are holding to Pope Francis’ advice to keep their homilies on the shorter side, especially compared to Protestant denominations.
An analysis of nearly 50,000 sermons, given across a variety of Christian denominations during the months of April and May this year, found that the median length of a sermon was 37 minutes, but for Catholic priests, the average length was just 14 minutes.
Pew found that historically black Protestant sermons had the longest median length of 54 minutes, while mainline Protestant sermons were an average of 25 minutes long, with evangelical churches falling in between at 39 minute per sermon.
The analysis published last week was titled ‘The Digital Pulpit: A Nationwide Analysis of Online Sermons’.
Services
Pew took data from 6,431 different Church websites to create the analysis. The Churches all posted all or part of their religious services online.
The analysis found that while sermons at historically-black and evangelical churches typically contained roughly the same number of words, the sermons at the black churches were longer in length. The study’s authors suggested that this was due to the inclusion of “musical interludes, pauses between sentences or call and response with people in the pews”.
In analysing the content of the sermons, Pew found that 98% of Catholic homilies included the terms “God” and “Jesus”. The only word that included in 100% of the Catholic sermons examined was “say”.