Courtney McGrailSpeaking from Within: Biblical Approaches for Effective Preaching
by Kieran J O’Mahony OSA
(Veritas, €12.99)
In one of the upper rooms of the Central Catholic Library in Dublin there is a whole wall devoted to homiletic literature: volumes of sermons from past centuries, manuals on good preaching, collections of celebrated preachers like Fr Thomas Burke the Victorian Dominican.
But these unread books are all relics of a style and manner that no longer exists. Then, for a charity sermon a congregation, having paid a donation to enter the church, sat with patience through hour-long discourses by such stars of the pulpit as Fr Bernard Vaughan SJ.
For the local parishes there were the mission fathers, such as the Redemptorists whose stock in trade was Hell fire and repentance.
Congregations
Today congregations can barely take five minutes. The style of the preacher has become informal, chatty, often leading off with a personal anecdote or a golf story. But I suspect that many of the congregation go away, and have forgotten what was said an hour later.
But then the purpose of the homily these days has changed. Often one has the impression that what the priest said has been worked up the night before from an essay or an article found on line. Little thought is given to the different style needed for an oral presentation. The worst habits of academic speakers have become endemic.
Indeed very few preachers seem to have any rhetorical skills that do not need the support of an amplification system. Like so many actors of today they have lost the voice control skill to be heard without a microphone at the back of the church.
I myself have always thought that the homily should always have direct reference to the reading of the day. With this point of view Fr O’Mahony is in agreement. This book takes its inspiration from Pope Francis, for there are continuous references to The Joy of the Gospel. In its five chapters the author covers a great deal of ground.
One chapter is devoted to the matter of preparing the homily, but this is full of wise insights into understanding and representing the matter at hand.
The third chapter deals with the Lectionary itself, its development; and its great shortcoming – just how little there is of the Old Testament, the very part from which so much non-Catholic preaching is drawn. If Jesus is a fulfilment of the promises of the Old Testament there is surely a need to know these texts as well.
But the most vital chapter, and one which every reader can take from, is that devoted to “developing a personal Biblical culture”. This seems to express the heart of the matter for the author.
Though brief, this book is everywhere very much to the point, and every reader whether clerical or lay, will learn a very great deal. The last three are devoted to three aspects of what we read, Jesus in Nazareth, the Prodigal Son and the Road to Emmaus, as examples of how passages from the gospels can be used and developed. The real lessons are, the author also suggests, to be learnt from the Bible itself.
This is compact but rich book which can be heartily recommended to all readers, both those who preach and those who listen.