Why Catholics can't preach - and prefer not to listen

It is said that the Devil hates preachers even more than he hates exorcists. A preacher, after all, ministers to multitudes, driving away error and encouraging conversion of heart by the exposition of Catholic doctrine. Common opinion suggests that today’s homiletic standards should give the Evil One little cause for concern. Everyone, or so it seems, has a pulpit horror story of banality, heresy or simple incoherence, even from traditional priests. Having accounted for exaggerations, clerical bad hair days and the posturings of the professional sermon critics among us, it does seem that much, perhaps most, preaching, is substandard.

It’s harder to establish the reasons for this lack of eloquence. Laying the blame on a lack of proximate preparation seems the most popular course - Father is too busy or lazy to prepare properly. Many priests don’t seem to read much more than the daily newspapers, and become preachers of The Weekend Australian rather than the Gospel. The television and the internet have established themselves as the sacerdotal diversions of choice. It’s not that the means of social communication, as the Vatican coyly dubs them, are unimportant, just that as a promoter of homiletic skills they are intrinsically limited. Gone are the days of the presbytery library brimming not just with texts of the Fathers, theology and lives of the saints but also with classics of literature in several languages.

The Curé of Ars as a young priest is said to have slaved over the preparation of his sermons, writing them out in full on the sacristy bench and going to the high altar to pray when he needed inspiration. Having completed them he would commit them to memory. His sources were limited to the standard manuals of the time and his sermons reflect his chief preoccupations - the evils of dancing, drinking and impurity. You have to wonder whether the laity who complain about the irrelevance and tedium of contemporary preaching would deal well with the words of a saint like St John Vianney. His extensive denunciations of all kinds of vice and every spiritual malaise would drain the blood from any face. Nothing he said was for the sake of consolation but rather for destroying the calm of those content with laxity and sin. It was noted that his listeners didn’t even have the luxury of sleeping through his often very loud sermons.

He was not thought of as a good or learned preacher. Both long winded (his average was about an hour and forty minutes) and severe (he was accused of having a Jansenist temperament), he often forgot his place, resuming, if at all, after a long pause. One of his brother priests absentmindedly mislaid the text of about twenty of the saint’s homilies because he didn’t think them very interesting or important. It was only when he began to preach ex tempore, abandoning his youthful rigorism, that the Curé’s words hit home. As a toothless old man mumbling in the pulpit about the love of God he would reduce the whole church to tears of penitence - his sermon was his life. Anything that involves the action of the Holy Spirit is a lot more complicated than any of us imagine.

We can compare the preaching of this saint to that of another holy man, Henry Cardinal Newman, his contemporary. He coaxed and cajoled his listeners, pointing to the beauty of the Church and its teaching, secure in the conviction that the Truth, once announced, attracted the mind. His was a soul that rested peacefully in that Truth, inviting others into its tranquil harbour. You couldn’t imagine Newman shouting at a congregation in the way that Vianney did, yet both were holy, both influenced the people of their time, neither had truck with error or vice.

Much has changed in the course of two centuries and those who lament that their clergy don’t preach like Henry Newman or John Vianney should bear in mind that, by and large, a modern congregation won’t sit still for more than twenty minutes or consent to listen to anything more challenging or complicated than a joke about the football. St John would be viewed as an arrogant bore gratuitously insulting his respectable parish, Bd Henry as an uncaring elitist preaching “over the heads” of simple folk. You can be more or less certain that both would be reported to the diocesan authorities or their religious superiors as troublemakers and “unpastoral”. A.N.Wilson wrote a novel which begins with a dense Jesuit who didn’t know how to preach. He coped with the challenge by reading other people’s sermons. As long as he chose the words of those who pandered to the current fashions he was considered a celebrity preacher, given honour and advancement. His fall occurred when, running short of time, he selected a book at random on the way to the pulpit - a collection of Cardinal Newman’s homilies. Unfortunately for him it contained an oblique reference to the glories of High Mass in Latin. His career as a preacher ended ignominously.

Humbert of Romans, a medieval theorist of preaching, suggests that the Holy Spirit inspires the preacher in direct proportion to the devotion of the people. It is worth considering that bad preaching is not just a clerical problem, but a function of the low regard in which this ministry is held by everyone in the Church, despite protestations to the contrary. In the same way that the merest glimpse of even a completely cold thurible provokes Pavlovian coughing fits, the accession of the priest to the pulpit often reduces the congregation to a state of evident catatonia before he says a single word. A culturally ingrained habit of thought, of both clergy and laity, considers the preaching of the Church not so much an action of Christ the Teacher but an address whose principle function is to deliver the congregation from boredom. The recent tendency to employ nonclerical preachers at the liturgy - their proper functions lie elsewhere - has not helped this perception.

The French chronicler of manners, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, records the custom of one famous old canon who would periodically pause during his longer instructions to consume a pickled walnut, while he allowed the congregation leave briefly to clear their throats and nasal passages. He also records an ecclesiastical difference of opinion over the propriety of allowing ladies to have their servants bring them cups of hot chocolate during extended preaching. However quaint these historical portraits they reveal a period in which preaching was taken seriously. It was an event of Divine Mercy at which you might to find edification, grace or conversion of heart.

In an age when the preacher competes not just with the cabarets and soirees of Ars but with increasingly expert and technologically advanced electronic media and cinema proper training of the clergy in sacred eloquence is only part of the solution. We have to have good listeners as well as good preachers.

Even if the circumstance presented themselves to me, I could only hope that I would be as faithful as our fellow saints. But right now there are brave souls in these Muslim countries who are preaching the word. We should be praying for their boldness and safety.

You mean like these people?

NO, I did not say that Catholics are like Muslims. I said, through inference, that ALL, no matter their religion,are identical in the Eyes of God...wretched and without hope of Salvation, and thusly unable to be reconciled to God, without the sacrifice of His Son, Jesus.

That sacrifice is not applied to us without a personal acceptance of Jesus as Lord.

I was merely pointing out that there is no next step for a Muslim to take, because they are so close, because they are NOT any closer than any other religion. Jesus was not the Son of Allah. He was and IS the Son of Jehovah.

Sensei Ern

I was merely pointing out that there is no next step for a Muslim to take, because they are so close, because they are NOT any closer than any other religion. Jesus was not the Son of Allah. He was and IS the Son of Jehovah.

The "next step" is to convert to the one true Church. I encourage you to to the same.

Really?

I doubt I will convert to a religious group that has a misguided man as its figurehead.

Examine the Scriptures. Whenever the Church is referred to in them, it is referring to a local body of united believers, well usually united, as the Apostles chided in their Epistles several churches for their infighting.

As for a pope. It is not in the Scriptures. Peter was given the role to open the doors of Heaven, first, to the Jews at Jerusalem, next to the Samaritans, then to the Gentiles. James was the first head of the first church, at Jerusalem; not Peter.

The reason a human figurehead is not allowed in the Scriptures is that Christ is the Head of the Church, and if you have a personal relationship with Him, you, as a Christian are His representative here on Earth.

In a local church, the pastor is not a figurehead. He is an under-shepherd. He has no more say in the actions a church takes than any other believer in that congregation.

Sensei Ern

Interpretation?

I believe you are referring to the following definition:
To conceive in the light of individual belief, judgment, or circumstance - Synonym: CONSTRUE ( or better, you believe I MIS-CONSTRUE)

No, do not take my word for it, if you feel I am untrustworthy. Allow the Scriptures to explain itself. Look at an English, if that is your native language, transliteration...a word-for-word translation from the original text, or go back to the original form, and examine where the same word is used that we translate to English as 'church'. See in what context it is used.

If you still do not wish to pursue knowledge in that manner, you have not refuted my first point, that the pope was misguided in thinking Islam is 'close' to being a Catholic. And, since he is misguided in that, he is not infallible, so he cannot be an earthly ruler of a Spiritual Kingdom.

Sensei Ern

It's amazing to me that so many apparently do not realize what is really happening in the mid-east as well as in the rest of the world. Instead of appreciating the Pope's consistent,judicious and holy responses to the atrocities committed throughout the world and the escalating fury directed at Christians and Americans,he and the Church are denigrated and dismissed by many. He is trying to temper the turmoil and save Christianity in Western Civilization thereby saving both,and there is no one on earth that can speak with his auhority.

Those poor Chaldeans,God help them and all the innocents,for that matter.

Whenever the Church is referred to in them, it is referring to a local body of united believers

Which "local body of united believers" did Jesus promise to found in Matthew 16?

The pope has no authority given him other than by those who relinquished their will to his.

I do not relinquish mine, as God has given all believers the authority to be His Ambassadors here on Earth.

The pope does not speak for me when he condemns the U. S> for taking action in Iraq. He does not speak for me when he mis-instructs Muslims, or any other group, by telling them they only need to take the 'next step' to reconciliation to God...because they are 'so close'.

Sensei Ern

Scripture is not self interpreting. Your beliefs are not based on simple scripture reading, they are based on your interpretation of those scripture readings. That is the sad reality of the heresy of sola scriptura and the rejection of His authentic Church which alone posses the authority to interpret Scripture.

Thousands of divergent interpretations can't be wrong, can they?

It is the singular. That is because each local group of believers is the whole Body of Christ. Each group of believers is not part of the Body of Christ...else I would suspect I could classify several churches as being the nether regions.

However, this is a divergent argument. Lets first finish our debate as to whether the pope was right in saying that Muslims follow the same God as Christians.

In fact, I believe that discussion was a diversion from the first which was what again? Something about preaching, its degradation from past times, and listening, the laity's inability to hear passionate truth from the Word of God.

Sensei Ern

The Scripture MUST be self-interpreting. It declares Itself to be God in written form in that It attributes Itself all of the characteristics we attribute to God.

That is, It is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. It is without error. It is only good, not evil.

And finally, in the Gospel of John, It declares Itself to be God.

God cannot be defined outside of His Own revelation. Neither can His Word be defined outside Its Own revelation.

Sensie Ern

In a note of concern, I am afraid I am doing the Newbie thing of dominating an argument. Because of this concern, I ask instruction of proper posting etiquette on this board.

Am I monopolizing to the point of insult and impropriety? If so, please guide me.

Sensei Ern

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