Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

I was in the USAF for twenty years and during that time, I had the opportunity to experience a wide variety of priests, both active duty and civilian, around the world.  In general, I would say that most of them more poorly formed in their homiletics.  That is not to say that most were poor public speakers.

Actually, most of them could speak relatively well from the pulpit.  Rather, most seemed to use the same tired formula for homilies.  It begins with some personal experience that some how relates to the theme that the homilist intends to convey.  Then, if it does any explanation of the biblical text under discussion at all, it is usually to provide a popular critical theory which serves no purpose other than to undermine the authority of Scripture in the minds of the faithful.  Then it ends with some sort of exhoration that seems aimed at others, that is what happens when sin is only committed by social structures I guess, who are not as generous with their time or taxes as we are.

A number of years ago before leaving one assignment, a retired priest who assisted at the Air Force chapel that I attended asked me to provide him my assessment of his homilies.  Now this priest was not the worst that I had encountered but he did exemplify many of the problems that I see in homilies.  I ended up with a 7 page response; the first page and a quarter were encouragements to continue in strengths that I saw.  This left 5 and 3/4 pages of criticisms.  I thought I might share some of these in a series of posts.  Let me know if any one has seen similar problems in their Mass experience or has an opinion to share with respect to my response to, we will call him, Fr. Gary:

The first content comment is that it appears that you subscribe to the prevalent perspective among liturgists today that the purpose of homiletics is to inspire rather than teach. I understand that this philosophy goes so far as to explicitly rule out incorporating catechetical instruction as part of the homily.

In an ideal world, I would agree with this philosophy as it better fits the artistic nature of the Sacrifice of the Mass. However, this approach presupposes a sufficient catechesis of the listener so that he has the ability to respond to the message and therefore I don’t think this approach can succeed.

I do not believe that my experience is a unique aberrance, but the CCD I received provided me with far LESS than the bare minimum understanding an adult Catholic should have. I think that this is true of the vast majority of lay Catholics; and compounding the problem—I think that very few do any type of continuing catechesis. Therefore, the necessary background is missing.

Most Catholics know neither the “what” of how we are supposed to live much less, the “why” they should be living that way. Therefore, there is no foundation from which to inspire them. For a homily to challenge and inspire the listener, he must know what he is being inspired to live up to and why.

Therefore, for any priest to have a fighting chance of getting his parishioners to be equipped to respond to his message, I think that basic catechetics must be part of almost every homily. The primary reason we see little to any response is that most Catholics do not understand:

1) that they must be saints to enter heaven (Rev 21:27 “…nothing unclean shall enter [heaven].” Also see Lumen Gentium #40);

2) beyond this they do not recognize that Jesus Christ established a Church, the Catholic Church (cf. Matt 16:18);

3) that the Catholic Church has Jesus’ authority over them to bind and loose  in matters of discipline as well as in faith and morals (cf. Matt 16:19);

4) that the Church and Her Sacraments (most especially the Mass/Eucharist) are their ordinary means to achieving what Vatican II terms the “universal call to holiness;”

5) that they have a moral obligation to follow the spiritual direction of Church through their bishop and priest in all aspects of their lives “for they are keeping watch over [their] souls, as men who will have to give account.” (Heb 13:17) when they are directing them in union with the Church.

These are realizations which “floored” me when I came to understand them after living through 30+ years of a veritable “spiritual coma.” These realizations are what have caused me to reform my life and with respect to the topic at hand, they continue to cause me to take everything I can from a priest’s homily regardless of his talent as a preacher.

Without these truths, the average Catholic will feel he has no reason to follow anything a priest or anyone else says because he is influenced by today’s predominant philosophies of: relativism which suggests there is no absolute truth, or skepticism claiming that even if there is, no one can know it any way.

Therefore, “it” is all opinion, one opinion is as good as another, and so the easy, hedonistic opinion which we are pummeled with from the mass media is the “opinion” we are most often going to go with. I think that this is what we are generally seeing in the life of Catholics in the West today.

As the passage from Hosea I cited earlier said (and I really do believe it applies to us today): “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge…” (Hos 3:6). Unless obligatory catechetical classes for adults were implemented I fear the only way to get these basics across is using the homily.