I didn’t catch who it was, but the priest who gave the sermon Saturday afternoon for the Mass in Barrigada celebrating the feast of St. Vincent Ferrer did a pretty good job. I was only able to hear part of it on KOLG, but what I heard was good enough to cause me to pull over into a parking lot and listen. I really enjoyed the “storytelling” aspect of the sermon as the speaker illumined his congregation on the life of this great saint.
I have a particular interest in St. Vincent Ferrer. As a 19 year old, I accompanied my pastor to Europe for a special function at the Vatican. I don’t remember what the ceremony was actually called, but Paul VI was making a bunch of bishops into cardinals. Standing in St. Peter’s within 50 feet of the Pope amidst bishops, cardinals, and towering marble saints was quite an experience for a young guy from the suburban cultural wasteland where I was from.
While there we toured several countries and visited many churches and religious communities. In Europe every church and convent seems to have their own collection of saintly body parts, and one of the churches ( I don’t remember where) had the hand and forearm of St. Vincent Ferrer. I remember seeing it there in a glass case, rather brown and wilted, but still in good shape for centuries-old human flesh. I remember my pastor saying that the hand and forearm of this saint had been chosen for particular veneration because of the many miracles he had worked with the touch of that hand.
We got to see lots of body parts on that trip, the bones of St. Dominic in Bologna, the tongue of St. Anthony in Padua, whole saints laid out in glass cases under altars, and most striking, the 600 year-old head of St. Catherine in Siena. Pretty cool stuff for a young guy to see. Being from East LA, the sighting of body parts was not a wholly foreign experience, however, in my neighborhood, investigations, not vernerations, usually followed. But I’m departing from my point.
The quality of the preaching of this particular sermon and its subject, St. Vincent, who had won converts for Catholicism all over Europe in his short, magnificent life, got me thinking about how important “Preaching” is to the life of our Church. I think it is a tool that is under-utilized in our Church today. For most of us, those 15-20 minutes each Sunday will be our only exposure to any kind of instruction or illumination on our faith.
It’s almost a standing joke amongst Catholics to ask any of us what the sermon was about by the time we get home, or even, by the time we walk out the church door. I personally have to force myself countless times within the space of that short time to turn my mind back to the sermon and away from some all-absorbing, usually trivial distraction.
Sometimes to distract myself from my distractions I’ll look around just to see if others have that same face. You know, the one that you’ve trained to gaze at the priest with respectful attention while your mind takes leave of your brain matter and gallivants all over the place. I would venture to say that most of us do more thinking about stuff during a Sunday sermon than we do the whole rest of the week.
I have no experience in giving homilies, but I have a simple suggestion from a business perspective. Most business leaders in the contemporary workplace pay big bucks to bring in guests lecturers, teachers, and trainers to tell their people the very same thing that they themselves could tell them. It’s the “out-of-town expert” syndrome. CEO’s and their like know that their underlings will listen better to a complete stranger with a nice suit than the man they see everyday.
The old maxim that familiarity breeds contempt can be extended to include deafness. Any parent (or husband or wife) can tell you this. It’s the old biblical dilemma that a prophet is always a stranger in his own land. If Jesus, with all His signs and wonders couldn’t get the folks in his own town to listen to Him, why should pastors and priests expect any better?
I recommend that we take a lesson from the business world and also from our Protestant brethren who are fond of inviting in guest preachers, and have more “guest priests” give the sermon. It would help if the priest is particularly skilled in homiletic delivery and knowledgeable about his subject, but most of us are as easily entertained as we are distracted and will probably listen better just because he’s different. We might even remember what he said.
Tim Rohr
May 7, 2000