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In his session at the Louisana Priests’ Convention on the art of preaching, Dominican Father Peter Cameron, the editor of Magnificat magazine, asked priests to assess the spiritual condition of their parishioners.
The priests’ answers varied: receptive, hurting, hungry, confused, hopeful, struggling, angry, depressed, curious.
“That’s very interesting,” Father Cameron said. “No group of priests has ever said, ‘They are ignorant.’”
Father Cameron said recent surveys have shown that many Mass-going Catholics do not believe that Jesus is fully present in the Eucharist.
“I’m not saying this in a way to lay blame, but this is a true psychological and spiritual problem of the people who come in front of our pulpits,” Father Cameron said. “It’s like running a soup kitchen for persons who are bereft of everything, and before you feed them you try to give them a lesson – and it doesn’t work. They have to be fed first.”
So what’s the solution to spiritually feeding a person who is beaten down?
“Compassion and consolation,” Father Cameron said. “Preaching has to be the offer of friendship – period. When people are hurting, they want to hear something comforting them.”
A friend called ‘Father’
Father Cameron noted that in “Verbum Domini,” Pope Benedict cautioned that “generic and abstract homilies are to be avoided.”
If the only thing parishioners needed was an orthodox, non-heretical homily each week, the best way might be to pipe in Pope Francis each Sunday via the Internet.
“But the content loses something of its efficacy if it is not spoken to me by a friend – a friend who is my father,” Father Cameron said. “I think one of the reasons preaching is suffering at this moment is the thought that if I can just get enough lofty ideas in front of my people, that will save them from sin and darkness and all the lies of the world, then they will be holy. They’ll become saints. The pope says it doesn’t work that way.”
Father Cameron said a seminarian challenged him once that priests need to forcefully tell parishioners about evil and “make it clear to them that this is wrong, saying it until they do understand.”
“OK, you can try that,” Father Cameron said, “but will it work? The paradigm of all preaching is our Lord with the woman at the well. So much happens there, but notice what does not happen. The woman is guilty of transgressions against the moral order. Adultery is wrong. But where in the encounter does Jesus say that?
“It’s not because Jesus didn’t know the commandments. And how does it turn out? Good, and off she goes like an evangelist herself. A close reading of the text shows that Christ woos her to a predisposition to want the truth.”
“We misconceive what preaching is meant to be. One very basic misconception is that it is meant to be a lesson and instruction. I’m starving, but I’m getting a lecture. If all we needed to be saved was a message, a discourse, God the Father never would have sent his son in the flesh. He would’ve sent a memo. But he doesn’t. He sent his son. Every act of preaching is kind of like a little Christmas, handing (a gift) over to people, heart to heart.
“Preaching has to begin by giving people back their heart. It’s a spiritual act of defibrillation. If we want to give people back their hearts, we have to preach from their experience. We have to preach what is converting us, and witness follows. If this thing is converting us, then it is converting them.”
Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected].
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