Crumbs from the Pastor’s Table: Reflection on the Catholic Lectionary – Three Year Cycle,
by ‘Fr Francis’
(Scholastic Publications, available through Amazon.ie, €20.53 + €3.99 postage.)
We have lived to see the end of the great days of sermons. In the Central Catholic Library, on Dublin’s Merrion Square, there is one wall in the reserved research part of the library devoted entirely to homiletic literature. It was filled with volumes from great preachers such as Bossuet, going back over the 17th to 19th centuries.
Indeed, in Dublin in those times, people went in for “Charity Sermons” in which a celebrated preacher such as the Dominican Fr Thomas Burke would preach before a packed congregation which had paid a contribution to a charity, say a hospital, to attend.
These days our sense of a sermon has been reduced to a brief homily at Sunday Mass.
“Fr Francis” is the nom de parole of a priest with half a century of experience. He has had time and occasions to think long and hard about what a sermon is, what it should be, and what it should try to achieve for the listeners. As the title indicates, this is a substantial book – some 560 pages – widely spaced and easy to read, which he hopes will serve other priests for inspiration.
As for “preaching another man’s sermon”, clergymen do it all the time. They aren’t expected to always make up the sermons they preach. So it is likely that many parish priests, as well as many members of congregations, will derive solace and comfort from these pages, which run the cycle of the canonical years three times through.
Privately, “Fr Francis” admits that over his fifty years of parish service, “the homily had always been the most demanding challenge of the week for me.” He hopes to leave this book as a help to his confreres in holy orders. And we think it undoubtedly will be such.
Privately he quotes as well some remarks by Sr Briege McKenna about her own work that “If we have 500 people in the congregation and preach for six minutes that is fifty hours of other people’s times. Keeping that in mind helped me to take the challenge seriously”.
Anyone making a presentation should recall what used to call “the Sergeant Major’s Advice” on addressing his men: “First I tell them what I am going to tell them, then I tell them what I want to tell them, and then I remind them of what I have told them.”
Such repetition is something to avoid in writing, but not in speaking. Many a sermon reads well in print, but proves difficult to follow on hearing.
Preachers should perhaps be conscious of just how Jesus speaks in the Gospels: the Sermon on the Mount might be seen as the best guide on how to go about their regular Sunday task.
(The source of the title can be found in Matthew 15:21-28, by the way.)
