The Deacon's Bench
Last weekend, I gave a talk to deacons in Cincinnati about the “7 Habits of Highly Successful Preachers,” and I’m happy to see two of them spotlighted here: prayer and preparation.
“I really am encouraging priests, deacons, liturgical preachers to take time,” said Fr. Joseph Mele, author ofThe Sacred Conversation: The Art of Catholic Preaching and the New Evangelization. “What I always try to have my students do in preparing the homily is to first of all spend time simply reading the word, reading the Scripture, studying it … and let the word speak to them. You really need to take time to outline, to structure your homily so that you know one main point and you are going to be concise about that.”
And that main point cannot be a message from the preacher himself to the people in the pews but rather one which comes from God. Recognizing this is one of the biggest challenges young preachers struggle with, said Mele, who holds a PhD in rhetoric and communications from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.
That’s because hearing the message from God requires patience and a willingness to put one’s own agenda aside.
“Often the first thing to come to mind is still their own thought — this is what I want to say about this passage,” said Mele, a former professor of homiletics at Saint Vincent College in Pennsylvania. “Nine times out of 10 if they just stay patient and prayerful and reflective on the word another message will come. So the priest really needs to be faithful to wait for God to communicate the message God is desiring for the people.”
Mele gave this message to the Archdiocese of Toronto’s conference in homiletics held July 7 to 10 at St. Augustine’s Seminary. The conference, part of the seminary’s centenary celebrations, aimed to improve the preaching power of the archdiocese’s priests and deacons at the request of Cardinal Thomas Collins.
“(The cardinal) wanted to put a special emphasis on improving the state of homiletics,” said Deacon Peter Lovrick, who organized the three-day event. “Every one of the last popes have talked about the urgency to improve the state of homiletics in the Church and have given some very poignant and specific challenges or calls to the Church’s preachers as kind of a vocation for us to live up to. The Church is being very clear in what it is asking for from its preachers.”
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