By CARDINAL JOHN J. O'CONNOR

V. Preach the Word

Father P.H. Kolvenbach, S.J., is Father General of the Society of Jesus. He says of preaching: "The ability...to preach does not first and foremost depend...on knowledge, but on the priest's personally entering into the body of Christ and on our understanding's entering into God's word which has been passed down to us...A priest must devote himself totally to the word of God." (A New Song to the Lord, p. 169)

Preaching has come a long way in the Church since my days as a young priest. In those days it was not uncommon to use the sermon time (the word "homily" was not in vogue then) to make endless announcements about the collections, the building program, the dates for the bazaar, who had won at bingo, and on and on and on. Announcements completed, there might be time for a five-minute "nosegay," depending on the time for the next Mass and the need to get cars out of and into the parking lot. A universal practice? No, but hardly unique or isolated to any one parish.

Even then, 50 years ago, I wondered where the people were supposed to learn about their faith. Perhaps, as today, some 25 percent had opportunity to go to a Catholic school. Their direct contact with Church teaching, for the most part, took place at Sunday Mass. A certain percentage would come to parish missions every few years, where the preaching was usually outstanding and substantive, some would even go to weekly novenas, although there the preaching was usually less than substantive, although pious. Highly informative instruction classes were held in various places and these were certainly useful. Obviously, there were parishes where Sunday preaching was taken very seriously. They were vibrant parishes, indeed.

It is my personal estimate, however, thoroughly subject to error, that huge numbers of Catholics were totally unprepared for the Second Vatican Council. Their knowledge of the faith was too limited to cope with questions raised by the council and with moderate changes that followed, such as no longer having to abstain from meat on Friday. Even more crucial was and too often is today the inability of many Catholic young people to cope with the misinformation and disinformation that confronts them in many secular colleges and universities.

I believe preaching has improved very much. The majority of priests take it very seriously. They read, they study, they prepare well, they root their homilies or reflections in the sacred Scriptures of the day, they try to point out the applicability of Church teaching to daily life. Above all, they recognize the gravity of what they're about, and pay serious attention to the injunction of St. Paul to Timothy, a timid, young preacher: "I solemnly urge you to preach the word, to insist upon proclaiming it, in season and out of season, when convenient and when inconvenient, to convince, reproach and encourage, as you teach with all patience. The time will come when people will not listen to sound doctrine, but will follow their own desires and will collect for themselves more and more teachers who will tell them what they are itching to hear. They will turn away from listening to the truth and give themselves to legends." (2 Tim. 4:1-4)

There's the rub. A priest can prepare carefully, prayerfully, having studied the readings of the day and thought through their application to daily life. He may preach clearly and sincerely. If his people are not listening carefully and prayerfully, however, or they are not hearing what satisfies their own desires, and reject the truth, nothing happens to their hearts, to their lives. Preaching is a form of communicating. To communicate means to come into union with others, to become, in a sense, one in mind and heart.

We come face to face with God's word in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass through the sacred Scriptures and through the Eucharist, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. But to come face to face is not necessarily to commune with. We receive the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ--the whole Christ--in Holy Communion. We permit Christ to come into our being and to receive us into his being. Holy Communion, in other words, is a two-way experience. The same must be true of the word of God presented to us through preaching. If preaching is to be effective, the listener must permit the word to enter into his or her very being, and let the word take us into himself. Father Kolvenbach says that the priest's preaching depends on his personally entering into the Body of Christ. One might well say that the hearer's listening depends on the hearer's personally entering into the Body of Christ. Sound preaching and sincere listening thus become as it were, another form of Holy Communion.

Good preachers always respect God's people. Who would want to be excoriated by a St. Jerome, himself a great Scripture scholar? "Nothing is more disgusting than the arrogance of uncouth priests who regard a glib tongue as a sign of learning and authority. They are always ready for an argument, and they thunder at the flock entrusted to them with high sounding words." (Epistles 68, and Oceanem, No. 9). It is clear that preaching has improved more than a little bit since the days of St. Jerome!

I don't know a single priest today who would deserve such censure.

For me, personally, however, it was the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Suhard, who made one of the great statements of all time about preaching. It could well be the creed for preachers and hearers alike:

"One of the priest's first services to the world is to tell it the truth. He must remain within the prophetic tradition. His voice must bring to life again the awe-inspiring and heartrending cries of the great inspired ones of old...

"Like Christ, the priest brings mankind a priceless good, that of worrying it. He must be the 'minister of restlessness,' the dispenser of a new thirst and a new hunger. Like God, he calls 'a famine upon the land.'...The unrest which the priest must spread is the fear of God, that torment for the infinite, which has brought forth such amazing outbursts from the mystics and thinkers of all times."

Now that's worth listening to!