Our People

Getting out: the Ministry of Preaching

Retreat to Clergy of the Military Ordinariate, Fifth Conference, 30 November 2005

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
30/11/2005

A bishop, priests and deacons hearing a retreat from a member of the Order of Preachers probably expect a few hints about preaching. So here goes. I will, as far as possible, ignore Jesuit, Franciscan and Carmelite sources unless I can shamelessly pilfer them and claim them as Dominican. “OP”, of course, doesn’t stand for “Good Preacher”, perhaps just “Relentless Preacher”. Hopefully, like cryptic crosswords, the more you do the better you get – but there’s no guarantee. I remember when I was discerning my vocation telling with a Diocesan priest I was thinking of the Dominicans. “Ah,” he said, “they’re the ones famous for their bad preaching. But don’t worry: the Sisters of Mercy are merciless and the Sisters of Charity have got none!”

I don’t intend to speak about ‘Dominican Spirituality’. The best authors say there is no such thing – or, better, that there are just too many spiritual masters in the Order to pick one: Dominic himself, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas and his many schools of followers, Meister Eckhart, Tauler and Suso, Catherine of Siena, Antoninus of Florence, Fra Angelico, Savonarola, Vittoria and Bartolome de las Casas, Rose of Lima and Martin de Porres, Lacordaire, Lagrange, Chenu, Congar, Herbert McCabe, Simon Tugwell, Timothy Radcliff… the list is endless and there is not much in common between some of them except their habit. There certainly aren’t any esoteric Dominican spiritual “tricks” – exercises, mansions, meditations or mountains. St Dominic left very little in the way of writings. There is a description of how he prayed, known as The Nine Ways, pen pictures with a little commentary on what you might call thirteenth century spiritual callisthenics: sitting and standing, bowing, genuflecting and prostrating, using the body in prayer, as well as the soul. Questions about ‘spirituality’ and methods of prayer would have made no sense to a mediæval like Dominic: you just did it. You went to choir for Mass and Office, said your prayers to Our Lady at her altar, threw yourself on the ground before the cross, kept the silence, studied, fasted and wept for your sins. Easy really. Retreats and methods of structured meditation are a much later preoccupation, dating from the late fourteenth century with the devotio moderna and flowering during the Counter Reformation under the influence of Reformed Carmelites and Jesuits.

Dominicans, right from the beginning, though, have theorized about preaching – about its theology and its practice. Strangely though, St Dominic himself is only rarely portrayed in the Order’s iconography as a preacher – which ought to give us a hint. Blessed Fra Angelico paints him in the cloister or the friars’ cells of San Marco in Florence meditating on the scriptures beneath Christ mocked or hanging onto the Cross on which Christ is dying or attending the Annunciation on the side. The image of the Annunciation is a central to a Dominican understanding of preaching: principally in its reference to the Incarnation and its effect in the life of the Christian who is its witness. Thus in at the head of the stairs to the dormitory Angelico painted his most famous Annunciation in which Our Lady is dressed in a Dominican habit, seated not on a throne but a little friar’s stool, and at home not in Nazareth but in the cloister of the priory. The preacher brings his world with him to the contemplation of the Holy Mysteries and then takes the sacred moment back out with him to the world to which he must preach. The God who forever spoke forth the Word now incarnates that Word in Jesus Christ and his Church and the preacher stands for this Incarnation. Whatever his personal difficulties and issues, however high or low his morale, what is best for him is contemplare et contemplata aliis tradere: to contemplate the sacred mysteries and then get out of his cell and go tell, sharing the fruits of that contemplation with others. Preaching is the antidote to self-satisfaction and self-pity: for it takes the preacher out of himself and exposes him to a world sometimes hostile, sometimes welcoming, mostly indifferent, and demands he make the joys and griefs of the people of his time his own.

In the Basilica of St Dominic in Bologna there is a stunning Baroque depiction of the Annunciation. Our Lady is portrayed as a young girl and the Archangel as a courtly young man. Overlooking the scene is God the Father, perched on a cloud surrounded by the court of heaven, painted as naked baby cherubs in the traditional style. These putti are playing with the Father’s beard and toes as He gazes serenely upon the unfolding story of Redemption. Overall the intention of the artist is to convey God’s bounty overflowing from Heaven, inundating poor humanity with grace and mercy. The first act of Redemption is seen from the perspective of its successful conclusion, and preaching, likewise, takes such a timeless angle on things, even as it brings that universal and eternal into contact with very particular people and their needs.

The Dominican insight into preaching is that it is, of its nature, Marian, Eucharistic and Ecclesial. It is Marian, not in a merely devotional sense, but because it is anchored in the Incarnation of Christ, the bridge between heaven and earth, the manifestation of the mercy of God. It demands receptivity to that mercy, our parallel to the Fiat Mihi of Our Lady. It demands that he ‘ponder these things’ in his heart, as she did. It also brings forth both new Christians and new life in the old Christian.

Our preaching is also Eucharistic, because it leads from and back to the Mysteries as the “source and summit” of the Christian life. It is an invitation not only to the Wedding Feast of the Lamb in the world to come, but to its foretaste in this world. It also transforms the bread of human life into the Bread come down from Heaven.
Thirdly, preaching is Ecclesial because it belongs not to us, but to the Church. If we would lay claim to the Holy Spirit’s inspiration, we have to be the friends of the Bridegroom and his bride, Christ and his Church. The purpose of preaching is the building up of that Church, the adornment of that Bride. So the antiphons most commonly sung in honour of St Dominic are O Lumen Ecclesiae and In Medio Ecclesiae – Light of Church, Preacher of Truth and In the midst of the Church he opened his mouth.

Above all, preaching is a work of mercy. It is far from clear that St Dominic, the founder of the Order of Preachers, was much chop as a preacher himself. From that century of great preachers many homilies survive, including many by Francis, Anthony of Padua, Thomas Aquinas, Albert, Bonaventure and others. There is not one of Dominic’s: no-one, it seems, thought them worth preserving. The friars love to retell the story of how Dominic converted an Albigensian hotel-keeper by talking to him (and perhaps drinking with him) all night until at dawn he agreed – whether out of conviction or exhaustion – to convert. Perhaps we like retelling the story because it suggests pastoral life can take place in a pub. But another reason would seem to be that it is the only story we have of Dominic’s preaching being so successful. In the generation which followed, however, there were many greater preacher friars. Dominic’s genius was that he gathered them together, gave them a formation, community, liturgical prayer life, apostolate and rule of life which would be the basis of their preaching, and set them one task only: to preach for the salvation of souls.

With typical Spanish extravagance Dominic said he would happily go to hell if he could block the door to anyone else’s entry with his body. He wept many tears for sinners. But rather than forcing people into Catholic faith and into heaven at the point of the sword, he thought it best to preach them into heaven. The preacher, then, is dedicated to the salvation of souls, to becoming the instrument of God’s mercy for the world. This is what forms both the preacher’s own prayer life – receptivity to God’s gracious annunciation of Redemption, and the content and means of preaching – the extension of that redemption to others. Forgiveness received and forgiveness given are the trademark of Dominican preaching. The thirteenth-century Dominican Master-General Humbert of Romans, in his Treatise on Preaching speaks of the “unavoidable sins of the preacher”. No preacher is sinless, apart from Christ Our Lord. No one lives up to the glory that he preaches. Yet that should not deter the preacher from bringing salvation to others. Apart from tears of penitence, the recognition of personal sin ought to inspire diligence in the preparation of sermons and humility in their delivery. Preaching can be confessional, both in the sense of proclaiming the faith that we confess, and in the sense of exposing the sinner who preaches. Yet it must not be idiosyncratic. Our task, Humbert said, is purely and simply to preach the Gospel, the whole Gospel, and nothing but the Gospel. Not our own thoughts. Not our favourite bits. Not the bits most comfortable to our hearers. The Gospel, whole, entire, unadulterated.

Much is made these days of practicing what you preach and not being a hypocrite. This is good if it encourages ongoing conversion in preachers. There is a story about a Jewish rabbi who was discovered in flagrante delicto with a lady of the synagogue, not his wife. The committee of the synagogue summoned him and announced they had decided to cut his salary by one tenth. When he asked why, they told him that he was one tenth less useful, since now he could only preach about nine of the commandments. Paying preachers in ratio to the number of commandments observed is not, though, the Christian way.

It is said that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice renders to virtue – not meant as condemnation. Whatever of our personal faults, as preachers, we shouldn’t parade them. This ought not to be so much out of shame, but from a desire not to confuse or upset our brothers and sisters in Christ, not to lead one of the little ones into scandal. If we only preached about the commandments we observed perfectly, then our pay would probably decline by much more than ten percent. There might be precious little preaching, at all, even from bishops. We should be consoled by the idea that there is a sense in which the Word of God preaches Himself, and we are not only the means and instruments, but also acted upon by the Word.

Fr Amorth, the Roman exorcist, has said that the Devil hates preachers even more than he hates exorcists. A preacher, after all, ministers to multitudes, drives away error and encourages conversion of heart. An exorcist only does it one at a time. It’s hard sometimes to reconcile this mighty ministry with our own felt lack of wisdom and eloquence. I suspect most of us crib on preparation – preferring the form guide or movie reviews to the hard slog of proximate and immediate preparation for writing sermons in the study of the Sacred page and of good theology. This is only part of the problem, though. Our world is filled with words, transient, trivial words. Finding the right words, in a sea of meaningless verbiage, to express the God’s Word, requires a great deal of zeal and imagination, on the part of congregation as well as preacher.

The Curé of Ars (not a Dominican!) as a young priest slaved over the preparation of his sermons. He wrote them out in full on the sacristy bench and went to the high altar to pray when he needed inspiration. Having completed them he would commit them to memory word by word. He drew heavily upon the standard seminary manuals and his sermons consequently reflect the concerns of his own time: dancing (a terrible evil), drinking (also nasty) and (especially) sexual immorality. He was not pastorally sensitive by today’s standards. He managed to have something unpleasant but true to say to everyone in the congregation. And you couldn’t even sleep through his sermons: John Vianney was said to shout very loudly.

No one ever accused him of being a well-educated or even a good preacher. He broke all the rules for preaching in the book, talking on average about an hour and forty minutes – which was quite a feat for a ‘dummy’ who had committed his homily to memory. Sadly this meant he quite frequently lost his place, and took some time to get back to it, if at all. He was so severe that he was accused of having a Jansenist temperament. One of his brother priests lost the text of about twenty of the saint’s homilies because he didn’t think them good enough to keep track of. When he began to preach ex tempore, however, abandoning his youthful severity, the Curé of Ars’ words hit home. As a frail old man speaking in faltering tones in the pulpit about the love of God, he often reduced the whole church to tears of penitence.

We can compare the preaching of this saint to that of his contemporary, another holy man, John Henry Cardinal Newman. Newman coaxed and cajoled his listeners, pointing to the beauty of the Church and her teaching, secure in the conviction that the Truth, once announced, attracted the mind. His was a soul that rested peacefully in that Truth, inviting others into its tranquil harbour. You couldn’t imagine Newman shouting at a congregation in the way that Vianney did, yet both were evidently holy, both had a massive influence on the Church of their time.
Examples from the past are a double-edged sword. Much has changed in the course of two centuries and those who lament that their clergy don’t preach like John Henry Newman or John Vianney should bear in mind that, by and large, a modern congregation won’t sit still for much more than twenty minutes. Were Vianney a curé today, he would probably be viewed by some as a boorish, judgmental, fanatic, continually insulting his respectable parish with his fundamentalist views. Newman might be judged an elitist preaching “over the heads” of simple folk. Times change. In the Book of Nehemiah it is reported that the people gathered on the Dies Domini to hear the Book of the Law read aloud from early in the morning until noon, with all listening attentively. After six hours of the lectionary there came a good long homily from Ezra, priest and scholar. By the end of it the whole congregation were in tears – though whether of joy or exhaustion we are not told. In the 20th Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles is recorded the story of a young man named Eutychus who was amongst those who went to a ‘Mass’ celebrated by St Paul. Before the ‘breaking of the bread’ Paul gave a prolonged homily – until after midnight – and the youth, who was sitting in a third-story window-ledge, fell into such a deep sleep that he fell down. Paul raised him back to life, but then returned to his topic, celebrating the Eucharist somewhere along the way, and speaking “a long while, until daybreak” before departing. The author of Acts wryly records that the people “were not a little comforted” – though whether that was because the boy survived or because Paul had finally finished, we are not told.

Homilies were not always so long. By the time of Charles II’s reign, when the great preacher Isaac Burrow preached to the Lord Mayor and aldermen on the subject of charity, the homily had declined to a mere three-and-a-half hours in length. On one occasion when Burrows was preaching in Westminster Abbe, however, the Dean directed the organist to start playing so as to shut the preacher up. In the next century hour-glasses were built into pulpits to keep preachers to the hour, though some were known to turn the glass over at the end of the hour and say ‘let’s have another glass’. In the eighteenth century Anthelme Brillat-Savarin records in his book, The Physiology of Taste, that one well-thought-of preacher in Paris would stop every so often during his longer instructions to consume a pickled walnut and allowed his congregation a short break. He also records a difference of opinion over whether or not ladies should be allowed to have their maids bring them cups of hot chocolate during especially long sermons. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that typical homilies were cut to around twenty minutes, partly because Queen Victoria had such a short attention span and was short on patience in theological matters.

Perhaps the most pastorally corrosive attitude to preaching on the part of a preacher, however, is not the inclination to preach too long or too deep for his congregation to bear, but the inclination to think it really doesn’t matter how or what we preach. After all, we’ve got the liturgy to carry us along: it is the Protestants who have to focus on the sermon if there is to be anything on offer. Many of us, too, have had the experience of putting in long preparation to make brilliant points, only to find they fall flat. At other times, we’ve had no time to prepare, talk extempore, and find it has more impact. So why bother. Unfortunately people pick up the ‘why bother’ very quickly if it is there in our preaching. And they might well start to ask the same question.
Then there is the kind of preacher who turns the homily, or even the whole Mass, into a kind of Vaudeville show. A frustrated stage entertainer, he might try anything from clown suits to cartwheels on the sanctuary to gain attention. Any vestment or combination of vestments, any prayer or reading or combination of both, any place or furnishings, might be tried, as long as they are not the ones laid down by the Church. Novelty is all; boredom is the enemy. Each Mass is in competition with the previous one, each liturgist with each other one, each homilist with the next, for being the most memorable. At least until the same time, same place, next week, when something really new will be attempted! Now don’t get me wrong. I’m all for variety, and for a real effort to make the homily and the rest of the liturgy engage people ‘where they are at’. And I think myself that there is a lot to be said for street theatre as an evangelical tool – provided it stays on the street. But we must never lose sight of the fact that the saving Word of God can change lives on its own merits, indeed on His own merits, without the benefit of a spoonful of our sugar to make the medicine go down.

This year’s Gospel of Mark is the most urgent of the Gospels. Jesus is introduced simply with
In those days Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness where he was tempted by Satan... And Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the Gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the Good News.” And passing along by the Sea of Galilee, he saw the brothers Simon and Andrew casting their net in the sea, for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, “Follow me and I will make you become fishers of men.” And immediately they left their nets and followed him.

There are many points that could be made about these first few verses of Mark’s story. It offers in a few words a first sense of Jesus’ identity and mission and in turn our identity and mission as his ministers. He is the well-beloved and pleasing Son of God who is impelled by the Holy Spirit. He is the enemy of Satan, sin, ignorance, suffering. He preaches conversion and faith. And he calls us to be, first, disciples (that is his followers) and then ‘fishers of men’ (that is preachers). We must likewise be driven men, but driven by the Holy Spirit not our own private demons, our compulsions or egos or ideologies. We must likewise be godly men, children of God, pleasing to God, and disciples of his beloved Son. We must likewise be fishing men, ready to bring others in, the fishing fleet of a truly Catholic Church, one that aspires to catch all. And to do this we must like Christ be preaching men, calling all to conversion and faith.

That’s our job. The summons of Christ to something good and better must sound in our words. We need to explain why particular attitudes or actions are contrary to reason and to the Gospel and to call unashamedly for conversion, not just of outward activity, but also of heart, mind, attitudes, whole life-styles and world-views, whole cultures and institutions. In short we need to demonstrate to our people that we actually believe what the Church teaches and are prepared to propound it and defend it. If the Annunciation, Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection is to mean anything in our ministerial lives, it must mean that the Incarnate and Resurrected One is present in our preaching, bringing grace and mercy – Good News for us as well as our congregation.