Why priests can't preach.

The rugged priest with the chiseled Bogart face stared down at a hundred seminarians in the lecture hall. "Going to bed with a woman is not the greatest sin a priest can commit," he declared. Pindrop silence. "The greatest sin a priest can commit is to get up in the pulpit on a Sunday unprepared to preach." The speaker was my brother, Eugene, preeminent preacher and Paulist theologian.

Some months ago, as I sat on the Archbishop's Pastoral Planning Commission in San Francisco, that scene from the 1950s came vividly to mind. A sociologist from the University of San Francisco was reporting that one of the lowest scores in a survey of 15,000 Catholics in San Francisco was in response to the statement: "[The priest] makes the gospel real through homilies that apply to our lives." I empathize with priests today. They are overworked and often demoralized, and the thinning of their ranks will not make things easier. By the year 2000, one-third of the priests in the Archdiocese of San Francisco will have retired or died. Only a handful of new priests will be ordained in the interim. One possible solution, importing priests from abroad, does not bode well for preaching, as many such priests speak with accents that are virtually incomprehensible from the pulpit. A recent survey of priests conducted by Dean Hoge of The Catholic University found that "self-esteem" was their number-one concern. Yet according to Father Frank McNulty of Newark, the self-esteem problem of priests is linked to good preaching: "It seems to me that better preachers get more affirmation," he told the National Catholic Reporter, "and that increases self-esteem."

They do and it does.

The archbishop of San Francisco, John Quinn, is an excellent, albeit formal, preacher. Five years ago he required priests in the archdiocese to take remedial courses in homiletics. Yet, as my wife and I found out by visiting various parishes in the inner city Sunday after Sunday, a lot remains to be done. Having listened to sermons in Buenos Aires, Caracas, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco during the last year, I am convinced that the high percentage of mediocre homilies is not just a San Francisco problem. It is a worldwide Catholic problem, and - in an age of mushrooming disbelief - a serious one.

Why can't priests preach? Part of the problem is the Catholic notion of priesthood. Compare it to the Protestant concept of minister. A Catholic becomes a priest to say Mass; a Protestant becomes a minister to preach the gospel. A priest is ordained to provide the Eucharist for the faith community within certain territorial boundaries; a minister is sent to build a Christian community - often afresh - by witnessing to the Word. The result of this theological difference is that typically a priest sees preaching as a secondary aspect of his vocation.

But there is a deeper problem. The great preacher must have the heart of a missionary: the burning desire to ride the shoulders of grace as it spins and turns the souls of the hearers to Christ. Preaching is inseparable from the notion of conversion. Yet, as one older priest told me, in the seminary the primary emphasis was on pastoral ministry rather than conversion of the world: "We were taught to be maintenance men."

In the early stages of the Pastoral Planning Commission, it was the laity - not the priests - who felt the archdiocesan plan should emphasize the evangelization of San Francisco. The priests, though obviously zealous, seemed absorbed - overwhelmed even - with their other ministries within the church.

Still, why can't priests preach ? I believe that with evangelization playing second fiddle to other tasks, they simply don't prepare. They put a few thoughts on the back of an envelope and "wing it." A priest I know told me that a conscientious young priest confided in him that he worked really hard at preparing his sermons. The older priest, who had a reputation as a preacher, inquired: "How long do you spend preparing?"

"A couple of hours."

"That's good," the older priest said with only mild enthusiasm.

"How long do you spend?" the younger priest asked.

"Well, I start reading a book on Monday. I think about my homily every spare moment, make notes. Then on Saturday night I spend five or six hours writing it out word for word." The young priest looked shocked.

Every person in a congregation knows intuitively when the priest-preacher has not prepared, for the preacher fails to communicate that this time is sacred, for I desire to share with you what has set me on fire,. Doing his impromptu thing, he cannot hear the teeth gnashing or the minds clicking off.

What does it mean to prepare? It means the priest must read, the Scriptures, above all, but theology, history, biography, good fiction, journals, magazines, or newspapers. All are grist for sermons. Recently, a seasoned pastor told me: "The new priests are part of the television generation. They watch TV four hours a day." If this is true, it is terrifying. A preacher who does not read is not thinking; not thinking, he lacks ideas; and lacking ideas - convictions. The laity want their preacher to speak from a heart that is full and a mind that is alive, for only then - short of a miracle - will the word of God pierce to their innermost soul.

Furthermore, there must be an explicitly spiritual component to the preparation. It is a special kind of spirituality and a special kind of prayer that links the priest to the Spirit of Christ who was sent to bear witness to the Father's love for every person. He wept over Jerusalem; he was moved with pity at the sight of the sick and the crippled, the blind and the deaf; he yearned that all "might be one even as the Father and I are one." The Spirit of Christ is the Spirit of a missionary, one sent to the people "groaning for redemption."

Two years ago, at the University of Southern California Newman Center in Los Angeles, I caught that spirit as I rarely have. Father Marty Jenco, the Servite priest kidnapped and imprisoned in Beirut for so many months, was preaching (or was it meditating?) on Jeremiah. Reading his carefully written talk word for word like John Henry Newman, in a fervid, urgent voice, Jenco's eyes and face glistened with conviction. I was caught up in his spirit. Mesmerized. For I knew I was listening to a prophet, a man of prayer, a man who had seen the Burning Bush and yearned for the source of that fire.

At one time there was a great hope that the renewal of Catholic biblical scholarship would enhance preaching. And it has, in many ways. But, often as not, it has also meant that the cut-and-dried answers of the catechism have been replaced by a dreary fundamentalism: a mindless rehash or a slavish exegesis of the text just read. A biblically based homily requires every bit as much imagination and surprise as any other. A dull homily is a dull speech. And in my experience, dullness on the part of the priest drives people from the church.

The Bible is the purest, richest source of God's word. It is the book on which the church meditates, the well from which it drinks. But it is not the only source. God speaks to us in a thousand ways: through a troubled son or daughter; a person in a soup line; a new baby; a newspaper story; an earthquake; a novel like Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy; or a TV show like "NYPD Blue." Christ used the sights around him: farmers in the field, birds in the air. He helped people see the word of God in everything in their lives. A priest should do no less.

But let's say the priest lacks the time to prepare (which I don't believe - people always find time for what they deem is important), why not have the priests in a parish take turns preaching at all the Sunday Masses? Why not have designated preachers? Ordination does not necessarily include the charism of preaching. I know the integrity of the liturgy calls for the celebrant to give homily. But what if, in fact, the priest does not faithfully prepare, or cannot be understood, or somehow has an anticharism? There is a higher principle in sacramental theology than the integrity of the liturgy and that is sacramenta propter homines: sacraments are for the people. If the faithful are giving up the sacrament because of poor preaching, the integrity of the liturgy becomes a dispensable liturgical ideal.

All the courses in the world - be they Scripture or homiletics - cannot make a man an excellent preacher. The only thing that can is a sense of urgency that preaching is the highest priority, that "Faith comes through hearing," and "how can they hear without a preacher?"

I encountered that sense of urgency last summer in the Castro, the gay district of San Francisco. My wife and I were assisting at Mass at Holy Redeemer with a church full of fine-looking men, most in their thirties and forties. From the back we could see their carefully trimmed hair and muscular shoulders, casual shirts and faded jeans. I couldn't remember the last time I had seen so many men at Mass. And when they sang out with male vigor, I thought of fighter pilots on the eve of a fateful mission, for there was an intensity about them: men conscious of their very mortality.

The priest was hardly prepossessing. Slender, balding, with glasses, he had a thin voice that at first was hard to pick up as he half-read from his notes. But by the second sentence of the homily the church was perfectly still, for the priest had prepared.

This is the kernel of what he said: "A man had a vineyard in the Napa Valley that had just been attacked by fungus. So, he went to his son and said: `Chablis, will you help me in the vineyard?' Chablis answered: `Yes, of course.' But Chablis, distracted by friends, got in his red sports car, drove down to San Francisco and was never heard from again" [spontaneous laughter].

"The man then went to his other son. `Zinfandel...'" [more laughter], "`will you help me in the vineyard?' Zinfandel replied: No, I'm busy.' But Zinfandel walked away, and had second thoughts." [Long pause.] "He returned and worked the vineyard."

"God is in our second thoughts," the frail priest explained. "Not in the temptations that draw us or the impulses that propel us to what is wrong. No, God is in those brief moments before we decide or act, those moments when we catch ourselves considering things; those moments we call ... second thoughts. So, at the Safeway store as you look over the wine aisle this week, ask yourself: When the temptations swirl around me, will it be Chablis or ... [long pause] Zinfandel?"

The stillness in the church said God's mighty word had struck home. After Mass, as I thanked the priest (which I always do when I hear a well-prepared sermon), I asked him how much time he had spent preparing. His face wrinkled with calculation and I noticed the men crossing the street for coffee next to the old convent, now a hospice for the dying. Then, he answered: "I thought about it all week, made notes every day, wrote it out word for word. I guess eight or nine hours."

I rest my case.

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