Advice to Homilists: Please Get to the Point in Six or Eight Minutes
New Orleans
For eight days at Loyola University New Orleans, three priests and five deacons absorbed the cool mathematics and internal symmetry of good preaching.
"The idea is not so much 'brevity' as it is not taking longer than you need," said Wilhelm, a doctoral student with a focus on preaching at the Aquinas Institute of Theology.
If priests and deacons do not take seriously their vocational call and the preparation needed to preach the Gospel, Father Shelly said, the resulting communication will be flat and possibly even an obstacle to worship.
"Archbishop Fulton Sheen said, 'If you want me to speak for an hour, I'm ready. If you want me to speak for 10 minutes, I'll need a week,'" Father Shelly said. "This is a very deliberate process. We encourage people to focus in on one idea and also to realize that this is not the only time in the lives of these people that they will hear this text preached on. The worst thing is to try to say everything. Focus on one thing."
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St. Clare of Montefalco
17 August 2011
