Friday Frivolity: Unto ages of ages…
Tag: Homily
Fr. Michael’s Preaching
As many of you know, I spent about a year and a half living in Seattle. During that time, I attended the Byzantine parish of St. John Crysostom.
There were many things I loved about that parish, but one of my favourites was the preaching of the pastor, Fr. Michael Mandelas. It is no surprise, therefore, that I was delighted to discover that some of Fr. Michael’s homilies are being recorded and uploaded to Soundcloud:
While this is great, personally I consume most of my audio through the Podcast app on my iPhone. Fortunately, Soundcloud exposes the RSS feed for their channels:
http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:301561424/sounds.rss
Happy listening 🙂
Wise Words on Wednesday: Homily
Homily means ‘dialogue’ – it should create a dialogue between the Gospel and a person’s life, so that we can insert our lives into the Gospel, and that includes being disturbed and challenged by the Gospel. If a homily doesn’t do this, it’s not a homily.
– Fr Gabriel OSB
Fr. Anthony’s Homilies
I recently discovered that Fr. Anthony Saroki, pastor at Our Lady of Mt Carmel in San Diego, has started posting his homilies on YouTube. If you’d like to listen to them, then subscribe to his YouTube Channel.
Fr. Saroki is one of my favourite homilists here in San Diego and he’s recently launched a new website, Good Life USA, as part of his parish’s ministry:
The View From The Pew
The homily given by the priest during the Catholic liturgy is incredibly important. Unfortunately, the homily is often one of the primary topics about which Catholics (and particularly former Catholics) complain.
“The ministry of the Word…among which the liturgical homily should hold pride of place…is healthily nourished and thrives in holiness through the Word of Scripture”
– Dei Verbum, 24
Unfortunately, it is often said that the homily is often unintelligible, boring, uninspiring and unrelated to real life.
Our priests certainly have a challenging task assigned to them. They should therefore receive our support and constant prayers. We should listen carefully to each homily, attentive to what God wishes to teach us, each one of us, through His minister. When I returned to the Church, I was often humbled by listening to a homily and being shocked by the gold that was there for the taking, if only I had ears to hear.
However, in today’s post I would like to do something a little brave and suggest some practical ways in which the typical liturgical homily could be enhanced. I know I’m in a bit over my head here. I am not a priest, nor have I been trained in homiletics, but as a Catholic layman, over the course of my life thus far, I have heard over 2,000 homilies. So, for what it is worth, drawing upon my experiences from my side of the pulpit, here are my top ten suggestions for the preachers of the Word…
More Sermons than you could shake a stick at
One of the purposes of this blog is to put people into contact with good Catholic resources. Well, today I have a doozy. Audio Sancto is a website run by a group Catholic laymen and contains well over six hundred sermons from a number of different priests, all categorized and iTunes-ready. Enjoy 🙂
When Church Sucks…
When Christians get together there’s really nothing we love to do more than to complain! In my experience, what we especially like to do is to have a good whine about the problems we have with our parish. In response to this, I would like to write a series of short posts about some common complaints I’ve heard. Today I’ll begin with one of the most common criticisms:
“Our priest’s homilies are boring…”
As I say, this is a very common complaint. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve heard people say something like this. Unfortunately, it’s often a reason given as to why someone left to join a Protestant congregation. 🙁
