Improving the quality and spiritual depth of preaching has been a passion for Shelly, who is director of vocations and oversees homiletics training for the permanent diaconate in his diocese.
If priests and deacons do not take seriously their vocational call and the preparation needed to preach the Gospel, Shelly said, the resulting communication will be flat and possibly even an obstacle to worship.
“The Pew Foundation looked at why young adults are leaving the Church, and the first reason the study gave was poor preaching,” Shelly said.
“In the diocese of Monterey, we only recently renewed the diaconate. The mandate that came from the presbyteral council was that deacons should be effective preachers — and we should also hold the presbyterate to the same standards. This post-Vatican II generation expects more from us,” he added.
Over the course of a week earlier this summer, three priests from the archdiocese of New Orleans — Frs. Chris DeLerno, Kevin DeLerno and Martin Smullen — joined five deacons in preparing two homilies each, which were videotaped and then critiqued by the group.
Spiritual preparation is critical, Shelly said, and the methodology employed involves lectio divina — reading, reflecting and praying over the Scripture passage.
“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,’ ” 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.”
Great preaching is a balancing act, Shelly said. While the homily should be “personal, it should not be about ‘you.’”
“You want to make it personal — a revelation of your own faith life — and place that in service to the people, but it should not become narcissistic,” Shelly said.
Smullen said many times preachers forget the value of silence as a tool in teaching God’s word.
“We can only see the eloquence, the gentleness and the meekness of it when we’re quiet,” he said. “Jesus chooses to be silent to allow us to experience His quiet presence, not to experience His commands or His admonitions.”
Shorter homilies may help bring youth back to Church
By Peter Finney Jr., Catholic News ServiceNEW ORLEANS - For eight days at Loyola University New Orleans, three priests and five deacons absorbed the cool mathematics and internal symmetry of good preaching.
Just as Moses descended from Mount Sinai with Ten Commandments chiseled on two stone tablets, the rules laid out by Fr. Roy Shelly and Deborah Wilhelm of the diocese of Monterey, Calif., while not etched in permanent marker, are boundaries worthy of respect: six to eight minutes for a Sunday homily, three to five minutes for a weekday sermon.
“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.
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