- It sometimes seems like E/P preachers-to-be are recruited based on their oratory skills. Since there is much less formal requirements, it can often seem like a person starts off maybe street preaching or being vociferous in a small group and its like they get groomed if they are able to preach on. In the Catholic Church, it seems like public speaking skills are not really used to ‘vet’ future Priests.
Again, you are making assumptions. What you describe is often true in fundamentalist and Pentecostal/Holiness Protestantism.
Please understand that I’m quite aware that there is plenty of bad preaching in Protestantism. I’ve heard my share of bad Protestant sermons. But what I’d think of as a really bad sermon in the Episcopal Church (since that’s the denomination to which I belong and also the denomination whose approach to preaching and worship is closest to that of Catholicism) would be no worse than average in the Catholic Church. And that’s before we get into the various virtues (and accompanying defects) of Reformed or Methodist or Baptist preaching.
I think the key difference is that in Protestantism, preaching is seen as being in some way sacramental. Yes, this goes along with (except perhaps in Anglicanism and Lutheranism) a certain devaluation of the sacraments compared to their place in Catholicism. In classical Protestantism Word and Table are seen as mirrors of each other, and unfortunately in much modern Protestantism the sacraments are ranked much lower than preaching, at least in practice.
But whatever the flaws of this Protestant attitude, I think it’s fair to say that by and large in Protestantism preaching is expected to be a means of grace, to bring people into contact with the living Christ, in a way that it isn’t expected to do in Catholicism. This is driven home for me by the responses of many Catholics on this thread. It’s clear to me that what most of you think of as a good sermon is a sermon that indoctrinates people in what you think are important teachings or practices. While Protestant sermons may do this, the traditional goal of a Protestant sermon is to “preach the Word” and/or (it’s another way of saying the same thing) to “preach the Gospel.” That is to say, the goal is to break open the written Word of God in such a way as to bring people into contact with the living Christ.
I think one obstacle in the way of Catholic priests doing this is the Catholic separation between faith and love/good works, which makes it harder for Catholic priests to “preach the Gospel” in an evangelical sense (because faith is traditionally defined as accepting true doctrine, with love/good works requiring a separate infusion of grace and a separate act of the cooperating human will). But that’s a different discussion.
Another objection a Catholic might have to the statement I just made is that it doesn’t take the Tradition into account. But it would seem to me that Tradition ought to help Catholic preachers in this regard. This brings me to what I see as the other major problem with Catholic preaching, a point where I suspect folks on this forum are more likely to agree with me.
Catholic priests are (rightly, in my opinion) expected to preach from the lectionary. But at the same time, their Scripture classes in seminary have been dominated by historical criticism. I’m not opposed to historical criticism, but when it is taken as *the *way for Christians to interpret Scripture, and the only legitimate basis for exegetical preaching, it makes vibrant preaching difficult if not impossible. This is less of a problem for evangelical Protestants, both because they are taught a more conservative form of Biblical scholarship (the “grammatical-historical method,” which I see as a conservative variant of historical criticism but which many Protestants insist is something quite different) and because of the doctrine of sola scriptura. Protestantism rests (if it rests at all, which is dubious) on the premise that if you can’t support your theology or preaching by your exegesis, then the theology/preaching needs to change. (That is perhaps the most practical way of defining sola scriptura.)
In post-Vatican-II American Roman Catholicism (using “Roman” here in distinction from the Eastern Catholic churches), the combination of historical criticism, lectionary preaching, and the Catholic doctrine of tradition seems to result in the following conclusions:
- Good Biblical scholarship often does not support Catholic teaching.
- That doesn’t matter, because Catholics believe in Sacred Tradition.
- However, preaching is supposed to be based on Scripture.
That means that in practice there is a lot of Catholic teaching that “doesn’t preach.” Preachers are thus left with relatively little to say, and certainly with large areas of Catholic theology and spiritual life about which they can’t speak from the pulpit without failing to preach from Scripture.
As with so many other aspects of the North American post-VatII status quo, this isn’t quite what Vatican II called for. Dei Verbum speaks of a dynamic, interpenetrating relationship between Scripture and Tradition. But to make that a living reality Catholics need to return to a more traditional, more mystical way of reading Scripture. I don’t think Catholic preaching has a chance of improving until that happens. That’s where the work of folks like Scott Hahn is very important, I think. One of my friends from Duke, Tim Gray, studied with Hahn and now teaches Scripture at the Denver diocesan seminary. Perhaps that’s a sign of hope.
Edwin
