In my first and second post in this series, I reflected on ministry placements related to preaching that I held during my time in the Master of Divinity program at Notre Dame. This third and final post reflects on the preaching classes offered to M Div students at ND that I myself took and that I have now had the privilege to co-teach for two semesters as a PhD candidate.
I think it is a wonderful model to have seminarians and lay students in formation together and in particular to allow them to grow as preachers together. Students bring diverse experiences and do not shy away from giving one another constructive feedback. However, the elephant in the room during these preaching classes is Canon 767’s restriction against lay preaching during the eucharist.
During my first day of my first preaching class at ND, our professor asked us to name the most essential difference between Protestant and Catholic preaching. I answered by simply saying, “women.” This was not the answer my instructor was looking for. He instead emphasized that there is a difference in length between a typical Protestant sermon and Catholic homily. After class, the female professor assisting with the course came up to me and said, “I liked your answer better.”
Seven years later, on my first day co-teaching a preaching class at ND, the women in class likewise raised the issue immediately. Students had been asked to reflect on their own call to preach as part of their vocation to ministry and to describe their developing identity as preachers. The lay students, and the women in particular, found this to be a challenging assignment because they felt prevented from fully affirming and living their identity as preachers. They spoke about having discerned a charism for preaching and having had that gift affirmed within the community, and yet they felt excluded by the restriction against lay preaching during the very source and summit of our faith. A question posed by Mary Catherine Hilkert resonated deeply with them: “What are we saying to our communities—especially to women and girls—when we say that the words and witness of the baptized may draw others to the eucharistic mystery, but their words of faith have no place within that celebration, or at least not until the sacred celebration has closed when they can offer testimony after the post-communion prayer?”[1]
There isn’t space in this brief blog post to offer an extended theological argument for lay preaching at the eucharist (though it is the subject of a number of helpful resources and is also the subject of my own dissertation). I would instead like to highlight the pastoral need for commissioning a more diverse pool of preachers to give the homily at our eucharistic liturgies and to put a human face on a contentious issue. I’d also like to encourage the community here at PrayTell to continue the conversation especially in light of synodality.[2]
Seminarians frequently express fears about having to preach so often, especially when they think about daily Masses. During our preaching course, they preach about three or four times over the course of the semester and devote extensive time to prayer, study, and preparation in addition to actually writing, delivering, and revising their homilies based on feedback from peers and instructors. These seminarians recognize the importance of homilies and understand how much time and effort it takes to preach well. They ask for tips about how to avoid burn out or how to keep their material fresh or how to simply find the time that good preaching requires on top of all the additional responsibilities they will have as priests. Some of the seminarians have thus used the term “burden” to describe their responsibility to preach.
Meanwhile, many of the lay students would be thrilled to have an opportunity to preach more frequently and to a regular, consistent congregation (as opposed to other scenarios like preaching at retreats or online). They instead view this “burden” as a gift, privilege, and opportunity. They would be more than happy to be co-responsible for this ministry alongside their peers preparing for ordination. While they strive to preach in a variety of other contexts, they lament the fact that these opportunities are often limited. These opportunities also often differ greatly from the lectionary-based, eucharist-oriented preaching they have been well-formed in through their courses at ND.
The seminarians regularly admit that some of the most gifted preachers in our classes are lay students. They also appreciate hearing the word broken open from different perspectives and have described how meaningful it has been for their own spiritual life and for their formation as preachers. They find it especially moving to hear the love of God described from the perspective of a parent, an angle they had never heard before in a homily and one that they themselves would never be able to replicate. Commissioning lay preachers to preach the homily would address two pastoral needs simultaneously – it would better nourish a people of God hungry for hearing the word broken open in diverse ways and it would also better sustain our priests who are often overworked. It could also lead to greater ongoing formation and feedback in preaching and better promote the responsibility of the entire church to proclaim the gospel.
Preaching courses at ND are themselves a model of co-responsibility. A lay woman and ordained Holy Cross priest teaching homiletics together to both lay and seminarian students. Of the 13 students in our class, only 4 were in formation for priesthood and will preach “regularly.” The 9 other students – 2 Holy Cross brothers, 1 lay man, and 6 lay women – are equally well-formed and perhaps even more passionate about a call to preach but will have far fewer opportunities to exercise their gifts on behalf of the community.
As I mentioned in my first post, I want to approach the ministry of preaching from a perspective of abundance, and I encourage M Divs to also think from a perspective of abundance rather than scarcity. I myself take advantage of opportunities to preach whenever they present themselves, and I have also worked to create those opportunities. And yet, I was very aware of the fact that I was the only person in this course—student or instructor—who did not preach at all during the five months we would all gather together.
Lately I’ve been meditating a lot on Jesus’ words to his disciples: “The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest” (Matthew 9:37-38). I cannot help but think that when it comes to the ministry of preaching and to the homily in particular, the laborers are actually quite abundant and yet the harvest is being restricted.
[1] Mary Catherine Hilkert, A Time to Keep Silence and A Time to Speak, (Los Angeles, CA: Marymount Institute Press, 2023), 58.
[2] See the forthcoming book, Lay Eucharistic Preaching in a Synodal Catholic Church, from Liturgical Press edited by Gregory Heille.
Megan Effron is a doctoral candidate in systematic theology at the University of Notre Dame. Her dissertation draws on the writings of French Dominican Yves Congar as a foundation from which to construct a theology of preaching, with a particular focus on lay preaching. She lives in La Porte, Indiana with her husband and son.
Previous posts in this series: Co-Responsibility for Proclaiming the Gospel: Part I and Co-Responsibility for Proclaiming the Gospel: Part II
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