Importance of Sunday homily: A priest's confession!! A Special CAMCORD Dedication to the Roman Catholic Church in Cameroon

“Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It’s a month since my last confession. For the past four weeks I have made little effort to prepare my homily for Sunday Mass…”

Pope Francis has mentioned it again and again, but I am not sure that even he fully grasps the extent of the problem with preaching in the Church today, not least in Cameroon.

It’s a huge problem with many sides to it yet, apart from the Pope, it receives virtually no attention. In fact, we hardly seem to be aware that it even needs attention.

Many of us priests get up Sunday after Sunday and preach no homily at all or we dish out a plateful of psychological platitudes, moralistic abstractions and reassuring waffle sprinkled with a few token phrases from the Scriptures.

This is certainly not what Jesus had in mind when he sent us out to pastor the sheep. Rather, too often we sound like those who have little care for the sheep, those who are ready to flee at just a mention of the wolf. 

Often we can analyse in detail how each member of the Cameroon National football team has been playing, what he needs to do to up his fitness or to eliminate the flaws in his positioning, passing or kicking.

But when it comes to our own “preaching performance” at Sunday Mass, we have gladly forgotten it before we say, “Let us all stand now for the Creed.”

But no committed footballer acts like that. Rather, he reviews how he has played, what he needs to improve on, what worked or didn’t work, and so on. He talks to other players, reads sports magazines, takes coaching.

But he does all this for one reason only – because he wants to improve, he wants to improve. How many priests ever reflect, “I want to improve as a preacher, I want to give better homilies”?

How many reflect on the immense importance of the homily for the spiritual well-being of the people who still come to Mass, of their Christ-given responsibility towards those people?

Our people are dying from spiritual starvation. In the past they received spiritual nourishment from a variety of sources – school, prayer in the home, religious books, a culture that confirmed their Christian faith.

But today few of these sources still exist. Which means that people depend even more on the Sunday homily.

We need to make preaching a major priority in our ministry, to keep reflecting on it, to study how others do it, to examine what “works” and what doesn’t work.

Once we make this a central concern, we will be surprised at how passion alone for the Word of God, and for preaching it, can begin to change our preaching for the better.