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Tom (Inadvertent Obfuscation)'s avatar

To me the attitude expressed by the Central Committee of German Catholics:

"In just a few years, no one will be able to seriously oppose lay sermons and baptisms by lay people if the Church still wants to have meaning for the local people."

may explain why:

"We already have a glaring shortage of priests."

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Clare K's avatar

Can we have an explainer, or maybe a pod, on the differences between the homily and other types of preaching? I know there was a previous pod on which JD suggested an office of installed lay preacher, but it still left me confused on the difference. Is it simply a question of who and where (clergy, in a Mass) or is there a content element? Coming from a Protestant background, I frequently refer to what we hear at Mass as a "sermon" (just the vocabulary term I'm comfortable with), and on more than one occasion have been officiously corrected "actually, it's a homily, not a sermon." The officious corrector has never been able to explain for me the difference. At one point someone told me, "Well, the homily has to involve the proclamation of the kerygma." OK... I can count on one hand the number of homilies I've heard that do, in fact, explicitly proclaim the kerygma. Beyond that, note this quote from above: “This is not an exclusion of the laity,” Cardinal Roche wrote, “nor is it, of course, a denial of the right and duty of every baptized person, male or female, to proclaim the Gospel, but rather a confirmation of the specificity of this form of proclamation, which is the homily.” So every baptized person has the right and duty to proclaim the Gospel, but the homily is a specific form of that proclamation. **What is the specific form then?** Again, is it simply a question of who and where (clergy, in a Mass) or is there a content element? Is proclamation of the Gospel different from the proclamation of the kerygma, and if so, in what specific ways? (I'm totally OK with the answer being that it's simply about who and where, BTW. This is just a question that has bugged me for years and I can't seem to get a straight answer.)

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