Clever Title Goes Here

A Blog, rather a IREM

Power and difficult task of the preacher

http://blog.ipsissima-verba.org/archives/277
So we did this video for Alumni day, and posted it online and now over 1000 page views on youtube. That is a lot of people.
But in some parishes, those likely to have associates, in St. Louis there are over 1000 communicants on a Sunday (contingent, of course, on the time of the Ram's game). So it is rather easy for a priest to reach 1000 people every week.
The video took a lot of work, a lot of planning. We carefully phrased some things to best present the ideas. We debated if there was too many sci-fi elements, too much or too little smoking,  to include a shoulder cape or not. There was a diverse audience, priests form classes dating to 1940 to 2007, formators, seminarians, and lay faculty. It was important to not offend anyone, some priests their wear a cassock in the parish, others despise it. We wanted them first to laugh but we also had a message. We, seminarians, while having a bi-monthly Mass according to the missal of John XXIII, can have fun, we are not robots, we love the same Church.
In the same way in which we antagonized over the video, we need to, in the future, God willing, carefully plan our homilies. The number of people we can touch is about the same as the, but the purpose is so much more important that laughter. While a homily is not a funny little video for alumni day, it needs to be just as clever. Not clever in the "boy, I am funny" way, but  clever as in "gentle as doves and clever as serpents" (MT 10:16) Every parish has a diversity of people much broader than that for alumni day. In a large parish today there are the simple, the ardent readers of America, and subscribers of the Wanderer,   the overly devotional, and those who proudly do not own a rosary, the sanitation engineer, and the stock broker, and the older pious looking couple who has a gay son and a daughter who has had multiple abortions who get upset when these topics are broached, and the tatooed young couple who want to teach NFP. To accomplish the work of pastoring this flock a shepherd has to be quite clever, and spend a lot of energy on preparing his homilies.

Oh why do my musing always mean more work after ordination! ;)
Dylan, I want you to note I directed the way to the video through your blog.

posted by: nictitator at 14:10 | link | comments (1) |

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