Peter Costello
Wheels of Light
by Fr Con Buckley
(Author House, £19.99 pb; eBook edition, €5.89)
Where We Now Stand: The Lourdes Sermons of John Charles McQuaid
compiled by M. Ó Ciardubháin
(EPrint Publishing, €20.00)
In the Central Catholic Library, there is a whole wall of books devoted to homiletics, some of the titles dating back to the 18th Century. These books are rarely looked at today, except by researchers.
The sermon as a form was taken more seriously in past centuries. We can recall the names of Fr Tom Burke of Tallaght Priory, Fr Bernard Vaughan, the Jesuit whose fashionable sermons filled Farm Street, John Henry Newman whose sermons were also greatly valued, as were those of Fr Robert Hugh Benson. There were even such things as Charity Sermons, two-hour long affairs preached to raise money for a good cause.
How different it is today. Sermons are no longer preached from a pulpit high over the heads of the congregation, but are given through a microphone that may not always be tuned properly. All too often what is said seems to have been cobbled together the night before from some manual of American origin.
Many priests try hard to vivify and make relevant what they have to say. And this collection of texts by Fr Con Buckley is intended to provide examples of what might be done. As his subtitle suggests he provides samples of introduction, homilies, prayers of the faithful, with appropriate reflections for every Sunday of the three year cycle and special feast days.
Preachers might bear in mind the old advice of the sergeant major: “First I tells ‘em what I’m going to tell ‘em, then I tells ‘em what I have to tell ‘em, and then I tells ‘em what I have told ‘em.” It always worked in the army, and ought to work in the Church. It is a technique very different from an essay.
But whatever they say, priests must remember that they need to learn to speak properly, clearly and slowly, and to reach the back of the church. The mumbling conversational style of so many homilies simply does not work. Texts such as Fr Buckley provides so generously, should prove immensely helpful to many other clergy. But as the sermons of Jesus in the Gospels demonstrates so well, a certain style is also needed.
An example of what sermons once were is also to hand, in a collection of sermons preached by Archbishop McQuaid on pilgrimages to Lourdes. Lourdes remains a popular devotion in Ireland – one which Dr McQuaid expounded to pilgrims over two decades and more.
Dr McQuaid in his lifetime was not a man of books; he published little beyond those Lenten pastorals which an older generation will remember. But he was by vocation a teacher and worked hard to impart through his homilies his vision of what the Church ought to be. That the Holy Spirit moved the People of God in another way dismayed him.
He has been unlucky enough to be better known today not in his own words, but in those of his biographers. This book, old fashioned though it is, will help to balance the scales, allowing modern readers to hear the man’s voice for themselves, and to appreciate what the devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary meant to him, and might also mean to others.