Good homilies are written with the particular community in mind. If it were more effective to write a homily for a generic public, the Vatican would have started publishing standard homilies long ago.
Go read the first part of Acts 4, where a section closes with: "Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognized that they had been with Jesus." So...yes! We do believe in a God that can empower average people to speak in above-average ways.
but yeah faiths are into faith
shrug
> You have a lot of faith in the qualities of average priests. >> To be fair, faith is the crux of Catholicism.
So, in context (which the downvoters seem to have missed), "faith" is being used equivocally here. There a difference between having faith in Christ and his promises and faith in his claims of divinity on the one hand, and having "faith" in a priest or whatever else on the other. Hence, my question whether this was some kind of a bad attempt at humor or whether something was meant by it.
(FWIW, authentic Christian faith is not an arbitrary faith in anything you please. This is blind faith which is irrational. This is why we can speak of preambula fidei. There must be reasons for faith. When a friend tells you something about his inner life that you cannot know directly, you may believe him given an ensemble of evidence and reasons that cannot prove his claim definitively, but are nonetheless very supportive of it. Furthermore, the claim makes sense of what you do know about him.)
But he's not talking about an arbitrary faith. He's talking about faith in the capacity of priests -- clearly a relevant subject. And there are, indeed, _preambula fidei_ here: that the priest was taught in seminary, that the priest was approved by the Church, that the priest (through the bishop who ordained them) participates in a line of apostolic succession going back to Jesus, etc.
What you've written is simply an intellectual jumble. What does faith (the theological virtue) and acceptance of the apostolic succession have to do with "faith" in the capacity of priests, here, as competent homilists?
> Moses said to the Lord, “Pardon your servant, Lord. I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue.”
> The Lord said to him, “Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.”
Like, that's the whole deal about all of the prophets, popes, priesthood in general. They are all mortal and imperfect, but God still speaks through them.
In this case, I thought it should be obvious that OP must have faith in priests, given that they're Catholic, which requires faith as a prereq.
If you read my comment as a slight against Catholicism, I can understand, but I wouldn't feel comfortable publicly joking about any religion other than my own. If that's the case, you're in good company, with the multitude of nuns who've admonished me for similar offhand comments spanning 20 years of Catholic education from pre-k to college, this is old hat for me.
God willing, I'll mature or start telling better jokes some day.
Naturalistic religions, so called "paganism", also worshipped living beings or natural phenomena like a particularly big tree, a mountain, a forest, the Sun, etc. Some of these didn't demand obedience nor spoke through a ruling elite. Bonus points for worshipping things that could be verified as real.
/s
Other churches have varying degrees of requirements to become a priest.
There actually are, but they are famous homilies from famous Church Fathers rather then explicitly produced to be standard homilies.
"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
https://associationofcatholicpriests.ie/liturgy/sunday-resou...
But they will try, and they'll share a lot of potentially private information in the process.
For me, the disturbing event was shortly before the 2016 event when a Catholic Church in Lowell MA had posters urging people to vote no on marijuana legalization.
(In my case, I smelt the politization when I was a teenager so I never continued being Catholic as an adult.)
(the US was founded by religious exiles from a state which didn't stay out)
Religions are explicitly political but politics shouldn't interfere with religions. To follow your religion means interacting with the outside world. It's not some personally private thing like a harmless badge you wear (although there are American faith communities that advocate for that).
The cases in the past where political have interfered with religions are often, ironically enough, by other religious politicians. Hence the good idea to separate church and state.
https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/charities-churches-and-politics
> In 1954, Congress approved an amendment by Sen. Lyndon Johnson to prohibit 501(c)(3) organizations, which includes charities and churches, from engaging in any political campaign activity. To the extent Congress has revisited the ban over the years, it has in fact strengthened the ban. The most recent change came in 1987 when Congress amended the language to clarify that the prohibition also applies to statements opposing candidates.
> Currently, the law prohibits political campaign activity by charities and churches by defining a 501(c)(3) organization as one "which does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office."
A homily about gambling would be right in line with religious teachings - the timing is really what is at the apex of your post.
Some people buy lottery tickets specifically because of who they benefit, which is very different than going to Vegas or certain forms of investment. (IE, uneducated investment is often just gambling.)
I see another reply is arguing that religion is inherently political. I disagree. Modern politics did not exist at the time the world's major religions were being formed. Attempting to twist them to fit with a particular party or candidate is a terrible idea all around in my book, for many reasons.
The state can cause a lot of damage by endorsing religion, the historical record is overflowing with examples. I'd argue that a religious body endorsing a state is every bit as potentially destructive. The government is at its best when it is neutral on the subject of faith and crafts policy in evidence-based ways that people of all (or at least most) faiths can agree upon. In this situation, there is no reason for a religious organization to promote such a government because their interests are orthogonal. They can cooperate, but there is a clear line between that and acting subservient, or declaring some sort of 'divine mandate' has been bequeathed upon a government institution or official.
(1) Religions are treated no differently than any other non-profit.
(2) No non-profit may endorse a particular candidate. They are free to comment on particular issues and policies and referenda.
A priest can say 'vote no on marijuana'. They cannot say 'vote yes to Mary Sue because she doesn't like marijuana'.
Further, the core reason for freedom of speech in a democracy is to have freedom for political speech. The need is to have different factions discuss ideas related to the governing of society. Any legal regime that restricts the rights of religion to engage in political speech is one that rejects the separation of church and state. The purpose of the separation is to prevent the government from interfering with the rights of disfavored religious groups or granting special privileges to favored religions. If an individual has a right to political speech, then an association of individuals also has that right whether or not it is religious in nature.
Honestly she should have changed parishes. St Rita’s is in an affluent part of Dallas. One of the priests is a former Anglican(?) with wife and children who obtained a special dispensation.
I heard a lot of bad phone it in homilies too. Today one of my favorite priests is from Benin. He serves the Francophone community but also celebrates mass in English and Spanish. He is at Mary Immaculate in Farmers Branch. He is more traditional and gives the Catholic interpretation of the day’s readings and how it applies today.
But dull, empty homilies are (alas) very frequent.
I think right now it’s the exact opposite.
Doubly-so since people are now apparently criticizing Christian pastors for quoting Christ.
Evangelical would be closer to one book thing, altrought it would still ve a stretch.
I don’t know what this means. There is no formal “vow of silence”. The closest things I can think of are the discipline of avoiding unnecessary speech in some monastic communities, or perhaps the seal of confession, but this doesn’t apply as priests can speak in generalities or anonymously about the kinds of moral issues people struggle with.
> Good homilies are written with the particular community in mind.
That’s a bit of a generalization. Many, if not most, readings simply benefit from clear explanation. Tying in local or cultural context can be helpful, but they can also be a distraction, and mostly, homilies should be about the essential meaning of the readings. By having to write the homily, the celebrant benefits from writing the homily as well, a benefit he would lose if he simply drew from a corpus of prewritten homilies.
And that is not just a theoretical thing. This what e.g. Nepomuk is a saint for and what other priests went for to a concentration camp.
By this, he meant that it was ok-but-not-great, and there's a lot of weak preaching out there. And your point is dead on: the text and the assembly are the primary considerations. I preach on the same readings to 4 different masses, but the 4:30 Saturday Vigil folks are a different group than the 11:30 Sunday Morning crowd, so the message is tuned accordingly. Different emphases, different touchstones, differing exhortations, etc.
A parish priest might not deliver a “canned sermon” verbatim, but still rely on one/more sermon manuals heavily when preparing his words for Sunday.
The Roman Catechism (Catechism of the Council of Trent), published by the Vatican and ordered for use in seminaries for core formation of candidates for the priesthood, included a list of specific topics to address for each Sunday of the year. While not a sermon manual as such, those “bullet points” informed Catholic sermons around the world for 300+ years.
I’m building BibleGuided, and one thing we’re adding is a church feature where congregants can opt in to sharing prayer themes, and leaders can see aggregated and anonymized trends over time rather than identities. That’s enough to shape a homily toward what people are actually struggling with, without violating confidentiality.
If anyone has experience with privacy thresholds (minimum group sizes, differential privacy), I’d love pointers.
For community context, we avoid confessional and private pastoral data. It is opt-in from congregants, then aggregated and anonymized into themes and trends.
We think AI can be a helpful tool across many areas, including faith, and over time many church leaders (of many denominations) will get comfortable using it in bounded, and responsible ways. If a church does not want AI used for homilies, those features can be toggled off and the rest of our tools still work.
Are you sure you have faith?
A priest could use AI for a homily dealing with drug addiction, without specifying "Bob in row 3 is a methhead"
The closest thing is that a priest cannot share anything told during the sacrament of reconciliation. But that’s not so much a vow as just the other side of what Catholics believe is a direct connection to god.
The first reference I could find for confessional secrecy was from a 4th century book written by the 3rd/4th century Persian bishop, Aphraates. In Demonstration VII, On Penance, he councils priests to keep a penitent's confessions secret, "lest he be exposed by his enemies and those who know him. .... If they reveal them to anyone, the whole army will suffer an adverse reputation."
Source: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_Sy0vAAAAMAAJ/page/n251/mo... That's a Syriac to Latin translation. I used Google Translate for Latin to English. There's at least one partial English translation of that book online, but I found their translation more confusing.
There's context in the strict technical sense - the AI is stateless, you need to get the right tokens to it in the right way, allow it to use tooling calls, etc. I get that. That, is cool. I use agentic coding a lot.
Then there's the sense of what you're saying - you have to feed the AI "enough context". In your case it's critical, but I've seen way too many pro-AI people just dismiss everything and say "context context you didn't give it proper context, have you tried this prompt etc." as a justification for the "lack" of intelligence.
At some point you have to wonder when it becomes unfalsifiable.
There’s a lot of hidden context in day to day work that a human often times wouldn’t even know to explain to the AI or even think that they’d have to include it, things that are just “known” by default of working somewhere for a long time.
With coding, there’s at least the entire codebase as context. With more creative tasks, it becomes murky. Even something as “simple” as sending a price increase notification to customers. There’s a lot of nuance in that, and customer relationship history you’d have to feed to the AI as context to get it right, yet a good CSR would just factor that context into their writing without a second thought.
There is a point, and it is reached very early, where it’s more costly and less productive to feed the AI as much context as you can try to imagine you’d need to give it vs. just doing it yourself. If I’m at the point of writing an entire document of history and context, into what’s effectively a full page prompt, then why bother with AI at that point.
Imagine a bunch of bushmen trying to perform the spell of rain. It doesn't matter what they sing, as long as it sounds like something that could pass as the spell of rain, because the goal here isn't to make rain happen, it's to strengthen the community through shared rituals. 99% of religious activities are exactly this.
I mean, not to dismiss your experience, but in my weekly Sunday going to church in Poland the priest would write an actual homily that felt relevant to the community. But then our small town had 3 churches, and each one had a different style - people would talk about preferring one over the other because they had more interesting "content".
But yeah, there was the message from the regional Bishop or the Archbishop of Poland or sometimes directly from the Vatican, then the reading from the old testament, then the homily which I'm 99% was written by the priest giving the mass.
>> I guarantee that not a single person from my entire village understood what the priest was saying
Well, I wouldn't say not a single person did, but yeah, we had those 3 churches, probably 10k seats each, every one was rammed on the sunday, but I'd say 90% of people there were only there to tick it off and snoozed through the whole thing. But it's not because the homily was boring, it's because going to church on sunday was(maybe still is?) a thing you have to do or people will make fun out of you.