Preaching with conviction

My wife said she had never heard such preaching in a Catholic church. I agreed. Although I have been unsuccessful in identifying the priest by name, let it be said that he spoke with passion and conviction. He began his “homily” by saying, “Fasten your seat belts.”

My family and I visited relatives in Michigan during the Memorial Day weekend, and we went to Mass on Sunday at St. Vincent Ferrer Church in Madison Heights, a suburb of Detroit. The sermon we heard that morning was some kind of sermon.

Father spoke about the unchanging law of God and about how it would be well if people realized that God’s law was still in effect. The preacher contrasted God’s unchanging law with laws of the Church which, obviously, change.

“Listen to me now,” he said, “This is important.” The Church can make a law and the Church can change a law, but neither the Church nor the Pope nor anybody else can change God’s law. God’s law is just as true today as it was in the time of Christ. God’s law was true when Moses came down from the mountain and it’s true to this day.

The message we heard that morning was a simple message – nothing heady or intellectual, but spoken with fire and feeling, out of obviously deep and heartfelt belief. Here was a man preaching a faith he lived.

People’s lives are empty today, he said, if they are not following the law of God. People are living together, having sexual relations outside of wedlock and looking for fulfillment but finding none. Because why? Because fornication is still a sin! he shouted. Adultery is still a sin! You can’t break God’s law and get away with it!

Father said he was tired of all the experts called “they” out there who are giving their expert opinion about how God’s law may or may not be applicable to a particular case, about how the Church’s authority has somehow become “relative.”

“You hear somebody say you don’t have to go to confession anymore, you ask that person on whose authority they speak!” the priest said with pointed and deliberate and emphatic diction. “They talk about ‘liberal’ Catholics and ‘conservative’ Catholics. What? Is the Church a political party now? They talk about the ‘non-churchgoing Catholic.’ What is that? Is that some special, new branch of the Church? Does that mean it’s okay for Catholics to not go to Mass anymore? It does not!” he said with power.

Father told his listeners to come off their complaining about changes in the Church and get back to practicing their faith and following the law of God spoken in their hearts by a true and informed conscience.

“I had a woman come to me and say her husband didn’t come to Mass anymore. ‘Is that so,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he just got to where he couldn’t take that guitar Mass anymore,’ she said.” Father made the Sign of the Cross. “I told her to tell him to go to one of the other Masses! Just because he doesn’t like the folk Mass doesn’t mean he doesn’t have to go to Mass! Get with it, people! You don’t like all these changes? Neither do I! That doesn’t mean you stop practicing your faith!”

Kind of does something to your heart to hear that kind of preaching, and I mean preaching. I felt some blood flowing in my veins that Sunday morning. Yes, Father what’s-his-name said a lot more things that morning: simple, uncomplicated, truthful things, things that make a person’s soul get stirred with the conviction that it is possible to walk in God’s way one more day. Thank you, Father.

It will be good to have something to cling to on Pentecost Sunday, something not half-baked and mealy-mouthed and soft in the middle, but something good and righteous and on fire.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on June 7th, 1987