Book Reviewed: J. E. Sigler, Holy Ghost in the Catholic Machine: Spirit-Structure Tensions in Parish Preaching Work (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2023)
Journal of Christian Teaching Practice, Volume 11, 2024 (January – December)
Reviewed by: Mark A. E. Williams
Reviewer Affiliation: California State University, Sacramento
Total Pages: 498
ISBN-13: 979-8385200047
I do not know if it is possible to digress in a first sentence, but that word gets closest to my intentions in this opening. If we are to understand J. E. Sigler’s powerful work on Catholic preaching, we must begin by way of a rather pointed digression: Catholic preaching is not just bad (according to Sigler), but also weird. By this I mean that it occupies a peculiar space quite different from the expectations and understandings of preaching in most Protestant worship. And sharing this peculiar Catholic space is the priest who delivers the homily. Clarifying the “weirdness” of the Catholic priest might be the best place to begin this review of Sigler’s ambitious and—for the most part—heuristic and insightful book.
The Catholic priest acts, we Catholics say, in persona Christi, that is, as the very person of Christ himself, wielding Christ’s authority to accomplish a sacramental purpose (pp. 33-35). The priest’s two most formidable uses of Christ’s authority are found in acts that, Catholics hold, can be validly performed only by an ordained Catholic priest: the absolution of sin after hearing an honest confession, and standing at the altar to re-member (that is, assemble again, or confect as the theologians say) the eucharistic feast of the Master.
While I am a Catholic, and I believe these things, I am hardly arguing their truth here; I simply wish to point out that, to grasp Sigler’s work it is essential to bear in mind the priest’s function: acting in persona Christi in order to present the divine grace of the sacraments, necessarily. Because the priest performs these sacramental actions not as himself but in persona Christi, the faithful are inevitably nurtured by the sacrament, independent of the piety or even decency of the priest. That is what sacraments do.
But that is not what preaching does. Preaching, in the Catholic tradition, is one part of the larger conversational interchange before the sacramental event of the Eucharist. That interchange is called the Liturgy of the Word, and it forms the first half of the Mass. The Liturgy of the Word is the warm exchange of news—good news, mostly—between friends before sitting down to dinner. The homily is the last part of Liturgy of the Word; after that, the priest begins the prayers of consecration, and it is there he stands in persona Christi and the inevitable spiritual goods of the Mass come into being.
One of Sigler’s points is that priests—and seminaries—can too easily and too casually assume the homily enjoys the same sort of inevitable sacramental grace that is found when the priest acts in persona Christi within the actual sacrament. But it doesn’t. The quality and worth of the eucharistic sacrament is independent of the priest’s character and skill: the eucharist is just as sacramental if the priest mumbles and yawns during the liturgy as it is if he is articulate and engaging. And the homily, occurring within that same Mass, can pick up a sort of “stolen honor”: an erroneous assumption of inevitable grace, as if it were a sacrament, too. And with that peculiar tension in mind, we are in a position to grasp much more deeply Sigler’s detailed work.
Sigler’s text very reasonably argues that priests and seminaries need to recontextualize their ideas of teaching homiletics, clarifying preaching not as a source of inevitable grace but rather a bit of hard work that just comes with the job, like balancing parish budgets and reviewing the Catholic school’s curriculum (pp. 37-40, 403-405). This call to recontextualize how preaching is taught in seminaries is the most powerful, relevant, and significant aspect of Sigler’s work. Sigler wants Catholic seminaries and seminarians to view the homily as a pragmatic task that is simply part of the job and requires both training and preparation. In an interview with CCSN,[1] Sigler notes that her study is the first to contextualize the Catholic homily as simply work. The view is a refreshing one, based not on common sense alone but on Sigler’s thorough research and solid theory.
Sigler’s two introductory chapters set up the problem and describe her method and assumptions, rooted in a Weberian frame of organizational authority and emphasizing Weber’s structural divergence. In structural divergence, competing and incompatible frames of meaning exist within an organization, a point Sigler brings home nicely, recognizing the tensions between the spirited, the mentoring, and the bureaucratic aspects of the Catholic church (Weber’s charisma, patrimony, and bureaucracy). She lays out this tension without any hint of guile (she is herself a practicing Catholic), and no seminary need fear that they are being set up for a thrashing. Quite the contrary; Sigler’s voice is powerful, and her criticisms of Catholic homiletics are pointed, clear, and heuristic, but they are also charitable and respectful. She has arrived at these conclusions because this is where the data has led her, not because she has an axe to grind.
Sigler spends the heft of her book, chapters 3-7, presenting and explicating her research findings. She interviewed 39 priests at various points in their vocational career and discovered a series of intricate ways in which these priests approach their homiletic task. Sigler’s interviews also uncovered varying perspectives on how their education prepared (or failed to prepare) them for preaching. Her analysis isolates nine recurring themes within the interviews, with 22 subthemes or associated expressions (what Sigler calls “categories”) around which that theme was expressed or explored. She further identifies four “threads,” by which she means common ways her participants connected aspects of the themes or categories together. For those whose minds run to taxonomy and visual mapping, these five chapters are an absolute feast. For those who prefer narrative gems and the “big picture” in order to arrange their thoughts, Sigler has plenty to offer as well, especially in the closing two chapters; but even here, amid the data-rich analytical heart of the book, there are personable reflections on specific interactions with her subjects (pp. 212-214 and 224-227 are both excellent examples), and each chapter has an extremely helpful abstract at its opening.
The final two chapters include a series of pragmatic invitations to restructure and reconsider Catholic attitudes toward homilies and homilists. At the opening of this review, for example, we saw the tension around the homily as an essential part of Catholic worship, without itself being a sacrament. In the middle chapters, Sigler had laid out the way in which a search for excellent homiletics is so easily bypassed, either because it seems a Protestant thing that we don’t do, or because it can be classified too easily (and too vaguely) as a sacramental-ish thing that we don’t need to worry about (since its grace is inevitably achieved by the Holy Spirit). Neither of these views seem to match the power, potential, or responsibility that the Second Vatican Council placed upon the homily. Another path is needed. And Sigler invites homiletics courses to reflect a theology (emphasized by one of her subjects) in which the Holy Spirit “gifts [priests] with agency rather than competes with them for it” (404). Such a theology, incarnational at its core, requires an increased attention to honing preaching skills as part of the work of the priest.
But Sigler’s suggestions go far beyond merely improved style and delivery training in seminary. These broader suggestions are, in Chapter 9, wisely addressed to the Catholic Church generally—to seminaries, to bishops, to preachers, to hearers, to artistic and curricular creators, and to scholars. The suggestions here are concrete, down-to-earth, and well-argued. For instance, how about incorporating preaching more broadly across the seminary curriculum, rather than isolating it to a single course? How about time management as part of the seminary education, so that seminarians are taught how to schedule homily preparations? And perhaps—her most radical suggestion—extending the “pastoral year” (where the seminarian spends a year in a parish just prior to ordination) to a two-year apprenticeship, with more time spent on real-world parish work, including preaching? If these recommendations for the church focus on practical human actions, in her discussion for scholars, Sigler boldly takes on the secular bias in our discourse on agency, inviting deeper reflections on how humans cooperate in God’s will.
Agree, or disagree, all of these considerations ought to be a topic of intense conversation and intense debate in every Catholic seminary in the country; Sigler’s book needs to be read, celebrated, and argued over.
Naturally, I have my reservations about some of Sigler’s assumptions, and I would be eager to debate some of the implications she draws from her data. I would also love to see her discuss her findings in light of Augustine’s De Doctrina, IV (a glaring omission by my lights!). Those small concerns aside, I welcome this powerful and carefully researched book and cannot recommend it strongly enough for every Catholic seminary, every seminarian, and anyone who is interested in the depths, glories, and very human aspects of Catholic worship.
Notes
[1] J. E. Sigler, recorded webinar, CCSN [Christianity & Communication Studies Network], January 17, 2024. https://www.theccsn.com/upcoming-webinar-holy-ghost-in-the-catholic-machine-spirit-structure-tensions-in-parish-preaching-work-j-e-sigler/