Notre Dame's McGrath Institute for Church Life presents Lilly Endowment-funded formation focused on heart of the Gospel
DETROIT — Catechists, teachers, lectors, priests and religious sisters gathered April 17 at Sacred Heart Major Seminary for a preaching formation workshop, “Savoring the Mystery: Renewing Catholic Preaching in an Age of Disaffiliation.” The workshop was presented by the University of Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life.
The initiative, funded by the Lilly Endowment, aims to renew Catholic preaching, not only in the context of the Mass but in classroom instruction, parish faith formation, and one-on-one conversations about the word of God.
Rather than offering tips for better homilies or proclaiming of the word, the workshop guided attendees to appreciate Scripture in a new light and thus become eager to share it with others.
“Preaching is not merely relaying facts about the Christian religion. It is, rather, an appeal to the heart, an offer of love," the McGrath Institute’s website states. "Hence our title is ‘savoring’ the mystery and not simply ‘knowing’ it.
“Savoring the Mystery understands the crisis of disaffiliation as a crisis of love and seeks to remedy this specifically in preaching by helping our participants and the people they serve grow in their love of Scripture and their love of the One to whom Scripture attests,” the website continues.
In 2023, Timothy O’Malley, Ph.D., associate director for research at the McGrath Institute, delivered the keynote speech at Sacred Heart’s annual In the Heart of the Church Lay Ecclesial Minister Speaker Series event. Last fall, O’Malley contacted Kevin Clarke, Ph.D., Sacred Heart’s dean of the Institute for Lay Ministry, to discuss the possibility of hosting the Savoring the Mystery workshop at the seminary.
“We were delighted to be selected for this initiative,” Clarke said. “By reaching out to both the clergy and the lay faithful — in short, anyone involved in the breaking open of the Word of God — this program helps people encounter the power of Scripture during this time of disaffiliation.”
Three seminaries around the country were selected for the preaching workshop. Sacred Heart hosted the first presentation.
“Sacred Heart was selected because it sits at the heart of a local Church that has made a radical, public commitment to evangelization,” said Joshua McManaway, program director of Savoring the Mystery. “There has been a renewed hunger in the Archdiocese of Detroit to ensure that the Word of God isn't just heard, but is transformative.”
Participants at the workshop listened to talks throughout the day with time for discussion after each, as well as guided journaling and prayer.
Carolyn Pirtle, program director for the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy at the McGrath Institute, presented visio divina, Latin for “divine seeing,” which uses art and sacred images to pray with Scripture. Pirtle displayed pages from the Saint John’s Bible, completed in 2011 and entirely hand-written and hand-illuminated by a team of calligraphers and artists.
“Illuminations are works of art that are imbedded in the very word of God, and therefore, their very purpose is to illuminate, to shed light, on both the word of God and on the person contemplating the word,” Pirtle said. “And so, this makes illuminations incredibly well-suited for use in prayer and for preparation for preaching.”
Tamra Hull Fromm, an instructor at the Catholic Biblical School of Michigan, attended the workshop in hopes of obtaining new practices to integrate into the courses she teaches. She seeks to present the Gospel in a way that reaches the “nones,” or those who don’t identify with an organized religion or who consider themselves agnostic or atheist.
“As my own research focuses on religious 'nones,' I appreciated the reiteration of key crises (i.e., memory, authority, and festivity) in our culture, which impact how preaching is received and how we can respond to these,” Fromm said.
Later in the day, attendees were invited to be part of ongoing discussions through online monthly gatherings for lay ministers and clergy, including those who will attend the workshop at other locations. The goal, McManaway said, is to foster a national conversation on the proclamation of the word.
“These groups will provide a consistent rhythm of reflection where members can dive deeper into Scripture and discuss contemporary works on homiletics and communication,” McManaway said. “It’s about moving from a one-time event to a shared journey. By reading and reflecting together, we ensure that the word remains at the center of our ministry and that our preachers and readers have a supportive peer network to lean on.”
McManaway sees these communities of practice as a broad think tank for Catholic preaching — a synchronized effort to elevate the standard of how the Gospel is shared across the American Catholic Church.
Fromm plans to participate in the ongoing meetings, having been inspired by Friday’s presentation.
“The workshop felt like a mini retreat where I was able to reconnect with and rest in the presence of the word through the methods of visio and lectio divina,” Fromm said. “It's very easy as an academic to get caught up in the intellectual pursuit of reading and explaining Scripture to my students, without taking the time to really hear the voice of God speaking to me personally.”
