I’m angrier than a coffee drinker with no sugar over the fact that it’s taken the Pope so long to speak out about this. Pope Francis has advised the more than 400,700 priests worldwide to keep their homilies short, defined by him as eight minutes or less. Otherwise, he reasoned, people could start falling asleep.
I can’t speak for other parishes, but at my parish, the homilies are typically less than five minutes for the weekday Masses and around eight or so minutes for the weekend Masses. So, there won’t need to be any changes at my parish. But I’m sure that there are some parishes in this diocese that will have to make some adjustments.
The Catholic News Agency reported thusly:
“…The homily for this must be short: an image, a thought, a feeling. The homily should not go beyond eight minutes because after that time you lose attention and people fall asleep.”
I’ve seen this in action. In this scene from the Kevin Smith film Dogma, we see what people do in their parishes during the homily. It happens in my parish too.
By shortening the homily, priests will be able to keep more people’s attention and that’s definitely a good thing. It’ll be interesting to see how things change when the priests put this new edict into action!