Actors coaching future priests
A Catholic seminary has hired two professional actors to put priests in training through an acting and public speaking workshop nicknamed Preaching Boot Camp.
The goal: more soul-stirring preaching.
“Priests today have to compete with a digital media culture where sounds bites, tweets and social media updates are the currency of communication,” said John Gehring, Catholic program director at the Washington-based advocacy group Faith in Public Life.
For the past several years, actors Arthur Beer and Mary Bremer-Beer have had the three-week workshops at Sacred Heart Major Seminary here. The seminarians are taught how to project, control tempo and master timing.
To get them to tap into their emotions, the men were asked to write speeches about their mothers — and to read those speeches to their moms.
When one of the seminarians said his mother started crying, Bremer-Beer took it as a good sign: “Doesn’t it make you feel good when they cry?”
Lousy sermonizing is one reason ex-Catholics cite for leaving the church. When Pope Francis ordained 19 priests a few weeks ago at the Vatican, he told them to make sure “that your homilies are not boring.”
When the Detroit archdiocese polled area Catholics in 2013, 83% said they wanted their pastors to have an “engaging preaching style.” Nationally in the same year, 92% of Catholics cited quality of preaching as one of the top reasons they were attracted to a parish.
Perrin Atisha, 22, of Bloomfield Hills, Mich., steeled himself for his preaching debut. The three dozen parishioners at Divine Child in Dearborn, Mich., were rating him.
“Just from looking out at the congregation and seeing the people smile back at me, I said ‘Wow,’ ” he said afterward. “I knew God had done something in me.”