The Challenge of Catholic Homiletics & Leadership Amid Polarization: Empowering Parish, School, and Apostolic Leaders to Be Both Prophetic and Reconciling

Sep 18, 2026

I was privileged yesterday to participate in a virtual Conference Co-sponsored by Loyola University Chicago, Clough School of Theology & Ministry at Boston College, Jesuits West, The Josephite Pastoral Center, Candler School of Theology at Emory, and others on Dignity, & Elections: A Virtual Catholic Theological Conference. The text of my topic, The Challenge of Catholic Homiletics & Leadership Amid Polarization: Empowering Parish, School, and Apostolic Leaders to Be Both Prophetic and Reconciling, follows:

Most people of good will — Catholic and otherwise, progressive and traditionalist, cleric and lay — accept, I think without much argument anymore, that the present moment in our country brings challenges that are genuinely unprecedented. I do not say that lightly, and I do not say it as a partisan claim. I say it as a pastoral observation, offered after fifty-two years of ordained ministry, most of it spent listening to people in confessionals, in hospital rooms, and at kitchen tables tell me what troubles them. And, I say that as a citizen of this beloved country.

For most of those fifty-two years, the default counsel given to preachers was simple and, I think, largely correct: be unequivocally nonpartisan in the pulpit. Do not let the sanctuary become a platform for one party or one candidate. That counsel remains sound. But I want to suggest to you this evening that soundness is not the same as sufficiency. The old rule, applied without nuance to this present moment, can become an alibi — a way of retreating into silence precisely when silence itself becomes a kind of speech, and not always an honest one.

Consider: when we see political leaders rhetorically assaulting the universal pastor of the Church — the Successor of Peter himself — we know, as the saying goes, that we are not in Kansas anymore. Consider, too, the scapegoating and demonization of immigrants in our public discourse — a level of dehumanizing rhetoric aimed at the stranger among us that I do not recall in fifty-two years of ministry, and that stands in direct contradiction to a Gospel which repeatedly commands us to welcome the stranger and see in him the face of Christ. This is not the polarization of a normal election cycle, where reasonable Catholics disagree about prudential judgments regarding taxation or foreign policy. This is something else. And something else requires something more than the reflexive nonpartisanship of a calmer age.

So what does this moment call for? What does it demand of us?

I find an answer, as I often do, in Saint Paul. Paul was not himself an episkopos — he was an apostle, a father in faith to the young churches he had planted. But writing to Timothy, the presbyter he had entrusted with the fragile, frightened community at Ephesus, Paul reminds him that God has given him not a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power and love and self-control — my own rough shorthand for those three gifts is that we are called to be strong, loving, and wise. Not two out of three. All three, held together, none sacrificed for the sake of the others. Strength without love curdles into cruelty. Love without wisdom collapses into sentimentality. Wisdom without strength becomes a well-reasoned excuse for cowardice.

And here is where I want to name something honestly: fear. Fear is the great temptation of religious leaders in a polarized moment, and it rarely announces itself as fear. It disguises itself as prudence, as pastoral sensitivity, as not wanting to “get political.” But too often what it actually produces is a preaching that tells people what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear. That is not shepherding. That is chaplaincy to our own congregation’s comfort.

Our preaching — and I would say the same of every form of leadership exercised in Christ’s name, in a parish office, a Catholic school classroom, a chancery, or a polling-place volunteer station — our preaching is meant to bear witness to the truth. Not to parrot dangerous propaganda, from whatever direction it comes. To do that without becoming partisan — except, if I may put it this way, partisan for the Good News itself — demands both courage and care. Courage, because truth-telling in a divided room costs something. Care, because truth without charity is just another weapon in a war we are not meant to be fighting.

I have found tremendous inspiration and, frankly, courage, in the witness of two contemporary saints — one canonized, one popularly and increasingly acclaimed as one: Saint Óscar Romero and the German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Both men confronted political realities that had come to compromise the very Gospel they had given their lives to proclaim. Both paid for that confrontation with martyrdom. Neither of them set out to be partisan figures. Both discovered that fidelity to the Gospel, taken seriously in their moment, looked to their enemies exactly like partisanship — and they bore that misreading rather than compromise the truth.

Bonhoeffer left us a phrase I return to often: cheap grace. Cheap grace, he said, is grace without discipleship, forgiveness without repentance, the Church’s absolution preached as a general truth without ever confronting anyone with their sin. I ask you, and I ask myself first of all: is our preaching in this moment about dispensing the cheap grace of not rocking the proverbial boat? Or are we willing to resurrect in our own preaching something of the costly grace that Bonhoeffer died defending — the kind of preaching that will, I can assure you from long experience, guarantee a few letters to the chancery? Just ask Bishop Freyer from my diocese, participating in this conference. I suspect he has read a fair number of them with my name attached.

I say all of this not only to my brother priests and deacons who stand in pulpits, but — and this matters greatly to me — to every lay leader in this conference: to the catechist, the Catholic school principal, the parish council chair, the young adult minister, the poll worker who wears her faith quietly into a polling place on a Tuesday in November. The invitation to be both prophetic and reconciling belongs to the whole Body of Christ, not to the ordained alone. You do not need a Roman collar to be strong, loving, and wise. You need only the willingness to tell the truth in love, and to keep loving the people to whom you tell it.

So let me close, not with a warning, but with an invitation. The polarization of this moment is real, and it will not be resolved by our silence, nor by our shouting. It will be met, if it is met at all, by leaders — ordained and lay alike — who have the strength to speak, the love to stay in relationship with those who disagree, and the wisdom to know the difference between partisanship and prophecy. That is a demanding vocation. It is also, I am convinced, exactly the vocation the Church needs from each of us right now. I have given the better part of my life to this Church, in seasons far calmer than this one, and I have never loved her more, nor believed more firmly that she still has the words this broken and beautiful country needs to hear.

May God give you, as he gave those first presbyters, not a spirit of cowardice, but of power and love and self-control. Go, and preach — and lead — accordingly.

Thank you.

Monsignor Arthur Holquin, S.T.L.