Deacon Greg pointed me to this article in the Irish Times where a group of journalists headed to several different churches in the Dublin area and wrote their thoughts on the weekly homily.
To be fair, the standards were rough. The journalists pointed to a good homily being about 8 minutes (which I think is a bit short to get into anything of depth). With the sexual abuse scandal there also seemed to be looking for a link to the prodigal son gospel to the scandal.
All in all, the journalists were pretty fair. I enjoyed this piece from an admitted agnostic:
Was I enlightened? Much as I admired Fr Clarke’s performance, this agnostic is not convinced personal forgiveness is ever simple, nor that there’s much more to the prodigal son than a patch to cover a moral loophole: if it’s so easy to be absolved, what’s the point of being good? That much, though, accompanied by the unravelling history of clerical scandals, prompted further consideration about how the Church and its teachings might ever be reconciled with society. Can you ever have meaningful forgiveness unless it is accompanied by justice?
Tough crowd–and rightly so. Perhaps we’ll do something similar in a host of cities in the United States over time.