3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 25th January 2026
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In today’s Gospel, Jesus calls the twelve Apostles to stay with Him, learn from Him, and then proclaim the Gospel to the whole world. And the Church has been trying to do this for centuries. I don’t know about you, but I have the feeling that we are not very successful in passing on Jesus’s Gospel and the faith to future generations… Why? Well, I think this is a complex problem!
In the early Church, there were three ways of proclaiming the Word of God: Kerygma, Catechumenate (which was a formal, multi-stage process of preparation for baptism and confirmation) and the last one was – Homily.
The Kerygma was a message of salvation addressed to the pagans. An example of this kind of proclamation is Peter’s speech described in the Acts of the Apostles, when he spoke bravely about God’s love for humanity and Jeus’s Redemption… and 3,000 people converted. Today, bishops and priests preach 3,000 times and no one converts because we don’t preach the Kerygma – the message encouraging people to join the Church.
When, after hearing the Kerygma, the desire to join the Church appeared in the hearts of the pagans, the second stage of preaching began: the Catechumenate, which lasted several years. During this stage, pagans learned the truths of faith and liturgy. When the bishop or priest responsible for the community recognized that the candidate, known as the Catechumen, was ready, then baptism and confirmation followed.
Only after baptism and confirmation was a new member of the Church allowed to listen the Homily, and to participate in the whole Mass, and the Word of God through the homily was food for him. This shows that the homily was already addressed to fully formed and matured Christians in order to help them navigate a world that was not Christian but pagan. The homily helped Christians to discern spiritually the reality surrounding them every day.
But over time, as the world became increasingly Christian, there were not so many pagans because most people had already converted. This caused the Kerygma to disappear from the Church.
Furthermore, since the number of pagans declined, and Christians started to promise the Church to pass on their faith to their children through: prayer, reading the Bible and participating in Sunday Eucharist, the Church began to practise the baptism of infants, which Christian parents had started to ask for. This practice also led to the disappearance of the Catechumenate, by which I mean the critical few years of preparation for baptism and confirmation. Thus, the only form of proclaiming the Word of God that remained was the Homily, originally intended for already formed Christians.
When, as a result of various civilisational and cultural changes, the process of secularisation (separation and diminishment of religion) took hold, it turned out that the Homily which had become the only way of preaching the Word of God, was inadequate to reality. Because we have among us a great many non-believers to whom no one preaches the Kerygma… We often invite them to Mass, or even instruct them to come to Mass (as is often the case in our Catholic schools), and these non-believers are confused, they do not know WHAT we do at Mass and WHY we do it, BUT we sincerely hope that if they come to Mass a few times, they will come to know God and convert. We hope that when they listen to some Homily, which is intended for already formed Christians already strong in faith, they will come to know God and also become Christians. BUT – it often doesn’t work!
And this is not the only problem facing the Church today when we talk about proclamation of God’s Word. It turns out that we have among us Christians who were baptised as infants or children but did not undergo the process of learning the truths of the faith and liturgy because it has been replaced by Homilies and school-Catechesis. And catechesis is thus limited to conveying, fragmentary truths of our faith, which are suspended in a kind of vacuum and completely incomprehensible without the wider context of our faith tradition.
All this shows that the proclamation of the Word of God in the world to which we are called has deteriorated considerably, and we are not proclaiming the Word of God in the right way. A Homily intended for Christians who are formed in the faith does not help non-believers or weak believers who are baptised but don’t understand their faith.
In the early Church, the MYSTAGOGOS played a fundamental role in passing on the faith. His role was to preach the Word of God and how God works in our lives, but he taught it not only theoretically. He taught it through the way in which he lived his daily life. He bore witness to God with his life.
Catechumens preparing for baptism, observing the life of the Mystagogos, became convinced that God works in their lives too. After such a preparation with the Mystagogos during the Catechumenate, newly baptised Christians were ready to give up their lives for God and for their faith. Such was the strength and depth of their formation. But when infant baptism began and the Catechumenate disappeared, the role of the Mystagogos in the community disappeared, and parents became substitutes for the Mystagogos, swearing before God during baptism that they would pass on the faith to their children.
Dear friends, this process has been going on for centuries in the Church… The solution to this problem is simple and difficult at the same time. In passing on the faith to future generations, we must return to the Kerygma and the Catechumenate formation, before we invite non-believers or those who are wavering in their faith to listen to Homilies.
Why am I talking about this today?
Firstly, because I have met many wonderful Catholics in my life for whom God is the centre of their lives. Their faith is strong and wonderful, but their children’s faith is not. These wonderful Catholics did everything they could to ensure that their children also believed, but they don’t practise their faith, and their believing parents suffer.
If you are a parent who has done everything possible to ensure that your children believe, and they – now as adults – don’t believe and don’t practise, please do not blame yourself for this! Pray for your adult children that they may one day meet a true Mystagogos, a real witness of faith who will show them through his or her life how to meet God and fall in love with Him. As a mother or father, you have done everything possible, but it is the Church (as a system) that has failed!
But there is a seed of hope. The Neocatechumenal Way, part of the Catholic Church, practices Kerygma, Catechumenate and Homily as the way of formation for those who seek God, and slowly and carefully leads people to a strong faith.
Another community within our Church still practices these three stages of formation is the Domestic Church which comes from the Equipes Notre-Dame appeared first time in France (1938).
Today, as we celebrate the Sunday of the Word of God, when in the Gospel Jesus calls the twelve apostles to teach the faith and proclaim the Gospel of the Kingdom, let us pray for the Church, which is a Mother who gives new life to her children, that her bishops, priests and deacons may be open to the work of the Holy Spirit and obedient to His will. Above all, let us pray for one another, that we may strengthen one another in faith through the testimony of our daily lives. Amen
with prayer – Fr. Tomasz
Tomasz MAMELKA - Timperley 