The Necessity of Preaching the Word

In compliance with the obligation (to preach), “the apostles went forth and preached everywhere” (Mark xvi, 20), in the face of all kinds of opposition. “They obeyed God rather than men.”(Acts v,29.) St. Paul would not even allow anyone to regard as a merit, his zeal to announce the gospel. To preach was for him, as he tells us, a necessity. He uttered against himself a kind of anathema if ever he neglected so sacred a duty: “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel!” What he most emphatically insisted on, in his Epistles to Timothy and Titus, was the duty of preaching the word of God. He adjures his two disciples, and all pastors of souls, by all that is most holy and awful; he abjures them by the presence of God and of Jesus Christ, by his future coming, by his eternal reign, to preach the word of God, to preach it in and out of season – to use all persuasive means which the most ardent charity inspires: “I charge thee, before God and Jesus Christ, who shall judge the living and the dead, by his coming and his kingdom, preach the word; be instant in it – in and out of season; reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine.” (2 Tim. iv, 1-2).

Hence the Church has never ceased to exhort her pastors to discharge most faithfully their duty of preaching the word of God. In one of her canons, she ordains that if a priest having charge of souls should fail to give them the bread of the word of God, he should be himself deprived of the Eucharistic Bread; and if he continue in his criminal silence, he should be suspended. The preaching of the word of God has, indeed, always been the great object of the solicitude of the Church. The Council of Trent arms the bishops with her thunders, and charges them to inflict her censures upon those mute pastors whom the Holy Ghost has branded as “dumb dogs, not able to bark.”(Isa. lvi, 10). The all-important duty of giving religious instruction was never more binding, and more necessary to be compiled with, than it is in our age. What the Fathers of the Council of Trent say on this duty applies more emphatically to our age and country:

“As the preaching of the divine word, should never be interrupted in the Church of God, so in these our days it becomes necessary to labour, with more than ordinary zeal and piety, to nurture and strengthen the faithful with sound and wholesome doctrine, as with the food of life: for false prophets have gone forth into the world (1 John iv, 1), with various and strange doctrines (Heb. xiii, 9), to corrupt the minds of the faithful, of whom the Lord has said: I sent them not, and they ran; I spoke not to them, yet they prophesied.(Jer.xxiii, 21)

(An excerpt from “The Church and Her Enemies” by Michael Muller)