Books on Catholic preaching from theological, biblical, rhetorical, and mechanical angles abound. This book is nothing like those. Using interviews with thirty-nine parish priests, Sigler exposes the deep roots of the Catholic preaching problem in the church's own organizational structures, revealing how seminary education, working conditions, parish norms, and even beliefs about God constrain priests from preaching well. Along the way, three preacher profiles emerge, capturing the array of preaching-related ambivalence, exhaustion, frustration, and anxiety that plague the vast majority of priests. Thankfully, not every priest suffers. Through the example of one preacher profile, Sigler shows how priests who fully embrace their cooperation with the Spirit in preaching steer clear of the preaching-related pressures and tensions that grind so many of their brother preachers down. Exploring these priests' exceptional approaches to their vocational identities, day-to-day parish work, and relationships with the Spirit provides every other priest with surprisingly practical guidance for finding peace in preaching. In the voices of priests that fill these pages, a rare conversation about the cold, hard realities of preaching in the Catholic Church begins. Out of their vast experience, intriguing disagreements, and profound insights, Holy Ghost in the Catholic Machine draws hope for better preaching.

Born in Boston of immigrant parents, Thomas A. Judge, CM (1868-1933) preached up and down the east coast on the Vincentian mission band between 1903 and 1915. Disturbed by the “leakage” of the immigrant poor from the church, he enlisted and organized lay women he met on the missions to work for the “preservation of the faith,” his watchword. His work grew apace with, and in some ways anticipated, the growing body of papal teaching on the lay apostolate. When he became superior of the godforsaken Vincentian Alabama mission in 1915, he invited the lay apostles to come south to help. “This is the layman’s hour,” he wrote in 1919. By then, however, many of his lay apostles had evolved in the direction of vowed communal life. This pioneer of the lay apostle founded two religious communities, one of women and one of men. With the indispensable help of his co-founder, Mother Boniface Keasey, he spent the last decade of his life trying to gain canonical approval for these groups, organizing them, and helping them learn “to train the work-a-day man and woman into an apostle, to cause each to be alert to the interests of the Church, to be the Church.” The roaring twenties saw the work expanded beyond the Alabama missions as far as Puerto Rico, which Judge viewed as a gateway to Latin America. The Great Depression ended this expansive mood and time and put agonizing pressure on Judge, his disciples, and their work. In 1932, the year before Judge’s death, the apostolic delegate, upon being appraised of Judge’s financial straits, described his work as “the only organized movement of its kind in the Church today that so completely meets the wishes of the Holy Father with reference to the Lay Apostolate.”