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If you haven’t heard of Timothy Radcliffe, O.P., since Pope Francis appointed him and Maria Ignazia Angelini, O.S.B., to lead the synod delegates on retreat outside Rome before the Synod on Synodality got underway at the Vatican last October, you likely have by now. His blend of sharp intellect, wry wit and deep compassion embodies the best of our Catholic tradition, and inspires hope for a church eager to better listen and adapt in service to God and the needs of God’s people.
If you still haven’t heard of him, the second session of the synod starts this week at the Vatican, providing a timely opportunity to learn more about this English Dominican who served as Master of the Order of Preachers from 1992 to 2001, and is a sought-after preacher and acclaimed spiritual author.
This summer, I spoke with the respected friar for “Preach,” the America Media podcast unpacking the craft of the church’s finest preachers. We discussed his approach to preparing for retreats, including the one he gave—and has just given again—to the synod delegates.
What follows is a transcript of our insightful conversation—lightly edited for clarity and style—but feel free to listen to the full interview by clicking the player above or searching for “Preach” on your favorite podcast app. - Ricardo da Silva, S.J.
Ricardo da Silva, S.J.: In one of your retreat talks that you gave in preparation for the synod last year, you spoke about how preaching the gospel is never just about communicating information, but rather that it’s an act of friendship or it’s nothing. I wonder what you mean by that. How can our preaching be this friendship with the congregation before us?
Timothy Radcliffe: The first thing I do when I prepare, especially to preach to people I’ve never met, is I try to imagine them. I look at websites to try and see their faces. I think it’s totally important when you preach that you talk to someone, to a group of people, and you ask, “What are the questions on their mind?”
I’ll give you two examples. Once I prepared a retreat for three dioceses in Malaysia and I prepared it sitting in Oxford, looking out of my window onto our beautiful university city. And when I arrived, I met all these wonderful old hardened missionaries coming down from the mountains and I thought, “I’ve got it wrong.” And I had to really rethink the whole retreat because I had to imagine, again, the people to whom I was preaching.
I gave a retreat earlier this year in the École Biblique in Jerusalem. I know them, but what I had to do this time is say, “What’s it like to live 40 minutes from Gaza? What are you going through?” A second thing I think about when you prepare to preach is you need a lot of silence. I spent a lot of time just being silent, praying for ideas, waiting for what it is I have to say to these people on this day, which is why I don’t think you can ever really repeat a sermon—I have to confess I have done that—but I think really you’ll wait for the gift of the word for them today in this unique moment.
I heard another of your talks—I’ve listened to so many of your talks on YouTube. One of the things you said in one of them is that the gift of the preacher should be to underwhelm and that we must diminish so that Christ can increase in us. And it seems that this advice that you give about knowing your audience and trying to imagine them is really designed to do that. It’s designed to give you less prominence and, of course, the presence of God in them much more prominence.
Absolutely. I love the fact that our founder, Dominic, was always called Brother Dominic. We call him our father Dominic, but only to honor the person who never claimed the title of “Father.” He was a brother. And I think all our preaching should be fraternal. When Pedro de Córdoba went to preach in Hispaniola at the beginning of the arrival of the order in the Americas, he was asked to preach to the Indigenous people and they erected an enormous high pulpit from which he was supposed to climb up and talk to them.
But he said, “No, I want to be on the same level, face to face, because you only preach as one brother to your brothers and sisters.” And I think that’s the essence of preaching. It’s an act of fraternal friendship. And of course you want to get out of the way. That doesn’t mean to say that you are impersonal. Dominic was obviously a very human person. He obviously delighted in the company of women. I think he much preferred to be with his sisters than his brothers. He enjoyed good wine. Most of Dominic’s miracles involved multiplying wine. So I think he was immensely human, but his humanity, in a way, you might say, was transparent to the Lord rather than getting in the way, not drawing attention to himself.
And this idea of friendship is so important when we go on retreat, right? We don’t want to feel that the person leading the retreat or accompanying us on the retreat is pontificating, but that they’re actually helping us to enter into this friendship with the Lord. Can you talk us through your process for preparing for a retreat? Where do you go in terms of resources, finding themes, scripture passages?
Well, I think I would say it’s always the most agonizing time because often as the time to give the retreat gets nearer and I feel no clarity at all of what I should talk about, I have to confess, moments of panic overcome me.
This is a great relief, I’m going to say, because I have this all the time. So thank you for echoing what I feel.
And I think you pray that you may discover what it is you have to say, what is the theme? I talk to my brothers often. I ask for their advice. I talk to my sisters. I wrote a little book called Questioning God (which I hope everybody’s going to buy). And I wrote it with a young Polish Dominican called Lukasz Popko, half my age. We always talk about our preaching. What are we going to preach? What about? We zoom every week. And I keep a pen ready to note things down. All preaching is you receive a gift and you pass on the gift. So you must be alert from wherever the gift is going to come from. It might come from a friend—it might come from a Jesuit, believe it or not!
But if you trust something will be given, just be alert and don’t prepare at the last moment. You can’t tell God when he is going to give you something to say.
So you say, “Don’t prepare at the last minute,” how far in advance of your preaching for a retreat would you try to prepare? And then maybe, if I can ask you, your regular Sunday homily, how long before that are you preparing? Because of course that’s a different kind of preparation and the timeline is very different.
I think preparing a retreat is like cooking a meal with several courses and you have your stove and you begin to identify the different pots that will be boiling away and you get things going. So I sketch things out, I go back, I go back, I go back.… I have to confess, I’m a bit like a cow, ruminating. Cows, I believe, have lots of stomachs, and they bring it back, chew it over, swallow it again and burp occasionally. So I would often start a good few weeks ahead beginning to note down, putting the pot on the boil, adding stuff, taking stuff away, savoring it until I begin to think that might just be tasty.
For a Sunday homily, I would start at least the Monday before. I find the texts and I just put them up there and I abide by them. I wait with them, and I read them and go back to them—read them in Greek, of course; my Hebrew is shamefully bad, I’m ashamed to say—but you dwell with them. In a way, that’s like friendship, isn’t it? A lot of your time with your friends, you are just with them. You attend to them, you don’t have to say anything special. I’m preaching this coming Sunday, so Monday morning, straight away, I looked at [the readings], noted down maybe one word and let it grow. See how it develops. Let it surprise you.
We’ve been doing this podcast now for over a year and everybody has a different sense of what it takes to prepare. And of course that’s a very individual and unique gift that the Holy Spirit gives to each of us. And we’ve also heard quite a bit from Jesuit preachers, you are a Dominican. I wonder if you might share something about what is the particular mark of Dominican preaching? What is the charism of the Dominican preacher?
I would say two things. First of all, I’ve already mentioned that you are a brother. In fact, even the title “Father” does not exist in the order. It’s not a title we ever use! You’re a brother talking to your brothers and sisters.
The second thing I would say is that we do love doctrine and people are afraid of doctrine. People think that doctrine is doctrinaire, it’s not about thinking for yourself. And I would say this is utterly wrong. Doctrine is the great teachings of Christ, which we will never finally grasp, which are always beyond us. And so when we talk about sharing the doctrines, we’re inviting people on an endless journey of exploration, a liberating journey. Every doctrine of the church tells us something about what it means to be loved by God in Christ.
I lived through those very troubled sixties, and everybody was leaving the order, and the Jesuits too. It was a time of chaos. And I think one of the reasons that some of us hang on was because we were taught these great and beautiful teachings; for example, about the Trinity, about how the doctrine of the Trinity is one of the most liberating, down to earth, practical doctrines you can imagine. And I think these great teachings sustain us when we don’t feel terribly on fire, when we feel everything is rather boring because we touch something profound. And I think that’s why doctrinal preaching is fundamental to Dominican preaching.
But also when it’s communicated well, doctrine can be very soothing to the ear. One of the things we do at America is this podcast, “Hark! The Stories Behind Our Favorite Christmas Carols.” And over the years producing it, I’ve realized how much doctrine was embedded into song or into our hymns and just in simple lyric. You can hear a song and you can feel, “Wow, I’ve learned something profound here. And nobody was bashing doctrine over my head, but actually it was being poured into my soul.” I wonder how we can do that in our preaching?
I couldn’t agree with you more. And it’s interesting that Aquinas, who, of course, we all love as Dominicans, was above all, one might say, a poet. A lot of the hymns that we sing come from Aquinas. And ever since I was 12 years old, I’ve never gone to bed without reading a novel. First of all, novels set your imagination on fire. Novels stretch, open your being. Novels mean that you can enter another life, imagine another way of being human.
So I think preachers should love poetry, novels and films. That stretches open your being so that when you preach to people, you open yourselves to who they are. That’s why I love to watch films with young people, because I want to know: What are the questions they have? What makes them laugh? What makes them astonished? The disciples say on the way to Emmaus, “Did not our hearts burn within us?” So how do we set people’s hearts on fire? And I think stories and poetry are essential to this. Now, of course, as is pretty obvious, I’m English and we English believe that you can’t say anything really serious without a joke. Religion is far too important to be serious about it. You have to touch people’s humor. Then they take off.
And you do this often in the middle of your preaching, you’ll just throw something in. You certainly did this during the synod retreat. It’s very short, but those brief interjections help us to reset and hear what’s coming next.
It’s so easy to go to sleep during homilies, and I think I have to say ecclesiastical documents have an enormous capacity to bore. I usually go to sleep in my first reading of any church document, and I’m only too aware when I talk to any audience that if I don’t keep contact with them and share a joke or a tear or something every two or three minutes they’ll go to sleep. Well, they often do anyway!
Talking about ecclesiastical documents, I think it’s opportune in this conversation to mention that Pope Francis, this summer in fact, issued this letter on the role of literature in formation; read poetry, watch films, read novels. He writes, “Time spent reading may well open up new interior spaces that help us avoid becoming trapped by a few obsessive thoughts that can stand in the way of our personal growth.”
Wonderful. I couldn’t agree more because I think one of the important things for any preacher is you have to forget yourself. And every good novel carries you out of yourself. You become somebody else. I was reading a Mozambique poet and novelist called Couto, and he said, “Every time you are touched by somebody in a story, you’ve discovered a part of yourself which has never come to light until then.” So I think in that way it does indeed bring you to maturity. It stretches open your being. Aquinas—who I’m required to mention periodically— said, “Your soul is in some sense everything. It belongs to our humanity that we can open ourselves to anything.” The delight when I was sent to France as a student way back in the early seventies, and I had to become a little bit French. I used to enjoy in those days smoking my Gauloises and drinking a cup of coffee and reading Le Monde, being a little bit French. And that’s marvelous because then a little bit of the boring old English Timothy is left behind, forgotten.
I certainly know how valuable it is to be open to other experiences, and my formation has taken me all over the world—from the U.K., where I certainly learned a little more reserve, to Brazil, where I needed to get a bit more into the partying, Samba-dancing me. And literature allows us to enter into those worlds without necessarily being able to go physically on those experiences.
Maybe just to close this section of our conversation, we’ve spoken a lot about relatable storytelling, we’ve spoken a lot about theology and doctrine, how can we marry these things in our preaching well?
It’s a very difficult balance because you don’t want your homily just to be one story after another. What I do when I begin to make my notes is they’re always far too long, but I let them expand like a great bush and then I vigorously cut them down. What can I leave out? What can I omit? What is in excess? What’s drawing too much attention to me? And slowly, slowly, slowly, you slim it. I don’t know whether you know the sculptor Modigliani? He longed to compose statues of robust people, strong solid people, but he always thought, “Well, I can take a little bit off there and I can take a little bit off there.” He always ended up with these really, really slim portraits. And I think that’s what we should do as preachers: Yes, let our imagination range and then cut back, cut back, omit, shave.
We started talking about these retreats that you gave to the Synod on Synodality together with Mother Maria Ignazia Angelini as a preamble to the synod last year. So Pope Francis invited all the delegates to arrive in Rome a few days earlier for a retreat to begin this time in friendship together. And you invited participants to bring their hopes and their fears. Perhaps the thing that struck me most in your opening talk was the way that you really allowed yourself to enter into the lives of so many different people and to be disclosive about the change in the paradigm of your own life; from being raised in a very traditional Catholic family to being exposed to a perhaps much more open, liberal situation when you entered the Dominican order. Can you talk about that part of it? How did you think to start this retreat?
I talked a lot with Maria Ignazia, and I think we both realized from the beginning that we had to be partners, brother and sister. And so the synodality began in our own conversations; talking, floating ideas, listening to each other. Of course, central to the synod is conversation, and it’s crucial to remember that the Bible, the sacred scriptures are above all, God’s conversation with us. And so you can only enter into the text by letting it address you and then replying to it. You converse with God. Pope Benedict XVI said, “Revelation so happens that we are addressed by God so as to become his friends.” So when you are addressed by a text, you have to ask, “What do I not understand?” The great temptation of preachers is to light upon what they want to say.
Whereas when you look at a text, the interesting thing is when it says something you don’t want to say; something that startles you, something that puzzles you, something that makes you uncomfortable. And when it engages you there, then may you begin to have something to say out of your puzzlement. And I think that it’s crucial in all preaching, but perhaps most especially in synodal preaching, that you come across not as somebody who knows it all, but as a searcher, a doubter, a questioner. Pope Francis said recently, “Where there are no questions, our faith is dead. If there are no questions, God’s not there.” So what we want in the synod is people to share their real questions, not immediately to try to convince other people that they’re right, but to say, “This is what I struggle with, this is what I don’t understand. Will you help me?”
I also think that what’s crucial is to imagine how it is possible that somebody holds this position so different from my own. And I mentioned the example of our general chapter in Krakow where some of the Dominicans insisted that preaching is essentially dialogical, whereas other Dominicans insisted it was essentially about proclamation.
And we had a good old row about this—very healthy indeed—and then we realized how different people’s experiences were because the brethren who insisted on dialog mainly came from Asia, as you cannot be a Christian in Asia without dialog. The ones who opposed, the ones who insisted on proclamation, mainly came from Central and Eastern Europe where they’d suffered persecution for their views. And when you emerge from prison after five years, your immediate instinct is not to want to have a chat with the person who put you in prison.
It’s true. I came from a pretty traditional family. I joined the order and I learned quite different views and I give thanks to God that I had both because both are part of who I am.
That Catholic both, and.
Exactly.
This introduces a particular tension that some pedagogues have mentioned to me over time about preaching. Fundamentally, preaching is a proclamation. It’s somebody standing in front of you talking at you; and there isn’t much of an opportunity for that dialogue, at least not in an immediate feedback sense. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that. How can our preaching be more dialogical even if it isn’t a dialogue in the moment?
I think I would have to make a distinction between when you preach to people you’ve never met before, and when you preach to people regularly, people whom you know. My first job as a priest was to be a university chaplain in London. I was so excited. I had sat at the feet of marvelous preachers, I was going to stun them. They would love my preaching. And they didn’t, and it was my first great crisis, I think, as a Dominican. “I’m not getting this right,” and I even thought, “Maybe I should resign. I’m no good at it.” But I had a last go. I invited the elder students whose judgment I really valued, I said, “Let’s go to the pub.” You know, the Dominican order was founded in the pub. So we went to a pub and I said, “What am I doing wrong? It’s obvious I’m not doing as well as I hoped.”
I can’t remember what they said, but it utterly transformed my relationship with them. I listened to them first. If you live in a community, if you live in a parish, if you live in a chaplaincy, it all begins with listening to them and your homily is just part of the conversation. You’ll hear back from them. And if you live in Oxford and probably New York it’s the same, you’ll get some pretty straightforward replies and that’s wonderful.
It’s more difficult, of course, if you give a retreat. I think what you have to do is be acutely aware of their faces. People don’t realize that we watch the faces of the congregation eagerly. Are they lit up? Are they bored? There was a Muslim preacher in the 13th century who said, “I talk all day and when their eyes light up, I write it down.” And I think that’s what we should do. You are looking anxiously, hopefully, because in the end, preaching is not what you do alone. Preaching is the encounter of the preacher and the congregation and you each set each other on fire. There was a man who used to sit in the front row and every time I preached he would pick up the parish bulletin and read it, and I felt slaughtered. It was almost impossible to say anything. I was so pleased when I discovered he did it for everybody else as well.
I can’t stress enough how important that is. There are some Masses that I am preaching and presiding at where the faces of the congregation are blank. I can barely hear the responses and I can certainly detect very little body language. And it is so difficult for me to feel like I’m communicating and also just to get feedback about what it is. Should I stop? Should I get faster? Should I get more excited? Should I slow down? And so I just want to say this to all our listeners out there, especially those who are in the congregation listening, please react. Tell us what you’re thinking because it really is the way that we know on the fly how we’re doing and how the spirit is communicating in the room.
There’s an American Dominican preacher of whom I am very fond called Don Goergen. Dear Don had a pet rabbit and sometimes he would bring the rabbit into the pulpit, and that certainly used to gain people’s attention. I’m afraid I haven’t got a rabbit. Maybe I should acquire one....
Back to the synodal idea of preaching. How do you think that synodality—as Pope Francis envisions, as it has been envisioned in the history of the church—can really contribute to transformation in our parishes, our personal conversion, and how can we, as preachers, truly become more synodal in our preaching?
I think what is really, really difficult to grasp is this: As I see it, our conversations are not primarily about making decisions. They’re in the first and most fundamental sense about being different, changing how we are.
We began by talking about friendship. Any profound friendship makes you a different person. And so what I hope is that we will come back from these synods…. people in parishes when they engage in “conversations in the spirit,” as it’s called, will actually be transformed in how they are, who they are. So much of the life of the church is people in combat trying to beat the other side. This is how our politics work. Our politics, I think I can say this both for America and for England, a lot of it is infantile. People accusing each other, gaining little points. Whereas the church should represent a different, deeper way of being a human being who delights to learn from the other person, who delights to be wrong.
I think the great pleasure is when you discover that all your life you’ve been wrong about something. How liberating. So let us hope that in our parishes, in our religious communities, we can learn the love of learning. A disciple is literally somebody who is a student, who studies, who goes on thinking. I often look back with love, really, to one of my great teachers who is called the grandfather of the Vatican Council. And every night, even when he was 80 (and now I no longer think that’s quite so old) he would go out every evening, he would go to listen to academics, trade union leaders, artists, all sorts of people. And we’d meet in the refectory for a beer, 10 o’clock at night and he would say, “What did you learn today? This is what I learned.” And once you stop learning, it’s time to stop preaching!
You mentioned infantile, and in one of your synod talks, you said, “We prepare for the kingdom by becoming playful, childlike, but not childish.” Sometimes we in the church are afflicted by dull, joyless, seriousness. No wonder people are bored. What can a child teach us as preachers? How can we play a little more?
The first thing we can do is to notice how often Jesus does it. I think that so many New Testament commentaries are in fact weighed down by hideous seriousness, and so many of the stories in the Gospel are playful. I had to preach a couple of days ago on the Canaanite woman who wants to have her daughter healed, and Jesus talks about dogs, don’t give the food of the children to dogs. Well, actually, we know that in her culture, they love dogs. In fact, the Syrophoenicians had enormous cemeteries for pet dogs.
So what we see is not Jesus being terribly rude, but him being playful. And once you open yourself, you find the gospels are filled with playfulness. I think playfulness is like jazz. Jazz can be a bit impromptu. You don’t know quite where it’s leading. You pick up an idea, you play with it, you throw it to the other person and you see what happens. Children are brilliant at this. Childishness means that you make yourself the center of attention. It’s narcissistic. Being childish, in the good way, in the playful way, means that you let yourself be spontaneous. You don’t have to think of everything beforehand. You say, “Let’s see where this will take us.” And it’ll be somewhere unexpected.
