Team Busted Halo recently traveled across the country to broadcast from the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress, but one of our guests traveled all the way from Australia to speak at the event! Father Dave welcomes Father Richard Leonard, a Jesuit priest and pastor of Our Lady of the Way in North Sydney. He is the author of numerous books including, “Why God? Stories to Inspire Faith” and “Hatch, Match and Dispatch: A Catholic Guide to Sacraments” from Paulist Press.
Father Richard directed the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting for 22 years before its closure in 2020. He discusses his transition from this role to now serving as a parish priest. “I love it…being back in people’s lives at the saddest and happiest moments, and all the things in between,” he says. “Parishes these days are very complex. Every day is so different, but we’re dealing with very unchurched people now.”
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“People are back for baptisms, weddings and funerals,” Father Richard continues. “They’ve often had a very tenuous relationship with the Church, or they’ve left it for very serious reasons, or they’ve been scandalized. So it calls for a lot of pastoral sensitivity, and I’m just finding that very engaging and really life-giving.”
Father Richard explains how baptisms, weddings, and funerals can be moments of evangelization. “If we are welcoming, engaging, inclusive, and do the ritual well…If you engage with people and just tell them they’re welcome, it can touch them very deeply,” he says. “Does that mean they come back to church the following week? No, but it does mean that you’ve broken down one of the barriers for them to think about God in their life and also to make a return to the Church.”
He cites funerals as an example of uniting people back to the Church. “[During a funeral], we take the body really seriously. We bow to the casket, we sprinkle it with the baptismal waters, we put incense over it. We didn’t know this person as a spirit or an idea; We knew them in and through their body,” Father Richard says. “We’re incensing [the body] because our prayer rises before God, but also we honor this person’s body. People are touched by that, because that’s their mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, or sometimes their baby. That just goes so far.”
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Father Dave notes, “I think one of the challenges that we have to overcome as folks that regularly work in the Church is thinking, oh boy, we never see these people, and they just show up when they need us...we have to realize that if we lose them now, we may lose them forever.”
Father Richard adds that churches can be too lenient. “Our parish has just been through this just recently about baptism, because we were a bit of a sacramental service station,” he says. “One of my assistants, an older Jesuit and a very wise and distinguished academic, said one day, ‘I think we’re part of the problem of making these people unchurched, because we don’t ask anything of them to belong.’” Father Dave responds, “It is finding that balance: being welcoming and hospitable, but saying that this is something important.”
