Intercultural Competency and the Sunday Homily: In the Footsteps of Pope Francis

Jesuit Father Allan Figueroa Deck, S.J., is Professor and Charles S. Casassa, S.J., Chair of Catholic Social Values at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Few topics could be more pertinent to the exciting and challenging moment we are living today as the People of God than that of preaching in the context of our nation’s and the world’s ever-growing diversity. This is so first of all because our US parishes, schools, and Catholic organizations increasingly reflect the same multi and intercultural reality of the global Church with its experience of migration, enhanced communications, and interdependent, global economies. As a result, priestly, diaconal, and all ministerial formation demands cultural competencies as never before. Second, the Church’s insistent focus on the New Evangelization urgently requires an appreciation of diversity and of the essential role it plays in the Church’s very mission. Preachers and teachers are called to seize the moment and reach out to diverse peoples, cultures, and social classes—what our amazing new Bishop of Rome Francis refers to as the outskirts, the “existential, geographic and economic peripheries of humanity.”1 This is truly a moment of kairos that means stressing the missiological dimension of both the ministerial and baptismal priesthood as well as the evangelizing mission of all preaching and teaching in the Church. Intercultural competence, in turn, becomes the essential and inescapable tool for executing the outreach and mission.