When Meg Cady, a 32-year-old math teacher at St. Ignatius College Prep in Chicago, prayed the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises with a group of teachers from her school, one thing impressed her most: a pregnant colleague’s reflections on Mary’s difficult third-trimester journey to Bethlehem. “That was the first time I had considered the nativity story as a human story and not a fable like the other stories you hear as a kid,” Cady says.
In a Christmas homily for Catholic Women Preach, Ann Garrido, associate professor of homiletics at Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis, touches on the same theme: Mary’s experience of childbirth. In her reflection, Garrido says that although the gospels of Luke and Matthew only give one line about Jesus’ physical birth, women who have nurtured life in their wombs and birthed children “fill in the blank spaces between those sparse words with all that goes unspoken.” This includes, she says, “mornings of nausea. Swollen breasts hard and heavy as rocks. Clothes that fray at the seams. The wonder of that first movement beneath one’s heart.”
Mary’s experience, Garrido says in her reflection, teaches us something important about Christ: “That there is nothing—nothing—in our human existence that [God] does not enter into, including the experience of life in the womb and the travail of birth.”
Yet this perspective on the incarnation is rarely heard from the pulpit on Christmas.
A woman’s perspective
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard a homily, especially around Christmas, that incorporated a woman’s perspective specifically on birth, on pregnancy, on the anticipation of being a mother,” says Sara Conneely, associate director of the Well Spirituality Center. “I’ve definitely had priests comment on it, but in a very superficial way. I can’t say I’ve heard one that included actual stories from actual women.”
Women’s perspectives can illuminate scripture in a distinct way. And pregnancy and childbirth experiences are certainly not the only way women can contribute to preaching.
Garrido, who holds a Doctor of Ministry degree (DMin) in preaching, is one of several women who have used their advanced training to teach or coach clergy. Some of these women discerned a call to preach, even as they wondered what options would be open to them in a church where only male clergy are allowed to preach during Mass.
Suzanne Nawrocki, who earned her DMin in preaching from Aquinas Institute, recalls someone asking her, “How do you envision this going?”
“Not well,” she remembers saying. “I know there is going to be this glass ceiling, and I might never work at all, but I just feel so called to do it.”
Current canon law states that the homily during Mass is “reserved to a priest or deacon.” There is also a line that states, “Lay persons can be permitted to preach in a church or oratory, if necessity requires it in certain circumstances or it seems advantageous in particular cases.”
But according to Dominican Father Gregory Heille, professor emeritus of preaching and evangelization and the recently retired director of the DMin in preaching program at Aquinas Institute, the interpretation of this line has narrowed in the years since it was written in 1983, resulting in fewer opportunities for laypeople to preach during Mass.
Where women can preach
There are still some spaces where women can preach: retreats, Catholic school prayer services, prison ministry, and online platforms such as Catholic Women Preach, to name a few. In recent years, several programs have also begun to train laypeople, including the PROCLAIM program, a partnership between Discerning Deacons and St. Mary’s College that forms Catholic women in preaching; the Courage to Preach Post-Master’s Certificate at Boston College, which trains participants to preach on contemporary issues; and the New Frontiers in Preaching Academy at Aquinas Institute, which from 2022 through 2025 formed deacons and pastoral leaders to preach in Hispanic and Black Catholic communities. Women lead most of these programs.
Susan McGurgan, who earned her DMin in preaching from Seabury-Western Theological Seminary (now Bexley-Seabury in Chicago), leads the Preach All Ways Initiative at Marian University in Indianapolis. This program includes training youth and young adults to preach their faith testimony, as well as an online certificate in lay preaching, teaching laypeople to preach in non-eucharistic spaces.
“We tend to think that the only opportunities to preach are at the Eucharist,” says McGurgan, “but if we continue to act as if these are the only opportunities for preaching, most people will not hear the preached Word, because they are not in church.”
Still, for many women who feel called to preach, the Eucharist does hold a special significance. As a part of a March 2024 symposium, Garrido and Heille were among 27 scholars and preachers who signed a proposal to the Synod on Synodality for an amendment to Canon 767, allowing “properly prepared laity” to preach the homily through an instituted ministry of lay preacher (much like the current ministries of lector or catechist).
“I think that if you only hear a clerical voice, then you are not hearing the full range of human experience preached, and same thing if you only hear a male voice,” says Deborah Wilhelm, an adjunct professor of preaching and evangelization at Aquinas Institute, who also signed the proposal. “I do think a woman preaching has a perspective to bring that we don’t ever get.”
Women teaching preaching
Wilhelm discovered her love of preaching when she attended her husband’s diaconate formation classes, which she later returned to teach for the Diocese of Monterey, California. She also preached at the Eucharist in her home parish there and cowrote a book with the former bishop of that diocese, Bishop Sylvester Ryan, titled Preaching Matters: A Praxis for Preachers (Paul Bechtold Library Publications).
When she later moved to the Diocese of Portland, Oregon, though, she was no longer allowed to preach at the Eucharist. “If the Spirit calls someone to preach and all the doors close, that is painful,” she says. “The Holy Spirit does not stop calling you just because someone says you can’t do something.”
Now, Wilhelm teaches preaching at Aquinas Institute, which she says is the next best thing to preaching from the pulpit. “I’m a preacher and I want to preach—when I can’t, my next-best use of that charism is to influence those who can,” she says. “That is part of the draw of teaching preaching. How can I help form those who do have an ecclesial call to preach?”
Unfortunately, opportunities for women to teach preaching full-time, especially in seminaries, have also declined in recent years.
Deb Organ—the first layperson to graduate from Aquinas Institute’s DMin in preaching program—went on to become an assistant professor of homiletics at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity in St. Paul from 2001 to 2008. She was in charge of the homiletics curriculum for the first few years, until the school hired a priest (who did not have a doctorate) to be in charge. Organ says she and the priest actually did best when they taught together, because then their students “would hear from two very different perspectives.”
But in the years that followed, she continued to see a trend: Catholic seminaries were becoming less hospitable to women, she says. Once, in the middle of a conference, her rector, with no explanation to her, offered her job to one of her colleagues in homiletics—a priest.
Eventually, after she noticed this trend, she left the seminary voluntarily; she also felt a call to return to community pastoral work. She founded Raíces Sagradas Community Mental Health in Minneapolis, a nonprofit that offers mental health services at no cost to Latino/a immigrants without health insurance.
“At this point, it seems like the thinking in seminaries is we have to have priests teaching priests,” Organ says. “That is really flawed logic—we are not preparing them to live in seminary. We are preparing them to live with and among the people of God, and it would make sense to have laypeople with the day-to-day concerns of laypeople teaching them.”
Closing the ranks
Today, there are no Catholic women currently teaching homiletics full-time in diocesan seminaries. Father Benjamin Roberts, the president of the Catholic Association of Teachers of Homiletics, notes that this is a symptom of a larger trend: an overall decline in seminaries’ full-time homiletics positions. Roberts also says preaching is an “integrative discipline,” and the women who taught him in other areas of theology in the seminary influenced his preaching.
Some women are frustrated that, while the priests selected to teach homiletics may be good preachers themselves, they often have no training in how to teach preaching. According to a 2014 survey of women in homiletic leadership by Karla Bellinger, founding executive director of the Institute for Homiletics, “those women who have recently applied to available Catholic seminary positions have been rejected because they are not male clergy, even though their qualifications may be markedly higher than those who are ultimately selected for the position.”
At this moment in the church, clergy and laypeople are being asked to implement the fruit of the Synod on Synodality, which calls for the “lay faithful, both men and women” to be “given greater opportunities for participation, also exploring new forms of service and ministry in response to the pastoral needs of our time in a spirit of collaboration and differentiated co-responsibility.” The document also calls for “a significant presence of women” in the formation of ordained ministers.
As the church discerns what this could look like, two programs already provide examples of how women can be integrated into homiletics as part of clergy formation.
A pioneering program
Aquinas Institute of Theology offers the only Catholic DMin in preaching in the world—and a woman cofounded it.
In 1973, Dominican Sister Joan Delaplane was among the first women to study in a seminary. The now-93-year-old sister, whose life is steeped in scripture, recalls getting the call from the motherhouse asking her to go to seminary in anticipation of possible changes due to the Second Vatican Council. “Like Sarah, I burst out laughing,” she says.
Delaplane recalls a sister on her order’s General Council told her, “We are asking you to take a faith leap.” They wanted her to be academically prepared if the church decided to open ordination to women.
Delaplane earned her master of divinity degree at SS. Cyril & Methodius Seminary in Orchard Lake, Michigan. Then, in 1977, Aquinas Institute of Theology hired her as a homiletics professor and the school’s first woman faculty member. She later became the first woman and first Catholic president of the Academy of Homiletics, an ecumenical group of homiletics teachers that gathers once a year.
Delaplane and Dominican Father Ed Ruane, who founded the DMin preaching program at Aquinas in 1993, created a program that brought together Catholics and non-Catholics, men and women, lay and ordained, for in-depth preaching studies. The goal was to train more teachers of preaching, a response to the 1982 U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops document Fulfilled in Your Hearing. The bishops’ document called for renewed preaching in the church and specifically for a “doctoral program in homiletics to prepare teachers of preaching.”
In the years since the program’s founding, 42 women have earned a DMin in preaching there: 10 religious sisters, 17 laywomen, and 15 Protestant ministers. A few of them, including Garrido and Wilhelm, went on to become faculty members. Garrido also directed the DMin program for three years.
Garrido believes one of the most important things she brings to her teaching is the “experience of a listener.” She says, “Many, many priests, once they are ordained, very rarely actually listen to other people preach on Sundays, because often they’re on every week. As a layperson, I hear a whole lot of preaching and I have a good sense about what is landing and what is not within a congregation.”
Heille, who has taught alongside Delaplane and Wilhelm, says, “When you have a man and woman teaching together, you are modeling something to the students about what the church can look like. You are modeling shared ministry in the church.”
An integrative approach
After graduating with her DMin in preaching from Aquinas Institute, Karla Bellinger went on to serve for five years as the associate director of the John S. Marten Program in Homiletics and Liturgics at Notre Dame, where many women are visiting homiletics professors. There, Bellinger worked with Congregation of Holy Cross Father Michael Connors to develop the Preaching for Encounter program, which is funded by a Lilly Grant.
When the grant money ran out, she continued to build on the original program, serving as the founding executive director of the Institute for Homiletics, which is sponsored by the Catholic Foundation and the University of Dallas. Through this program, priests, deacons, and bishops can participate in a two-year cohort where they meet monthly for peer support. They are also assigned a coach to give them feedback on their preaching.
Nawrocki and Cindy Bernardin, both graduates of Aquinas Institute’s DMin program, now serve as coaches for clergy, meeting monthly with priests or deacons to work on their homilies. As coaches, Nawrocki and Bernardin integrate their pastoral experience, homiletic training, and personal lives.
“I bring to the table that I am a wife and a mother and a grandmother, and I live in a secular world,” says Nawrocki, a mother of three boys who also previously worked with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to train priests to preach Laudato Si’ (On Care for our Common Home).
Good preaching
Bernardin initially decided to pursue an advanced degree in theology so she could better understand the faith she was passing on to her four children. She went on to work in parish ministry and as a hospital chaplain, which inspired her to pursue her DMin in preaching. Now, she often thinks of her adult children who would be turned away by bad preaching.
“I think I grew up not listening, but they are listening, and they are turned off,” she says. “You can’t get away with that anymore. People are listening.”
Bernardin said one of her biggest hopes for the men she coaches is that a “preacher learns to anticipate how that mother of newborn twins and that woman who just lost her husband . . . how they hear what the preacher is saying.”
Bernardin asks, “What does it mean that every example you have has military language in it? What does it mean that your two examples are about women who are morally sinful?” She particularly considers the people who are thinking: I don’t have anything else in me. Give me something to get me through today.
The Institute for Homiletics also runs the St. Joseph’s Preachers Program, where laypeople are homiletically trained to be conversation partners with priests. In the first year, students learn about homiletics. In the second year, they begin to meet with clergy members to share where they are seeing God in their lives and to provide feedback on preaching.
Father Andy Matijevic, the associate pastor and director of worship at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago, says the Preaching for Encounter program is “not just about how to preach, but also about how to listen” to the people he serves. “They are teaching us where God is in their lives and how we can bring that out for the wider congregation.”
Everyone benefits
In a church where women currently cannot preach during Mass, having well-qualified women involved in clergy’s ongoing formation helps ensure that priests’ homilies represent diverse perspectives.
The people in the pews are not the only ones who benefit. Bellinger says when she started the Preaching for Encounter program, she wanted to help priests connect better with their congregations; while that remains true, now, after working with priests for so long, Bellinger has also grown to care about their well-being.
“When they improve their preaching, their satisfaction with their ministry really grows,” she says. “Recently, people are talking about keeping our priests healthy and well, but to be effective and good at something really does help.”
Matijevic says Nawrocki has helped him learn how to incorporate more personal stories into his preaching, so that the congregation can understand that priests “are people too.” His parishioners have already noticed a difference.
“It is a good boost of morale,” he says. “They are not just going through the motions of, ‘Oh, good homily.’ It’s, ‘Oh, my sister passed away two months ago, and what you said really touched me.’ ”
Deacon Tony Campise, assigned to a parish in Allen, Texas with about 4,500 families, has had plenty of public-speaking experience during his career at a large produce company, but he says working with Bernardin has helped him learn how to relate to people through preaching. “She has instilled some confidence in how I can speak more clearly, be more productive with words and painting pictures,” he says. “And people want a picture painted. They want to be able to really relate to it, to be able, on a Wednesday, to have something you said on Sunday pop back into their head.”
Connors thinks women-taught homiletics classes help clergy to be “grounded in actual life—the actual pastoral situation of our people. To have some of those people actually trained in homiletics is another bonus.”
And, for the women who teach preaching, they have the opportunity to do work they love on behalf of the church.
“While there have been real frustrations, I have loved being a minister of the church,” Organ says. “And I still do.”
This article also appears in the December 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 12, pages 26-30). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Courtesy of the Institute for Homiletics, Suzanne Nawrocki coaches Father Delphin Condori (left) and Father Alan McDonald (right) during a January 2024 retreat at Marywood Retreat Center in Lake Orion, Florida.
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