A Moment of Grace: John Cardinal O'Connor on the ... (ISBN 0898705541)

The faith in plain language:
When the Catechism of the Catholic Church was published in the early 90's, Cardinal O'Connor devoted a year's worth of sermons to the content of the book. He worked his way through the catechism section by section, and preached about each topic in his Sunday homily at St Patrick's Cathedral in NYC. This book is a collection of those homilies. O'Connor's strength is his clear, understandable, and engaging preaching. He does not preach as if addressing theologians or scholars (as so many bishops and cardials seem intent on doing). He preaches to the common person, addressing our concerns, interests, anxieties. He is notable for the extraordinary way in which he combines a zeal to speak the truth, and a love for people to speak it with compassion and understanding when it might be hard to hear. Most preachers excell in one and fail in the other. He makes applications to daily living, with plenty of concrete examples. He makes church teaching, which sometimes seems so esoteric and unrealistically ideal, real and meaningful to all. I suppose the main drawback of the homilies would be from a liturgical perspective. O'Connor's preaching on the scriptural readings of the each Sunday is often strained and sometimes non-existant because of his desire to preach on the given catechism section. Of course, a homily is supposed to be on the readings of the day. But for someone reading this book for the purpose of understanding better the catechism and its meaning to daily life, that will not matter much. Finally, I'd note that a significant portion of each homily is the cardinal reading paragraphs from the catechism itself. When most of the homilies were delivered, the catechism had not yet been published in English, so reading the sections in translation from the published French would have been of particular interest to the listeners. Today, we can just open the catechism itself, and the extensive reading would be unnecessary. All in all, this is an interesting, engaging, and inspiring book.