Pope Francis recently appealed once again about the length of homilies.
And the homily, that comment by the celebrant, must help to transfer the Word of God from the book to life. But for this, the homily must be brief: an image, a thought and a sentiment. The homily must not go on for more than eight minutes, because after that, with time attention is lost and the people fall asleep, and they are right. A homily must be like that. And I want to say this to priests, who talk a lot, very often, and one does not understand what they are talking about. A brief homily: a thought, a sentiment and a cue for action, for what to do. No more than eight minutes. Because the homily must help transfer the Word of God from the book to life. General Audience, 12 June 2024
If your parish is looking for maximum parish engagement, we here are Homilelectrics have a range of devices to reign in long homilies and people falling asleep. This is more than a problem where people lose interest. It is also a public danger, as St. Paul found out.
On the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread, Paul talked with them, intending to depart on the next day, and he prolonged his speech until midnight. There were many lamps in the upper room where we were gathered. And a young man named Eutychus, sitting at the window, sank into a deep sleep as Paul talked still longer. And being overcome by sleep, he fell down from the third story and was taken up dead. But Paul went down and bent over him, and taking him in his arms, said, “Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him.” (Acts 20:7–10)
Introducing Collar ID
Our Collar ID models identify and synchronize with the priest wearing it.
Key Features:
- Integrated LED Lights: Multiple LED lights are not just for aesthetics; they serve a crucial function in maintaining the ideal length of your homily. Color of LED lights can be set to automatically follow the color of the days liturgical celebration.
- Homily Duration Warning: The Collar ID is equipped with a subtle yet effective warning system. If your homily extends beyond the optimal time, the LED lights will gently pulse and vibrate, providing a discreet cue to yourself and those in the pew that you need to wrap up your homily.
- Analytics and Phone Integration: Track homily content metrics over time tied to biometrics devices to help increase engagement/bore ratios.
- Sustainable Battery Technology: The Collar ID is recharged with our USB-Cleric adapter that uses beeswax or a range of vegetable oils, including the traditional olive oil as the power source.
- Enhanced Homily Interrogation: Parishes can also opt for an enhanced model to help priests who just can’t break the “too long homily” problem. A shock collar option can provide a series of increased training modes. 40 training levels include beep (1–8), vibration (1–12), shock (1–20).
Phone App
The Collar Id App is available for iPhone and Android.
Features
- Gives parishioners maximum ability for feedback along with seeing other’s feedback. Just because the homily wasn’t helpful to you on this occasion does not mean that this was true for others.
- Provides real-time Cleric Caption (CC) to help translate too unnecessarily erudite or overly simplified homilies.
- Log the impactful portions of the homily that got through to you. Just because you heard something a 100 times, does not mean you actually heard the message.
- Access biometric indicators such as heart rate and Galvanic Skin Response (GSR).
- Was the introduction joke really as funny or necessary as the priest thought it was?
- Measure engagement of an aggregate of the congregation with data integrity, removing anomalous results.
- How many times did the parishioner look at their watch or phone to see what time it is?
- Was the parishioner developing pew sores because of the homily’s length?
- Anonymized data analysis to be used by clerics to help with their homiletic skills. End-to-end-encryption is used to ensure the privacy of feedback made. Although a data leak can occur when a well-known complainer about everything is deduced.
Included are community building features just for fun!
- For Laetare and Gaudete Sunday, rate the color of the rose vestments used.
- Access camera to identify matches against the rose color palette.
- On Trinity Sunday test your knowledge of the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon definitions and how many heretical analogies were used in the homily.
