Marten Program in Homiletics and Liturgics

The John S. and Viginia A. Marten Program in Homiletics and Liturgics is Notre Dame's response to the universal plea for preaching renewal. In service to the Church’s work of proclaiming Jesus Christ, we seek to form preachers who are faithful witnesses to the Gospel of Jesus and effective communicators of the kerygma.

How do we do that?

Within the Department of Theology at Notre Dame, we provide preaching courses and Marten Lectures for seminarians and lay students within the Master of Divinity Program.

In service to the universal Church:

• We offer a preaching conference every other summer.
• We provide resources in preaching for personal and classroom use.

Stay updated about activities within the program with Encounter, the official, free newsletter of the Marten Program.

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Past Newsletters

History

The Marten Program began at Notre Dame in 1983 with a generous gift from John S. and Virginia A. Marten of Indianapolis. These dedicated parents were especially interested in the way that Sunday homilies impacted the faith of their children. From that initial hunger for more effective preaching, they began their generous support of the training of preachers.

• Fr. John Allyn Melloh, S.M. was the founding director of the Notre Dame Marten Program. He retired from the faculty in 2008.
• Fr. Michael E. Connors, C.S.C. served as director of the program since 2010, and under his leadership, the program flourished and Fr. Connors made a lasting contribution to a generation of preachers. He retired in May 2024.
• Dr. Karla J. Bellinger came on board as the associate director in 2015 and retired in August 2020.
• Msgr Michael Heintz, Ph.D., was appointed visiting director in 2024.

Virginia Marten and her family (below) have remained vitally interested in the Marten Program. We are immensely grateful for their ongoing support!

Endeavors

Preaching matters.

"The homily is a means of bringing the scriptural message to life in a way that helps the faithful to realize that God's word is present and at work in their everyday lives...The faithful should be able to perceive clearly that the preacher has a compelling desire to present Christ, who must stand at the center of every homily."

"Let us renew our confidence in preaching, based on the conviction that it is God who seeks to reach out to others through the preacher, and that he displays his power through human words."

Outreach to the broader homiletic community began in 2012 when the Marten Program began its biennial summer preaching conferences. These conferences have led to the publication of several books, and more than a hundred of those conference videos are available still. The Notre Dame Preaching Academy was a Lilly Endowment funded project that ran from January 2016 to June 2020. The focus for that project was "preaching for encounter," asking, "How do we do that?" and "What does that look like?"

Collaborations within Notre Dame include:

• Department of Theology
• McGrath Institute for Church Life
• Notre Dame Center for Liturgy
• Campus Ministry
• Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism

The Marten Program has also collaborated with a number of offices and entities in the broader Catholic community. National partners have included:

• U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
• Catholic Coalition on Preaching
• Catholic Association of Teachers of Homiletics
• Societas Liturgica
• North American Academy of Liturgy
• North American Forum on the Catechumenate
• Academy of Preachers