Jokes From Fr. "You Decide!"

There is a priest who I often run into at Mass who always preaches homilies that have exactly the same format (I suspect he is using a homily service). I don’t know his name, so I think of him as Fr. "You Decide!"

The reason is that these are the closing words of each and every one of his homilies. He always starts with a joke, then comes something of a discussion of the biblical text, this builds up to a moral question of some kind that has an obvious answer, and having posed the question he says "You decide!" and walks back to his seat.

(NOTE: These are rhetorical questions. It’s obvious that he means one of the possible answers to be the moral one; it’s just a question of whether you make the decision to be moral.)

Fr. "You Decide!"’s jokes aren’t always that funny, but occasionally he comes up with a really good one. I particuarly liked the following two (with which I have taken slight liberties in the telling):

A couple of hunters are out in the woods and they get lost. When they realize that their situation is hopeless, one says to the other: "Look, we’re going to die out here if we don’t get some help. Let’s fire three shots in the air and see if anyone comes to our rescue." (NOTE FROM JIMMY: This is a bit of actual hunter lore. They teach you in hunter education class to fire three shots in the air as an emergency signal.) So they fire three shots in the air and wait for somebody to come. Nobody does. After a while, they fire three more shots. Again, nobody comes. Finally, the first hunter says, "Well, I guess we better try again." To which the second replies, "Okay, but we’re down to our last three arrows."

This Sunday he told the following joke:

A woman immigrates from Eastern Europe, but upon arriving in America, she discovers that she’s having trouble with her eyes. The people she’s saying with take her to an optometrist, who has her look at an eye chart, which reads "C Z R T J Y L S P D X." "Can you read it?" the eye doctor asks. "Read it!?" say the incredulous lady. "She’s my neighbor!"

Not bad for Sunday homily humor!

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

14 thoughts on “Jokes From Fr. "You Decide!"”

  1. Call me stupid, but I don’t get either one of them and I don’t think either are funny. Sorry.

  2. Are jokes in homilies a good way to get people listening or do they just cheapen the homily and subtley detract from the seriousness of the Gospel?

    You Decide…

  3. btw… You really DO know his name, right? This priest who you often run into at mass. You’re just being discreet, right? Otherwise it would be curious…

  4. Chris, a priest during a homily is not just commenting on the gospel, he’s often talking about a moral issue or something to his parish. If a joke helps his flock ease into it or helps with the sermon itself, it’s fine.

  5. Kosh:

    Yeah…

    See…

    It was kind of a rhetorical question to kind of get people thinking and at the same time it was kind of just a play on the whole post… thing. I didn’t, like, you know, really mean to imply that telling a joke was always inappropriate during a homily.

    On the other hand, if a homilist begins EVERY SINGLE homily with a joke, then I think that may be a little inappropriate.

  6. How about this one:

    Was Kosh taking my post too seriously or was my tonge-in-cheekness too vague?

    You Decide…

  7. That sounds just like my priest growing up…Fr. Pat O’Riley (if that’s not an irish name, I don’t know what is!).

    He was liturgically lax but fun…

  8. I was searching for new material for this week’s homily and stumbled on this. I like both jokes very much. Don’t think either will make it into my next homily but thanks for the laughs.

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