It's not common in my experience, and priests who indulge it often deploy insincere self-deprecation to continue doing it; priests who regularly preach at such length are likely to be defensive about it.

7-10 minutes is, in my experience, often held as a good marker of what priests should aim for even if they don't actually achieve it in practice.

Our Pastor is excellent and he keeps them to 10 minutes max. You always want to keep ‘em wanting more… never feeling like when is this gonna end.

After 5-7 minutes, the cleric is usually repeating himself, but sometimes enjoys the sound of his voice too much to stop.

The mistake is to give the time in minutes, when we started sing polyphonic Credo, I timed the Mass, so I was ready to give the times of the notices, sermon and Canon, and the fractions for singing Polyphonic settings.

So give it in length of the time taken compared to the time to say the Canon of the Mass... Our notices can sometimes be as long as the Canon, and sermons can be 2 to 3 times the length of the Canon.

The late Pope Francis was very insistent on a number of occasions that homilies should be no longer than ten minutes.

And the homily must be prepared well; it must be brief, short! A priest told me that once he had gone to another city where his parents lived, and his father told him: “You know, I am pleased, because my friends and I have found a church where they say Mass without a homily!”. And how often do we see that during the homily some fall asleep, others chat or go outside to smoke a cigarette…. For this reason, please, make the homily brief, but prepare it well. And how do we prepare a homily, dear priests, deacons, bishops? How should it be prepared? With prayer, by studying the Word of God and by making a clear and brief summary; it should not last more than 10 minutes, please.

Growing up with 3–7 min, it can be challenging to experience 20-40 min now. My experience is that very few can prepare and present a lengthy homily and keep everyone engaged. There are those that can, but they are the exception.

As a convert, I was used to 15-20 minutes. I don't mind longer, but I am appreciative when there is a good Homily between 8-12 minutes.

That said, the most poignant sermon I ever heard was all of 2.5 minutes long...and even in that, the long, pondering silences were immense. To this day, I remember almost every word of that Sermon (by a rather "Catholic" Lutheran ((Missouri Synod)) Pastor)

I would probably make a point of reminding our pastor that he asked for the tallest pulpit in the state if not the Southeast if he did this. Twenty plus minutes after the Charpentier Te Deum and before Benediction, when we had a black-tie function to follow, from the vicar general was tolerable only because he kept it coherent and knew that he had permission to preach that long just once.

I like ten minutes. Sometimes, even no minutes. The liturgy is too long. (You joke, or make noise about the canons on preaching, but we went over three hours twice just during the Masses of Holy Week.)

In my years as a church musician, I always noticed from the vantage point of the loft what happened during sermons. After the scripture reading the phones came out. Was anyone really listening?

Usually in public speaking, duration is inversely related to effort in preparation.

This. I write out my homilies in full and usually run about 8-9 minutes. On Palm Sunday I kept it under 6 minutes. If I preached from bullet points I am sure I would end up tacking on an extra five minutes.

SponsaChristi, I'm wondering how a vigil w/no baptisms managed to go 3.5 hours. Ours only went 3 and we did all the OT readings, each with a responsorial psalm, and had 14 baptisms and about the same number of receptions/confirmations. I'm not criticizing or anything, but just curious. Was there a lot of additional music?

@fcb I assume that @SponsaChristi had a 1962 or earlier vigil. But if you do the full tracts in the NO and have a very full house for communion, that can do it.

Monsignor R. Michael Schmitz, the vicar general of the Institute of Christ the King (alas, essentially confined to Europe as he’s been provincial of the German-speaking countries for some time) is one of the few whom I can trust to preach for twenty minutes, in three or four languages (German, English, French, quite possibly Italian) without difficulty, with just a few cues on an index card before him in the pulpit.

@a_f_hawkins that instruction did sometimes happen during Mass, but it was not a homily or sermon in the way that we expect priests to preach routinely, ideally originally, for some length of time, without reading any prepared text (in the way that the Rituale Romanum provides for an exhortation before marriage, in the editions prepared for various languages/countries) or to say any set of prayers such as the Lord’s Prayer, the Ave Maria, and the Gloria Patri or Apostles’ Creed with the faithful, each and every time that the pastor goes to the pulpit. A homily is not a sermon, and neither are catechetical exactly. They overlap, and reminders of doctrinal and other fundamentals from the pulpit are important, but going through the commandments or the first part of the CCC is not what preaching is for. And modern forms of exegesis are not appropriate either (especially when the priest half-remembers something learned in the 1980s, when scholarship has moved on, or when it goes over our heads). Fr Gabriel Thomas Mosher, OP puts it well: Preaching is supposed to be ordered primarily to moving the will to the good, whereas teaching is supposed to be ordered primarily to moving the intellect to the truth.

All depends on the preacher. I have heard hour+-long sermons that kept everyone hanging on each word. I have heard 5-minute meanderings that made me long for heaven, and not in a positive way.

I wish that pastors would consider the audience more. The parents with toddlers don’t really want 25 minutes of talking. The old folks don’t care about current pop culture and the young ones don’t know any 70s TV.

Just spend 5-7 minutes on the texts of the day and teach us what the Spirit is saying to the Church in the introit, the OT reading, the postcommunion….

Shoot me, but Rahner’s homilies are the example par excellence.

I notice the rustle of sweet papers every time the homily arrives.

Our priest "preaches" for about thirty minutes. He must have an internal alarm as mass begins at 10am and he always finishes by 10:47am. Thus, I have to be very judicious with music. Mass always ends at 11:15am.

Some priests put too many topics into a homily, but they would do better to organize their preaching and save some of those valuable points for use in another year.

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As an aside, the flattening of parish [para]liturgical culture such that Mass is the only type of service that ever happens is unfortunate.

And as a further aside, liturgies other than Mass can be lead by a deacon, of which many parishes now have a good supply.
Whether many are well trained preachers is a different question!

Because why have people come to church for an hour when they can come for two or three? Some preaching reminds the hearers of God's peace and mercy: it surpasseth all understanding and endureth forever. Parce nobis, Domine!

Our parochial vicar is a fairly new priest (this was his Holy Week this year). He sometimes jokes with the other priest about the length of [the other priest's] homilies, which tend to be quite long (20+ min most days). Father Parochial Vicar says he was trained that homilies should be 10 min or less, or 8 or less when it's a long Mass already (such as a Palm Sunday). He does a pretty good job sticking to that.

And guess what? His are the ones I can actually remember and they stick with me during the week!

Indeed. Chronically long homilies are become a sign of habitual lack of preparation rather than industriousness.