Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:
One of the more disturbing aspects of contemporary life is the co-opting of language by political and cultural ideologues.
For those of us who subscribe to the Church’s teachings on marriage and family, for example, the twisting of certain concepts, words, and phrases land like chalk going the wrong way up a blackboard.
One glaring example would be the use of “they” as a singular pronoun, which is a corruption of reality and an egregious offense against those of us who love language, words, and clarity.
“Reproductive rights” is another such tortured phrase.
READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.
A relevant passage from a conversation with journalist Matteo Matzuzzi:
In so-called ‘public opinion’ we often hear it said that what the Church offers is anachronistic, especially in the fields of moral life and even bioethics. After all, people say, why should we say no to euthanasia if a person suffers? The easier road is the one that is more pleasing. The problem is that many representatives of the Church likewise ask, in the media, whether we haven’t to ‘change’ or ‘reform’ because the message does not find its way to the People of God. What is you opinion? How useful, or how risky, it is to listen to the Zeitgeist?
The Zeitgeist is a fickle thing! Of course, we must listen out for it: it breathes a message we must take into account. But to seek to follow it is self-defying. By the time we have arrived where it was a moment ago, it has shifted. The Church is by its nature slow-moving. There is a risk that we engage with what we assume are contemporary trends when there is nothing left but dying embers. So we go haplessly, and absurdly, from one extinguished bonfire to the next. It is surely more promising, interesting and joyful to hold fast to what endures. That is what will speak to human hearts and minds in our age as in any age. The Second Vatican Council was marked by the incentive to drink deeply from the sources. The best vitality of Catholic life in the twentieth century sprang from the exhilaration of uncovering forgotten wells, to find the water therein limpid, fresh. What has happened to the exhilaration? Why do we now feel we must abandon the wells in order to set up collapsible stands by vending machines?
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