Recovering Words
October 26, 2012 4 Comments
Fr Z: Unless you recover the words, you can’t recover the concepts.
When you change the words, you change the concepts.
The liberal progressivist liturgical terrorist reformers were successful in changing our way of speaking about our sacred liturgical worship.
For example, they made us – and no one asked them to do this, by the way – give up talking about “sacrifice”. And when we lost “sacrifice”, we therefore lost a clear understanding of “priesthood”. No “sacrifice”, no “priest”. Today, “minister” dominates. We are losing or have, in some places, lost the words “worship” and “adoration”. Now we talk about “celebration”. We “gather”. We still “pray”. But do we? Really? To whom or what?
“Sin”? It is to laugh. “Hell”? What’s that?
“Worship” and “adoration” had to go, of course. They smack too much of Tantum ergo, and all that stuff. You can see why the now aging-hippies tried to do away with those words. In seminary, after all, the same generation of Richard McBrien types incessantly crammed down our throats “Jesus said ‘Take and eat’, not ‘sit and look’!”
“Altar” is now associated more with protestant “altar calls”. Catholics, talk about “table”. Altars are connected with “sacrifice”. Thus, the concept of altar had to go. “Tables” are us!
It is not, I think, that they were trying to find new ways to express old and fundamentally Catholic concepts to a new generation in modern terms. They were trying to destroy the old and fundamentally Catholic concepts for a new generation.
We must recover our terms.
Unless you recover the words, you can’t recover the concepts.
