On Cheap Language

Liturgy can, and ought to, be an uplifting experience. At its best it can free us, albeit temporarily, from the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to. At its worst it is not only inane, but maddening. I regret to tell you, dear reader, that the Mass I attended this evening was far closer to the latter than the former.

Chief among its problems was the priest. He was one of those who is fond of coming up with what he considers to be exemplary ritual improvisations; that is, he made stuff up. This wouldn't've been a problem, but for the fact that these improvisations only served to distract from the order of the Mass. (Just stick to the rubrics, Father.) Then there was the homily. As a Protestant, I place a far higher premium on competent preaching than Roman Catholics. But even by Papist standards, this priest had a tin ear for turns of phrase. This is, I suppose, the end result of decades of wrong ideas about what constitutes good language. What sort of prose is being fostered by the language of the 1970 Missal, by the New American Bible, and by the hymnody of Breaking Bread and Gather? Ugly language begets ugly language. The point I'm trying to make here is that what we read affects how we write and speak. (Compare the language of Abraham Lincoln, who grew up reading the noble and glorious Authorised Version, with that of most modern politicians, who have read... well, it's not quite certain whether they've read anything. Is Sarah Palin a voracious reader of Jonathan Swift?) If we're going to use the vernacular, we should take it upon ourselves to employ translations that are not, quite frankly, ugly.

If priests are incapable of minimally proficient sermonizing, they ought to deliver the homilies of the great preachers of the Church. Would you object to hearing the sermons of John Chrysostom, or Augustine, or John Henry Newman, instead of the underdeveloped ramblings of a man who thinks "Gather Us In" is excellent poetry? I certainly wouldn't.