Mass Notes

When you're trying to focus your attention, there's nothing worse than silly, needless distractions. Today at Mass, during the recitation of the Creed I could hear amidst the unison of worshippers in attendance the dissenting voice of a woman who decided to replace every masculine pronoun in the Creed that referred to God with the word, "God." So, for instance, instead of "Through Him all things were made." She would say, "Through God all things were made." And instead of "And with the Father and the Son He is worshiped and glorified", in reference to the Holy Spirit, she said, "And with the Father and the Son God is worshipped and glorified". And so on. It was so distracting. Goings on like this are not really new in the Church however. I've grown inured to the omission in the creed of "men" in the part that reads, "For us men and for our salvation..." After all, women might feel excluded, so we should just use the more inclusive "us". And instead of the simple and ancient term of affection, "Brethren", now I have to listen to "Sisters and brothers", just in case someone in attendance might feel excluded. And finally, there's the Sanctus prayer, that reads in part, "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord." Not long ago, I heard a guy behind me say, "Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord." Don't we all feel better now? It's all so absurd. But today was different still. I've never heard such stubborn insistence to surgically remove every masculine pronoun in a prayer or profession as I encountered today with this woman. I couldn't help glancing over my shoulder to get a look at the offender, and probably giving her the very attention she wanted. I expected to see a 1960's type, (you know what I mean), but much to my surprise, this was an elderly woman, with a cute handkerchief wrapped neatly over her white hair. How on earth, I wondered, did this nice little old lady become so bewitched by the insanity that is the political correctness movement in America?

Several years back, Jacques Barzun wrote, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present. It's a hefty book that covers the last 500 years of Western Civilization. In it, he takes a brisk swipe at the petulant advocates of political correctness in contemporary academia. The all-to-familiar preoccupation, for instance, to drop the use of the noun "man" or "mankind" when referring to, well, mankind, and replace it instead with the innocuous term, "humankind" is particularly maddening, according to Bazun, who writes strictly as an academic and historian. For centuries, he argues, whenever "man" was used in writing or in speech to refer to everyone, it was automatically understood to refer to all of humanity. It was something so obvious that it didn't require a patronizing explanation. The trend today, to always include a "he or she", or "humankind", is not only patronizing but it's deeply distracting. Can't it be assumed that I am intelligent enough to know certain things, like when "man" is being used to refer to everyone or "he" to refer to both boys and girls? I guess not. But to have to endure this silliness during the Liturgy is simply too much. It's yet another reason why we should just stick with Latin.