“The Man upstairs, if any, will be kind to me. Never mention God to me again.”

Our fisherman-neighbor on Cape Cod was packing 550 pounds of squid he’d just caught, and this was his reply to my asking him how it is between him and God. The occasion, last summer, was my commiserating with him on the suicide-death of his son…

….and, in the same cavalier conceit that God, “if any,” is grandfatherly-indulgent rather than fatherly-disciplinary, at the funeral of a scoundrel I picked up the buzz that “He’s gone to a better place.”

How did the pink cloud of this sentimental amorality descend upon us?

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Beef tenderloin and sherry were the Wednesday-evening sacred food and drink of a religion which originated in a federal prison. Since the printed constitution of the religion was lofty in spiritual self-definition and lawyerly in tone, and the supporting letter of request was formal and well-written, the warden—wise to the fact that religion is dangerous to touch because it might go off—quickly repressed the impulse to treat this new religion with the disrespect of laughter. He passed the matter off to the chair of the prison’s chaplains, who promptly availed himself of me as a religion consultant.

My advice? The warden loved it! It was to test the sincerity of the new religion by reducing the quality of the sacramental elements. Cheap wine instead of sherry. Spare ribs instead of beef tenderloin. The religion failed the test because it revealed that the luxury food and drink, instead of serving the religion, were its purpose. And we taxpayers were saved some expense.

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The Pope is right.

In 1943, the Pope was right in permitting Roman Catholic Biblical scholars to switch their basis of study from Latin to the Bible’s original languages--Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. In the U.S., Rome’s Bible scholars could now attend meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis. At our annual meeting in December, on either side of me (a Protestant) sat a Roman priest who was surprised to see that the book open in my hands was the New Testament in Greek and Latin. I was nobody special. Everybody's New Testament was in Greek and Latin—except the new-come Roman scholars, whose former New Testament was only in Latin.

In 1965 (the end of Vatican Council II), priests were permitted to say Mass in the vernacular, the people’s languages; and the Latin-said Mass faded fast. Also, the people began to fade away from Mass-attendance. The Latin language’s sacred sounds (phonemes), signs (morphemes), and significances (sememes), with almost two millennia of associations, died away. Heritage is more sound than sight, and silence soon is amnesia.

False is the argument that people need to hear everything in their own language in order to understand. Understanding is not just cognitive (ideas); it’s of one’s whole being. Fourth-century Augustine put it well: Understanding arises out of one’s whole experience of faith and belief and practice: “Credo ut intelligam.” Roman Catholics who hear no Latin are cut off from the sounds that have shaped the souls and minds of their ancestors in the Latin branch of the Christian Church. Besides, congregations are easily provided with translations in their own vernacular (preferably printed in parallel with the Latin). And it’s not as though the people leave church having heard nothing in their vernacular: the homily or sermon is in their mother-tongue.

We are the language animal, with mental and physical linguistic powers far exceeding those of our closest evolutionary neighbors. Religion, culture, civilization, heritage all depend on our audio memory-banks. We are shaped and saved by sounds.

Helen Keller began to be humanized when she associated the flow of water on her hands with the sound “water,” which she could speak but not hear. And when she put her fingers on my lips (I was 11) and I asked her “Who is God to you?” she said “God is the sound in my silence and the light in my darkness.” She put hearing first. For our becoming and remaining human, sound is even more important than sight.

I believe in the practice of hearing the sounds of the heritage one is committed to living. I am a Christian. I practice hearing the sounds of my faith and offering them to God in prayer. For more than a half century, each day I have read the Bible in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, the formative languages of the Christian mind.

English is the formative language of the American mind. Some of our founders could read and even speak other languages, but their public speaking and writing was exclusively in English. All our founding documents, from the Mayflower Compact to the latest Amendment to the Constitution, are in English. In this light, all other languages are un-American.

“The Pope is right” was my opening line last week. He should have encouraged the bishops of that church to restore the Latin mass, which continues the formative sounds of the Latin church. Memory is audio, and silence is amnesia.

“That church” I said, not “the Church.” Reinforcing the encyclical Dominus Jesus, Benedict XVI has repeated the denial of the word “church” to all the other churches. But subtraction is sectarian, and this medieval move of pulling up the drawbridges around the Roman Church is a cancellation of ecumenicity. The priority and purity of the church is preserved—keeping us “separated brethren” out of “the Church”--at the cost of confining Roman Catholics to a provinciality parading as universality.

This Pope has a generous heart as well as a brilliant and well-informed mind. His greatness contrasts with the small-mindedness and short-sightedness of this sad word-war proclamation.

Yes, subtraction is sectarian. But addition is ecumenical: we Christians should rejoice as more “churches” appear in this time of wide expansion of the Christian movement. For Chrisianity always has been more movement than institution, more strawberry plant than oak tree. The pyramidal model—from the Roman Empire, Pope replacing Emperor—is only one of the socio-models inhabited by world Christianity.

But no matter the form of the church, the fundamental content of the faith is constant, invariable. It's original wording in the Greek of the New Testament is "Kyrios Iesous" and in the Latin of the encyclical, "Dominus Jesus." Two words in Greek and Latin, and these three words in English:
'JESUS IS LORD."

No, we can’t “just” get along together on this "flat earth." It will take strong wanting to, hard work, painful listening, and resistance (Aabic "jihad") against those who want us not to get along unless under the dominance of their ideology.

No, “we” can’t get along together unless “they” are excluded—(1) tyrants, who conceive power as personal rather than as participatory; (2) terrorists, who want us not to get along unless under their terms; and (3) criminals, who—like the American repeat-offender who is remembered as the source of our title-question—pursue their selfish course in defiance of social order.

In last week’s “Muslims Speak Out,” all the Muslim contributors spoke out against the Islamists’ prostitution of Islam to a terror-driven ideology in violation of Islam’s strictures against both suicide and the killing of innocents.

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