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."

“Don’t sweat the small stuff.”

Abortion and same-gender equality--are they small stuff? “Small” signals that the question’s category is size. When conversations hit a question of size, I frequently recall my father the judge saying,“In comparison with what?”

The longer you stare at something, the bigger it gets. Not in your eyes but in your mind. It’s the psychology of attention. If it makes you sick, it’s the pathology of attention.

An ancient prayer for wisdom put it this way: “Lord, give us a right judgment in all things.” Proportion. Balance. Reality. Truth. Fairness. Justice. Yes, intelligent Love. This Peace Prayer was influential in ending Europe’s Thirty-Years' War and Britain’s Puritan/Restoration bitterness: “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.” Essentials are big stuff; non-essentials are small stuff; and mutual love prevents differences of sorting from becoming hot-button destroyers of community.

As a Christian, I am saddened, distressed, even frightened by Christians who sicken their minds and societies by single-issue passionate polemic for or against something, anything, whatever. Jesus came preaching “gospel” (Middle English for “good news”), and some of my Christian brothers and sisters moralize the gospel down to their notions of proper behavior and politicize it to their petitions for the use of public power to force their points of view on all who disagree with them. We Christians can’t use the excuse that “Everybody does it”: Jesus didn’t do it.

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“The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves have been flown from religious ideals.”

No, that was not written by a promoter of any particular religion but by a Harvard psychologist and philosopher, William James, who in his “The Varieties of Religious Experience” (1902) viewed religion not as “poison” (Christopher Hitchens’ word) but as food and medicine. (The quotation is from page 239 of his “Writings: 1902-10,” The Library of America, 1987.)

The current “On Faith” question is whether religion-motivated benevolent behavior can suffice for human need: “Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church just hosted its third ‘Global Summit on AIDS and the Church.’ Do you think the world’s biggest social problems—poverty, disease, homelessness—can be cured by well-intentioned religious believers?”

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Life would be easier—wouldn’t it?—if we didn’t need human leaders in either “state” or “church,” and didn’t need to suffer the successions from one leader to another. But we must somehow sail—in “church” and “state”—between lawless anarchy and freedomless tyranny, and the sailing takes skilled piloting.

The current “On Faith” question is, “How important are leadership styles and personalities of religious leaders to rank and file members of the faith and to public perception of those faiths?”

1.....The question implicitly invites religious leaders to ask themselves “How do I look to my people, and what does my faith look like to the general public?” Good question, but of third importance. Of second importance is the leader’s faith, character, integrity, authenticity, quality. Of first importance is the leader’s self-understanding as standing under the judgment and guidance of a superior—the source of the primary humility of worthy leaders of "state" as well as of "church."

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We human beings are moved more by passion than by reason. Reason can only enlighten, it cannot touch our springs of action. No matter the elaboration of communications-technology, we cannot outgrow our need for oratory.

Among the surviving presidential candidates, Obama is the only orator. He will be our next president.

1.....Orators are trilingual. (1) They speak “mother-speech,” everybody’s first language, which has the shortest and richest words (e.g., mother/father/home/God). (2) Orators speak “communal,” the particular speech of their particular communities. (3) Orators speak “general,” the language enabling communication between communities (as the English language functions in multi-lingual India).
For short, we may call this three-layer cake of language “homey,” “sacred,” and “secular.”

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The Question: The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 40 years ago. What are your memories of that day? What impact did it have on you? How is King relevant to you and to us today?

My response to QUESTION 1: After the shock of grief and wave of sadness, I said to myself, “The curtain has come down on the stage he managed, but the play has not ended.” On the staff of a national church-organization deeply supportive of “the Movement,” I knew King as a strategist as well as as a word-master and was personally conversant with his best-known lieutenants.
(We were paying the salary of one of them. King asked us to send him the checks so he could be the paymaster, and we complied. He was a tight manager of his stage-crew.)

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“Begin low, start slow, rise higher, catch fire!” From my 1935 course in public speaking, I remember that formula for oratory. No fire, no conflagration, no change. Lectures may inform the mind, but it takes oratory to move the heart, motivating to action.

In the history of American rhetoric, the Lincoln-Douglas debates stand out for massive public attention and for consequences, including Lincoln’s presidency. People got to hear each oration only once as the opponents traveled from place to place. The power was more in print than in presence: many hundreds of newspapers carried every word.

Poor Hillary and Barack! Millions hear their rubber speeches (slightly stretched for each occasion) many times, boringly many times; and few read and ponder their words. That is the setting for this “On Faith” question:

“The percentage of voters who find Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama ‘honest and trustworthy’ is declining as the campaign wears on. Why? From a moral standpoint, how important is this quality in a president?"

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