Dewfall, Spirits, and other Shenanigans

Watch out, folks--this post is a rant. I encourage responses.

It has come to my attention* that the Catholic Church, in all of its omniscient power (cue celestial hoards of angels), has sent down a new set of regulations for responses during mass. Thanks to the guys pictured above, Catholics in English speaking countries are now facing a more 'elevated' series of responses and phrases, set to be phased in over the next several years.

For the record, I'm a born and raised Catholic, and still try to make it to mass on a semi-ish-regular basis. While I think I could be considered faithful, I'm not sure you could call me completely dedicated. I have however, been reciting the same things for the past 20-odd years of my life, and, as I think most Catholics will agree, there's a lot of comfort/satisfaction in that. There's a security in being so familiar with the language of the Mass that I don't need to look at the church missal, and can rattle off any response to its appropriate prompt. I like the Catholic mass specifically for its ritual, and the ritual with which I've grown up. Changing all that is like coming home to my parent's house to find they've rearranged all the cupboards and I can't find the coffee mugs.

My bigger concern, however, is that fact that this little linguistic exercise has been years in the making, while the bigger issues of failing church attendance, a shortage of priests, and the Church's unwillingness to acknowledge it's modern flock have been ignored. Frankly, I don't think God gives a hoot if I say "one in being with the Father" or "consubstantial with the Father" in the Creed, and I definitely don't think that those guys in red know his feelings either. It's the same kind of logic used when the powers that be tell me that using birth control will send me to hell, or God really doesn't want women to be priests. God probably doesn't have a preference on the gender of his priests, and I can't imagine that he has a preference on whether priest says "Make holy, therefore, these gifts, we pray, by sending down your Spirit upon them like the dewfall" (DEWFALL?!?!) or the old phrase: "Let your Spirit come upon these gifts, to make them holy." Maybe the church should be spending less time picking adjectives, and more time figuring out a way to be more inclusive.

Finally, just to tie it in to the allegedly "legal" aspect of this blog--aren't the Cardinals just adding legalese to the mass? Why complicate the language (passive instead of active, 3 syllable words instead of 2, extra modifiers) unnecessarily? The legal field has been working hard for the past several years to simplify the language of the law, in an attempt to demystify it to the layperson. Then again, maybe that is their goal--lets keep it mysterious. And hell, if they're going to do that, lets just go back to Latin. At least I didn't have that memorized.

Here's the link to the NPR story (that site also has a break down of all the changes):

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93419478

*Thanks to Subpoena Joe for catching this story--NPR nerds are the best.