I mean, really, what is with having such a word? i hate this word. It is difficult to say. Do the bishops live in the real world where no one talks like that?
I used to really love saying the Nicene Creed. The other changes seem fine. But this one word has gotten to me.
It makes me feel stupid before God because it just can’t be pronounced easily. It causes a separation between me and my Lord at Mass.
Everyone is stumbling on this word. It is distracting.
Any anvenue to let the bishops know how unhappy this one catholic is with this word?
I don’t think it’s difficult to say. I bet you’ve said the word “substantial” in some other situation, like, “That is a very substantial amount of money,” when at the bank, so why is hard to add a “con” to the front of it and say it mass? Granted, I’m fond of words and I’m very good with them, they’re my thing, but this is
not a hard word by any means.
I detest the attitude that we have to speak like third graders during mass just because most of the secular English speaking, rather text-speaking, world does. “Consubstantial,” from the Latin, “consubstantialem,” is a very ancient word. Why we had to render it in elementary-speak, I don’t know. “Eucharistic,” as in, “Eucharistic Prayer,” isn’t exactly the simplest word either, but I’ve never heard anyone complain about it. “Oblation” is a rather archaic word, yet we still use it at mass, and it was even present in the old translation. Also, who in the world says “hosanna?” Not many people, but we say it at mass.
I am exactly the opposite of you, in that saying prayers in third-grader vocabulary makes me feel stupid, or like a seven year old, and saying them in their fullest, most direct translation makes me feel like I may begin to approach God as an adult. I am a Catholic of less than a year, yet even that has been long enough time for me to be tired of the hippyesque, Seventies groovy love language, which was so distasteful to me that I caught myself many times at mass shutting down and going on autopilot mode because there was no substance, no real idea to latch on to and think about.
I agree that many people are stumbling at this word. The stumbling is indeed distracting. Rather than hating the language, however, and blaming it, I blame it on our poor education systems and embarrassing way of thinking that makes no distinction between a sacred space and the street. That doesn’t give us the license to distill our faith down into some mucky baby food type language. Rather, I see “consubstantial” as a catechetical opportunity that we so desperately need in our churches. In my senior year English class in high school, half the people couldn’t read. They would stutter at the simplest words, they would make full pauses at the end of every line when there was no punctuation, and they consistently received very poor grades. Rather than embracing this, the Church should try her best to ensure both the spiritual and intellectual development of her people, as those things go hand in hand in the realm of theology, of which knowledge the average Catholic is so anorexically deprived, turning into a spitting hatred for all things complicated. I don’t expect every Catholic to be an accomplished theologian, but I don’t think it’s too much to ask that every Catholic know words that have been in use in the Church for thousands of years.
If you really do feel it necessary to voice your opinion to the hierarchy, you may write to your bishop. You can find his address on the diocesan website.
