Well, this 50 year old **woman ** has a question for you–were you one of the guest speaker/liturgy/pastoral council members speaking on this topic back in 1970 when I was 13 in Philly? I only ask because that argument was used then, nearly word for word including the obligatory dig at ‘being grateful to vote’ and the jab at ‘hair covering’, and I found it as flawed then as I do now.
First, the ‘picking’ of ‘man’ and ‘he’ was not done arbitrarily. The Bible itself goes to great lengths in Genesis to mention that Eve will be ‘woman’ because ‘out of her man’ she has been taken. God is not superficial or changeable, and if He thinks it important enough to tell us that Eve is ‘from’ Adam, and not vice versa, it means something.
For thousands of years, there has been no difficulty with understanding of languages and translations etc. Part of the difficulty with these people who insist on taking the idea of the use of ‘man’ to represent all people and deeming it arbitrary or discriminatory is that they haven’t had the grounding in Latin, or other languages (mine was French, my Greek is too elementary to count) to understand etymology and the development of language itself. Instead, they focus not on language itself but on a skillful polemic tactic of attempting to make a word into an ‘attack’ on an entire group of people, and then plead for ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’ when ‘fairness and equality’ were never in question to begin with.
And the argument about how one ‘feels’ is not germane to the case. Either something is correct or it is not, and how one ‘feels’ does not dictate its truth or falsity. As for the rest of the little ‘digs’, they simply demonstrate that the first part of the argument is so weak that one has to rely on fallacies and appeals to emotion to attempt to bolster it, IMO.
Both Latin and ancient Greek (at least in the Classical Latin and the Attican Classical Greek forms I’ve been studying) had two words for “man”
In Latin:
homo, hominis, *masculine **or *
feminine: human being, man;
in plural people, the world (Collins Latin Dictionary)
This word is common gendered, meaning that it’s both masculine and feminine in its gender, not to mention its meaning - looks pretty inclusive to me
The other Latin word for man is
vir, viri, masculine: man, grown man; husband (Collins Latin Dictionary)
Pretty much the same thing with Greek, with
anthropos, anthropou (sorry I don’t knwo how to use Greek letters here
) as the equivalent of the Latin
homo and
aner, andros the equivalent of
vir.
There is a distinction to be made between the different words, as when one is used as opposed to another is significant, and it is taken into account by the Church (for example, the rubrics for the washing of the feet on Holy Thursday state that its’
viri that are to have their feet washed, and this is why it’s only men who can have their feet washed - if the word had been
homo anyone could have gone up for the washing of the feet, including women and children.
As long as it’s the inclusive form of
men being used, I have no problem with translating it as such (saying people, humankind, etc.) - in my Latin classes the professor encourages this inclusive translation for the word
homo regardless of its context, to distinguish it from
vir.
Other than in this case, I don’t think inclusive language (such as modifying the way we invoke the Holy Trinity) is a good idea at all.
As long as we stick to the original meanings of the words, we’re not modifying Scripture IMO, and oftentimes words in Latin and Greek have multiple meanings that need to be accounted for.
God bless,
Karolina
)
However, this is going off topic. I must confer with everything that Tantum and blessedtoo have said–and they have said it much more eloquently than I could have said it.