FrDavid96:
Xanthippe_Voorhees:
He could simply copy it, however, after it was translated and re-written. It sounds like no matter what, he’s going to have to simply copy something in a language he knows nothing of.
Not necessarily true. He can know what he’s saying (and consenting) without necessarily knowing how to phrase the words exactly.
In any case, my question is this: what’s the harm in providing a simple translation?
Is it not easier to just type out a sentence or two of “this is one way…” instead of typing out all kinds of suggestions to do something else instead of what the OP is asking?
I didn’t mean to be offensive. I guess I’m used to doing things in a school where there are many students whose parents don’t speak English. When they need permission to do something they have their parents write something in their own language (describing their wishes around money, food and supervision) and then use a neighborhood service to translate it.
Using their own words is important to us. I guess I can see where it wouldn’t be as important to the Church.
And likewise, all I meant by my own comment was that it is much easier to just type out a suggestion than to try to convince the OP to do something different. Sometimes it is best to just “answer the question” instead of trying to change it to something else.
It is not that the Church dismisses the idea of “ones own words” but instead puts a value on the idea of being “in ones own hand.” It’s easy to hand someone a pre-typed (or even scribed by hand) letter and say “just sign this where I tell you to sign.”
The idea that if a person actually writes out the entire text in his own hand thereby taking the trouble to write out all the words, the letter itself has greater credibility. I’m thinking “Luca held a gun to his head and my father assured him that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract.”
Think about all the times when people nowadays “agree” to end user license agreements. Those long texts you have to accept in order to use software. They have lots of signatures, but few people have any idea what they sign.
It also means that if you write out the sentence yourself, you can’t later claim that you didn’t notice it, because you had to both read and write it.
Now, I don’t even know if this is the case. I don’t know that the OP needs to give a document which her husband wrote in his own hand.
It’s just that when I read the replies, I was thinking to myself: why all these suggestions on doing something else? Why not just answer the person’s question as it was asked?
