To be quite accurate, Peter, what happened was that Catholics still use words like “pray”, and “worship” in the way that all Christians historically did until the 16th century and later.
It was nonCatholics who redefined those words, and others, so that by** their **new and ‘improved’ redefinition, it looked as though Catholics were doing wrong.
After all, if ‘pray’ means talk to God, and you read historic documents where Catholics ‘pray’ to the saints. . ., why naughty naughty Catholics, praying to somebody other than God is a big no-no. . .except that until relatively recently, ‘pray’ was understood by all, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, to mean ‘ask’. . .just as William Shakespeare and others used it in common speech. Why we (Catholics) are expected to in essence ‘dumb down’ our speech with 2000 years worth of tradition and practice to accommodate the man-made and whimsical notions of some (not all) Protestants who have arbitrarily decided that ‘pray’ is only going to mean ‘talk to God’ is beyond me. . .I cannot imagine any reasonable person arguing that, for example, because “bread” was used as a slang term for money in the mid 20th century that from now on, all works, including the Bible, which use the word ‘bread’ will have to interpret that word as meaning solely and strictly ‘money’ because hey, that’s what it means to a ‘contemporary’ person, yo. And in fact, most Protestants would indignantly refuse to ‘change’ the biblical ‘bread’ into a 20th century ‘usage’. Why they have no problem superimposing a 20th century usage onto many other words of the Bible, I have no idea.
