The Church’s Essential Mission: Conversion, Not Welcome
“All are welcome!”
You can hardly walk into a Catholic parish today without encountering this slogan. Not so long ago all the talk was about the “New Evangelization,” but that topic has been back-burnered in favor of “welcoming.” No one should feel excluded from the Catholic Church! Who is it, exactly, that has been complaining about feeling unwelcome? That’s usually left unsaid. Yet the current emphasis on welcoming people to the Church certainly implies, at the very least, that we have been in some way inhospitable in the past.
The welcome wagon movement has as a foundational principle the need for changes in the language of the Church. It posits two problems with the language of our first 1,981 years:
1) It’s too hard to understand, and
2) It makes people feel bad.
The understandability issue relates to theological language – doctrines and how they are explained, in the liturgy and elsewhere. The accusations pertaining to hurt feelings are more often directed at moral language – how and when we speak about the moral law of the Christian life and the effect this has on those who feel implicated.
But is this desire for more understandable and acceptable language consistent with the Church’s mission? Does it help, or undermine, the work of evangelization?
First, the desire to make Catholic language understandable is, well, understandable. We know from Catholic history that the Church has had to discover how to explain her theological truths in ways comprehensible in diverse times and cultures. Current proponents of language changes argue that the Church did just this during the fourth century Trinitarian debates.
They propose that the Church sought to explain the Trinity in ways people could understand, specifically by using Greek philosophical terms. However, a closer look shows that the Church was not primarily concerned with making the doctrine of the Trinity understandable. She was interested in making it precise.
If the end goal is “understandable,” one usually ends up with a dumbed-down explanation which can easily lead to errors. But if the goal is precision, then although one might have to work to understand a concept, he can be assured of arriving at the correct understanding.
The irony is that when one works for precision he gets understanding, but when he works solely for understanding he gets confusion.
The Church’s desire for linguistic precision was the reason for the recent changes in the English translation of the Ordinary Form texts. Although the new translations might not be in commonly-spoken English, they are more accurate. When we see how many Catholics today have incorrect understandings of basic Catholic doctrines, the need for precision becomes clear. As one example, under the previous terminology Jesus was described as “one in being” with the Father. Couldn’t such a person still be simply a man who was very close to God, like St. Francis? Whereas a Jesus who is “consubstantial” with the Father demands an acknowledgement of his divinity.
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