Resist the word you are made to use

What is the point of discussing "transgender" baptism as if it's a question made in good faith? The word gives it away, and we are right to resist.

I wrote about it here, at The Catholic Thing. 

Please share! 

PS: They know when they've scored (this article is from 2018): 

Vatican officially uses term ‘LGBT’ for first time in its history

Campaigners praise signs Catholic Church is beginning to show 'respect,' but warn much work is ahead to achieve equality

The poison in the system

How often has this happened to you? 

You are reading along at (the Novus Ordo) Mass or praying familiar parts of it (like the Creed) and suddenly you become aware that the priest or deacon or lector omits or adds certain words ("man" and "men and women" for "men," respectively). You ponder how frequently this happens and often forget that it's been decades, actually...

You wonder why. Is it laziness? Is it some well meaning desire to avoid offense? It does grate -- especially if you are one of the 99.9% of woman with any sense of self respect and dislike of being patronized, vs. the 0.1% who possess an untrammeled urge to exert political power, say. 

Well, you should know something, something that is in danger of being forgotten. 

The priest (now laicized, it seems) who is most responsible for giving us "inclusive" language in Scripture and liturgy, as well as a handy "canonical" interpretation to facilitate any change desired and make freelancing redaction look official and retain a sort of bullet-proof existence, is Fr. John Huels. His influence has changed how people perceive their faith, their relationship to God, and their relationship to each other in countless subtle ways, mostly because the very words that transmit the Word to us, and the very gestures with which we worship in the Novus Ordo, have gone through a filter facilitated and rationalized by him. 

Let's take this translation of a Gospel reading:   

"He turned and said to Peter,

"Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. 

You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do"*

After a while, this sort of thing takes its toll in its banality, imprecision, and subtle manipulation. But how does it relate to Huels?

Helen Hull Hitchcock** wrote about him in an article in 2002, after the Bishops' Dallas meeting at which they created their "Charter" to address the problem of sexual abuse in the Church. She described the shocking account given there by a man, Michael Bland, who left the priesthood after being abused by John Huels. Bland was told by the authorities of his order in Rome to reconcile with Huels. 

When he refused, the authorities turned against him; whereupon he left the order and the priesthood.

The priesthood lost me, but kept the perpetrator," Bland told the bishops, noting that the abuser, whom he did not name [but who was later identified as Huels], had recently been promoted to full professor and vice-dean at a major Catholic university."

Huels was not just any priest or academic. Hitchcock writes: 

John Huels has been greatly influential in shaping the opinions of liturgists on a wide range of issues -- altar girls, posture and gestures of the people during Mass, so-called "inclusive" language in liturgical translations, placement of tabernacles in churches, roles of extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist, and even the kind of bread to be used for Mass.

He was a skilled operative for the older academics active after the Council, whose ambition was to transform the practice of the Church according to their progressive and libertine views (and lifestyle). 

Huels received his degree in canon law from Catholic University of America. His dissertation director and mentor was Monsignor Frederick McManus, emeritus professor of canon law at CUA.

Monsignor McManus exerted profound and pervasive influence over nearly every aspect of the liturgy after the Second Vatican Council -- from church architecture to music and rubrics and translation.

Huels, like his mentor, believes that the interpretation of liturgical law should determine liturgical practices, and he advocates "legislation by interpretation" of the Church's liturgical rules.

A key principle is that if he finds a particular law unpersuasive, the canonist's objective is to find justifications for interpreting the law in such a way as to legitimize a change in practice, which may conflict with the actual law.

This is the "make a path by walking on it" principle of changing or reversing laws one finds objectionable. Huels was a sexual abuser whose immorality fueled his desire to change everything about the way we worship. To this day, his extensive works -- and influence -- continue to be used and felt in seminaries all over the country (and in other English-speaking countries as well). 

In other words, he had the credentials not only to study and teach Canon Law, but to use it to effect change in ways no one could oppose (unless they -- bishops -- possessed both the authority and the will to do so). His prestige and expertise were used to defraud the ordinary Catholic of his one recourse when afflicted with liturgical innovation and abuse: the law.

"If confronted with an unwanted law, Huels repeatedly advises, create a new "custom":"He empowered "liturgists" to do away with tradition (such as kneeling) and to substitute whatever they pleased."

Read the whole article; these matters we encounter in the liturgy, ranging from little irritating tics to outright license and liturgical abuse, are not merely random differences in approach, nor are they solely the result of laziness or carelessness. The reason they are so difficult to combat is that they have a specific goal, tacitly acquiesced to at the highest levels, to undermine the reality and complementarity of the sexes and, ultimately, our nuptial human nature. 

Huel's work is a poison has remained in the system, even though the poisoner was identified long ago. 

Are we humans?

The tendency to use the word "humans" to refer to mankind damages our self-understanding, and it's used, thoughtlessly I believe, by even the most refined thinkers in these ideological days of ours. This usage has a curious evolution. 

Feminists understood that they could change how people thought about fundamental realities of life -- being a man or a woman, in this case -- without opposition, simply by making certain strategic demands. They weren't above couching these demands in terms that begged for a chivalrous response, ironically enough.

The general public dropped "man" and "mankind" and began to say "people" universally when "inclusive language" -- a political tool designed by feminists to control speech for their own ends, ends inimical to natural law -- became the norm. In academe especially, they succeeded in replacing ordinary speech with "inclusive language" (and this was their triumph of using an appeal to chivalry for egalitarian ends) and thereby achieved results without a struggle.

Feminists knew they had to control the social media of the time in order to change the minds of the great mass of people. Magazines and TV were the media through which opinions could be changed without the need for argumentation. They grasped the Marxist idea that communication itself is a means. And they succeeded in controlling the language to the extent that many children seem not to recognize older texts using the word "man" to mean "men and women," even when they continue to use "man" in its linguistically productive sense (as Fr. Paul Mankowski explains), in forming or recognizing new words.

English "man" remains a preeminently productive morpheme. This is obvious from the fact that speakers are continually using it spontaneously and unreflectively in the creation of new compounds, not only in such terms as "hit-man," "bag-man," "airman" and "manned flight," but even in words we have seen emerge in our own adult lifetime, such as "point man" or "pacman." A few moments' consideration will show that "humanity," "people," or "person" are not productive in this way.

(Read the whole essay, which focuses on inclusive-language translations in Scripture and the Liturgy, but can illuminate the general question.)

In our more managerial and utilitarian time, yet another ideological usage has taken hold: The deliberately imposed replacement "people" has been itself been replaced by "humans." I don't as yet know how this came about; it seems not to have been a conscious effort on the part of any group of agitators. Humans brings a particular context, albeit subliminally; namely, the biological categorization of animals. In biology, humans are studied next to other species; we would speak of humans as a kind of mammal, or in contradistinction to birds. It's not a word that was used to mean man in the old sense, for as a scientific term, it takes no notice of the immaterial aspect of the human being.

Using "humans" in a sentence like "Humans have been making mistakes in governance since ancient times" makes a category mistake, because man is rational, unlike the animals -- monkeys don't govern and clams don't make mistakes.

To use the word "humans" instead of "people" or "man" in non-biology discussions tends, I'd argue, to imply that man is not a rational creature -- that he has not been endowed by God with the capacity to reason and thus to share in the immaterial world of the angels and of divine life itself.

When I posted these thoughts on Facebook, Tony Esolen said, "I always mark 'humans,' in my students' papers, with the comment, 'sci-fi lingo'." He tends to confirm my intuition that it is a scientific term -- and not a complimentary one -- that fails to acknowledge man's soul. And that implication becomes a feature of the user's world view, just as "inclusive" language formed ideological egalitarianism between the sexes in those who adopted it.

A note about the term "human person," which may seem to overcome the difficulty of the over-technical term human, in that the added word "person" connotes the rational side: First, "person" is not productive in the linguistic sense. It's awkward to form new words or replace old ones with it -- we are self-conscious when we say "garbage person" and if military, we would not bother to refer to a "pointperson" -- even if in so doing we would increase our virtue signal. Second, "person" is also a technical term, this time in theology, not biology. It lacks "homeyness" or common use. The man on the street cannot be counted on to recognize it as anything other than a redundancy, and an effete one at that. It can be argued that it will gain that comfortable connotation as it is used, but these things can't be forced. Honesty requires us to ask whether we would have used the term "man" or "mankind" in the context that we use "human person"* but are too ashamed to do so, simply because we sense it would not be politically correct.

*edited to include "human being" in this lexicon of substitutes for the straightforward yet more meaningful "man."