On the eve of the
visit of Pope Francis to the Philippines from January 15-19, 2015, I thought of
reposting here an essay that I wrote way back in
2003 regarding the need to improve the English proficiency of the country’s
Roman Catholic priests. I actually had that essay posted in Jose Carillo's English Forum in 2010
or over four years ago together with the preface below, but not being aware of
any determined efforts taken by the church hierarchy regarding the matter, I
believe that the forthcoming visit of Pope Francis to our predominantly Roman
Catholic nation makes that essay even more relevant reading today. (December 28,
2014)
In their efforts at evangelization, should the major organized
religions just rely on the momentum and stickiness of their respective belief
systems? Or should they make a purposive and continuing effort to be better
communicators and defenders of the faith, whether using English or any other
language for that matter?
I have often pondered these questions over the years and even wrote an essay
about the subject, “The Grammar of Clerics and Preachers,” sometime in 2003
after listening to a priest give his homily during a mass in Metro Manila. That
priest had bungled his English grammar and had stumbled on his English phrases
and idioms far too often for comfort, and I felt that this was an untenable
state of affairs that needed the immediate action of the church leadership.
Within a few hours after my essay came out in the Internet edition of The
Manila Times, however, I received the following e-mail from one of the
faithful overseas:
“Regarding your column on the grammar of preachers, let me say that none of us
is perfect. I must admit that I’m not that great either when it comes to
English grammar. We even have a Filipino priest who has been here in America
for over 10 years, but who still finds it next to impossible to correctly
pronounce just a simple English word; he also doesn’t know the difference
between ‘she’ and ‘he,’ but of course I know what he means. However, if you
listen closely to the message of God that he is trying to tell you through the
homily, you will be surprised that all those grammar errors fade away. Let
God’s message reach your heart and mind instead. And for their big and little
imperfections, our priests need our prayers, too.”
I really wonder if the church hierarchy should follow the line of least
resistance being advocated above and leave everything to God, or start being
really proactive and make sure that its seminarians and even its full-fledged
priests will get much more intensive, rigorous grounding in English grammar and
usage from now on. (March 20, 2010)
The grammar of clerics and preachers
A few Sundays ago, my two sons and I attended Holy Mass in one of those
improvised worship halls put up inside Metro Manila malls. The priest, in his
late thirties or early forties, read the opening lines of the Eucharist in
pleasantly modulated English, his voice rippling the familiar words and phrases
like the chords of a well-tuned piano. His cadence and pronunciation reminded
me of the late Fr. James Donelan, S.J., then chaplain of the Asian Institute of
Management, who used to say morning mass at the institute in the late 1970s and
early 1980s. He would regale the middle-aged management students with
English-language homilies of simple beauty and depth, and then, in his formal
humanities class, he would lecture them with delicious erudition about the
cultural wealth of Western civilization. Now, listening to the young priest at
the mall, I thought that here at last was one more man of the cloth of possibly
the same weave. I thus settled down on my chair confident of hearing a
well-delivered homily to strengthen my resolve as a believer for the week
ahead.
That expectation was soon dashed to pieces, however, for as soon as the priest
no longer read from the book and started speaking extemporaneously, it became
clear that his command of English left a lot to be desired. He could not even
make the form of his verbs agree with the number of his nouns and pronouns, and
his grammar was so gender-blind as to be irritating (“The woman walked in the
storm and go under the tree to deliver his baby.”).
His command of the prepositions was likewise disturbingly inadequate, and he
stumbled on his English phrases and idioms far too often for comfort.
I therefore listened to the rest of his homily with increasing distress. Of
course, I couldn’t presume that the rest of the congregation shared my
discomfort; perhaps I was just too exacting in my English grammar that I tended
to magnify what could really be minor mistakes. But two weeks later, I asked
one of my sons—then a high school senior—to validate my impressions of that
homily. Having attended grade school in a Jesuit-run university, he would
normally be squeamish about criticizing priests about anything, but he told me
without batting an eyelash that he thought the priest’s English grammar was bad
because he kept on messing up his noun-verb agreement and gender usage. I
really needed no better confirmation of my impressions than that.
Looking back to that incident, I think that the country’s priests and
preachers—more than anybody else in our highly Anglicized society—need better
than just average English-language skills to effectively practice their
vocation. We expect TV and radio broadcasters to have good English so they can
properly report or interpret the news for us; we expect classroom teachers to
have good English so they can effectively instruct our children on
well-established, often doctrinaire areas of learning; and we expect lawyers to
have good English to ably defend us in our mundane civil entanglements or prosecute
those who have criminally acted against us and against society. But priests and
preachers have a much more difficult job than all of them, for their goal is to
teach us modes of belief and behavior that are matters not of fact but of
faith. They ask us to believe with hardly any proof. And whatever doctrine they
espouse, their mission is to help us experience the sublime, to make us shape
our lives according to the hallowed precepts of prophets or sages of a bygone
age. This is a definitely a tall order even for one with the gift of tongue,
for it demands not only the fire of belief but also good or excellent command
of whatever language he or she uses to preach.
Since I was a child, my impression has always been that priests and preachers
stay in school the longest—ten to eleven years if my memory serves me
well—because they have to master the craft of language, suasion, and persuasion
better than most everybody else. My understanding is that this is why
seminarians study for the priesthood far longer than students pursuing a degree
in medicine or law. I would think that those years of long study could give
them a truly strong foundation in English grammar and usage, in listening
skills, and in reading skills, then imbue them with a facility with the
language that couldn’t be matched by lesser mortals. However, as shown by the
fractured English of that priest delivering that homily at the mall and of so
many other priests I have listened to over the years, that foundation has been
resting on shaky ground indeed.
I therefore think it’s high time that the church hierarchy took steps to remedy
this problem. This might be a tall order, but if nothing is done about this,
I’m afraid that the established religious faiths would lose more and more of
their flock to less virtuous but more English-savvy preachers—preachers who may
have rickety or dubious religious platforms but who have honed their gift of
tongue and powers of elocution to a much higher degree. I therefore suggest,
for their own sake and for the long-term survival of the faith, that all
seminarians and even full-fledged priests be given a much more rigorous
grounding in English grammar and usage. They need to effectively smoothen out
the grammatical and semantic kinks in their English to become more able
promoters and defenders of the faith.
As the old saying goes, God helps only those who help themselves. (May 23,
2003)
From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo
in The Manila Times, May 23, 2003, © 2003 by the Manila Times
Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
RELATED
READING:
The Dangers of Overstatement
As a largely self-taught student
of rhetoric, I watched and listened attentively to the homily that Sunday
afternoon. The priest officiating the Mass exuded the verve and confidence of
an experienced schoolmaster, speaking in fluent Tagalog interspersed with
impeccable English. He obviously knew how to speak rhetorically, and I must say
that at the start, his eloquence held me and the rest of the audience
spellbound.
His elocution was classically
Aristotelian. First, although a lector had already given him a suitable
introduction, he restated his bonafides to more firmly establish his ethos, or
the appeal of a speaker’s character (“Yes, I am a teacher, make no mistake
about that.”). Then, for pathos, or the appeal to emotion, he used some
academic-style humor that often drew laughter and half-smiles from the
audience. I thus imagined that he was conversant with the Grecian flowers of
rhetoric, so I naturally expected his homily to have a persuasive logos or
appeal to reason as well.
To my bewilderment, however, he
used a strange rhetorical device for the homily. What he did was to pick a
native-language phrase—let’s just say “pinakamatalik
kong kaibigan” (“my closest friend”)—then playfully ask everybody what each
letter of the first word represented. Of course, there really was no way even
the most intelligent person could have fathomed what those were. It was like
telling a quiz show contestant this: “Give me the names of all the persons who
perished in the Titanic.” A mind with total recall and steeped in trivia
probably could have hazarded a guess if the priest had used a concrete noun
instead, like “Doe, a deer, a female deer/Ray, a drop of golden sun…” in that
delightful song of the Von Trapps in The
Sound of Music. But the priest did it in the manner that people with
nothing else to do will ask: “Ano ang
kahulugan ng bawat letra sa katagang ‘San Miguel’? Sirit na? Ang hina mo naman!
E, di ‘(S)a (a)ming (n)ayon (m)ay (is)ang (g)inoo (u)minom (e)h (l)asing.”
(“In our village a gentleman got drunk.”)
The rhetorical device he used
certainly was not a hyperbole, or an extravagant exaggeration used for emphasis
or effect, as in “I ate so much that I must now be heavier than an elephant.”
It could not have been a simile or metaphor, either, because no word was really
compared or substituted with another. I had a fleeting feeling—soon gone—that
it was some form of synecdoche, a
variant of the metaphor that mentions the part to signify a whole, as in “I
need six hands” to mean “I need six people.” In hindsight, I can see now that
it was a weak fusion of metonymy and prosopopoeia,
the first being a figure of speech that substitutes some suggestive word for
what is actually meant, and the latter—also called “personification”—one that
invests human qualities to abstractions or inanimate objects. In any case, his
question was so nebulous that the priest, as might be expected, ended up
providing all the answers himself.
The words he assigned to the
letters of the word “pinakamatalik”
are no longer relevant, so I will not dwell on them here. They formed the core
of his logos, however, and from sheer repetition, they ultimately brought home
the message of the beneficence, love, and invitation to the communion that God
extends to us all. There was no question about that. The problem was that the
priest didn’t know when to stop. Ever the taskmaster giving pupils a grammar
drill to the very end, he dunned his listeners many times to repeat each word;
when they balked, he would browbeat them until they relented and blurted out
the words. Then he asked everyone to do what I thought bordered on the absurd:
to say “Ikaw ang pinakamatalik kong
kaibigan” (“You are my closest friend.”) to his seatmate. He sternly
badgered the listeners until he was satisfied that their collective voice was
loud enough.
That was where, I think, the
logic of his logos snapped; the liberties he took with the language simply
became too embarrassing. Perhaps “Ikaw ay
aking kaibigan” would have been acceptable rhetorically, but to ask someone
to tell a total stranger that he is “your closest friend”? This gave you the
feeling that the priest was more interested in testing his power to elicit the
blind obedience of his flock than in planting a divine message in their minds.
In his classic book Rhetoric, Aristotle argues that
persuasion by argument is best achieved when the speaker’s chain of
argumentation is not too hard to follow and not too long: “The links in the
chain must be few.” I have this feeling that the priest, in coercing his
listeners to be party to his convoluted rhetoric, had seriously violated that
role on both counts. This is the danger in overstatement that all public
speakers must always guard against to keep their persuasiveness intact.
From the book
English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language, Copyright
© 2004 by Jose A. Carillo, Copyright © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing
Corp. All rights reserved.
