Words are important
WORDS ARE IMPORTANT
Today everything is inhabited in the Church, we go from inhabiting the anxieties of time and relationships up to - and this is an expression that we like very much - to inhabiting the complexity, what Mina sang: «Words just words, words between us".
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Author
Hermit Monk
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Every human environment expresses itself with its own language, which on the one hand is useful for communicating and preserving one's identity, on the other, it risks precluding access to the uninitiated, even bordering on self-referentiality.
Linguists and sociologists have been studying the phenomenon for a long time, which in some ways can also be experienced by lay people: it is enough to come into contact with some of these environments to recognize a certain use of the language with its related phrasebook. Let's take the world of marketing for example. Anyone who hears experts in this sector speak will hear a flood of anglicisms such as target, mindset, performance, adopted not least to give a professional tone. Even fashions change: the meeting, which for many now only evokes the annual Meeting of Rimini of Communion and Liberation, has given way to call, which we have learned to use due to Covid, when many were forced to work remotely or, as they say today, in smart working. Do one call, enter call, see us in call it has become a habitual way of speaking and relating.
Apart from these lateral aspects of daily speaking, at the center remains the fact that the more closed the environments are, the more the language remains comprehensible only to the initiated, that is, to those who are part of the group and share the same verb. It also happens in the Church. If there is a definition for the language used and understood by parties and their representatives, the politician, one was also coined for those who frequent the ecclesial world: the ecclesiastical. Various publications and some newspaper articles have been published on the subject, since ecclesiastical, anything but declining, it spread underground but rampantly. Someone defined it:
«Weak in content and thought, rigid with its schematic repetitiveness but actually flexible in bending it to the most banal contingencies, prone to slogans and sensitive to the ephemeral; in conclusion, "liquid" enough to adapt perfectly to the needs of the "man of the world" (and power) clerical"¹.
Thus it happens that the word "atheist" prefer the more harmless "non-believer". "Loving your neighbor" we can say, but it sounds better to "exercise proximity". The "desirata" or "programs" of a bishop and his collaborators, better to call them "orientations" and "pastoral plan". And the results of the initiatives adopted? Defined, naturally, «pastoral implications». The doctrine, the catechism? Outdated words: better to talk about the "path of Christian initiation". They seem like jokes, but that's exactly how it is.
Even the words of ecclesialese have their seasons. Someone will remember that in a not very distant past the term "discernment" was in fashion, which could be spirits or charismas: situations could be discerned, vocations and all kinds of things. When Don Luigi Ciotti, founder of the Abele Group in Turin and then of Libera, he began to often use the expression "struggling", soon this term also spread in ecclesial circles dedicated to social issues and charity, to indicate those people who struggle to find money, work, a roof and stability in a life they live on the fringes of. Then there was a time when we only talked about projects, which of course could be educational, formative or pastoral: someone remembers the cultural project of the Italian Church, so popular in the nineties of the last century? Finally Pope Francis arrived on the scene, as a coiner of slogans that became trendy in ecclesial language, it was truly unbeatable. Only a few days ago I heard the homily of an Italian archbishop who in his incipit referred to the "existential peripheries", an expression that has had some success.
But what is the word that is most fashionable in the Church today?, at least in the Italian one or at least in a part of it? I'm going by my feet, as detailed research would require a lot of time and dedication. Yet it seems to me that the most recurring term is "living". Today everything is inhabited in the Church, we go from inhabiting the anxieties of time and relationships up to - and this is an expression that we like very much - to inhabiting the complexity, what Mina sang: «Words just words, words between us".
A priest friend sent me the leaflet, which was once called a program, of the festival in honor of the patron saint of his parish and among the various initiatives I see a conference entitled: Inhabiting history. To have proof of this belief of mine I opened the web page of a religious information magazine and, by typing the word «living» in the search box, dozens of articles popped up that all had that term in the title. So I discovered that wounds can be inhabited, the borders, the borders, hope, the tension, arte, the world and relationships again, the emptiness of the heart and fortunately also the gaze of Christ.
«When it's fashion it's fashion», sang Giorgio Gaber in 1978, in a song from his famous album Farmed chickens. But what can you do then to not be approved, just like battery animals, everyone using the same phrasebook and the same words just because they are the most popular at that moment or because the famous guy used them once? I'm not an expert, so to avoid making mistakes I aim high and Jesus' way of speaking comes to mind, his language.
In an interview released many years ago, the director and intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini was asked who Jesus was for him. He replied,:
«As an archetype of every possible relationship with the world it is the highest I know» (cf.. who).
But immediately afterwards he clarified that this was true for him, born in the twenties of the last century and raised, on the mother's side, in the peasant world of Friuli, tied to the land and still able to understand the agricultural metaphors of the Gospel. The modern world, young people especially, they wouldn't understand them anymore; the hedonism that was already rampant in his time would even retain the beatitudes of alien realities. Without taking anything away from the scathing examination of the director The Gospel according to Matthew, what emerges from reading the Gospels is not so much the what - what exactly Jesus had to talk about in his time, if not of sheep and shepherds, of seeds and trees or of a woman sweeping the house? — as much as the how. He takes the material of the world around him and presents it in an absolutely new way, so much so that the same guards sent to arrest him are forced to say: «Never has a man spoken like this!» (GV 7,46). Even his interpretations of Scripture, despite all moving within the Jewish cultural and religious environment of the time, stand out for the originality of their solutions and proposals: "You have heard that it was said […] But I tell you" (cf.. Mt 5,21-48). So many listened to him weighing and remembering every word: among many also religious leaders and leaders, with whom he dialogued even though he clashed. Even the devil, surprised by his answers, he preferred to take his time and return at a more opportune time, for him (cf.. LC 4,13).
This way of Jesus I think it should illuminate our conversation: in his you never hear slogans or clichés and, if he quotes a traditional proverb, he does it to communicate more meaning without getting lost in verbiage. Yet Jesus had not studied at the Sorbonne. And it is precisely the Sorbonne that gives the title to a famous article that the Dominican François-Paul Dreyfus published in 1975 on the Bible Review, the magazine of the Biblical School of Jerusalem, comparing the biblical exegesis practiced in universities and the theological and spiritual exegesis cultivated within the Church²: the first aligned on the historical-critical and scientific side, the second less academic, but aimed at spiritually nourishing today's believers. The author hoped that the two worlds could meet; and it is the same risk that was mentioned at the beginning: every environment, closed in its own language, he ends up speaking only to his own initiates. But the Word that both worlds study came from the mouth of someone who didn't even have a doctorate in theology in Tübingen, as instead, albeit Honorary, the Antichrist of Soloviev's famous story. Nonetheless, his word was beautiful. When the high priest's servant slaps him, Jesus responds: "If I spoke badly, show me where the evil is. But if I spoke correctly, why do you strike me?» (GV 18,23); and that "good" in the Greek of the Gospel is kalōs, which means both well and beautifully.
If Jesus appeared to us to be too high an example to emulate, we could at least look at Francis of Assisi, another who had no titles or refined culture, yet exactly eight hundred years after its transit, occurred on the evening of 3 October 1226, continues to be present in the world. He is perhaps the most universal saint, in which even men of other spiritual traditions can recognize themselves and whose example speaks even to non-religious people. Not many people know that he loved speaking French even though he didn't know it very well. He'll let us know Legend of the three companions, attributed to Leo, Rufinus and Angelo, with a little involuntary coquetry on the part of those, like Rufinus, Chiara's cousin, he came from a very different background and background: «He willingly spoke this language although he was unable to use it correctly»³. The saint loved to express himself in French especially at the beginning of his change of life⁴, to witness the new way of being in the world. In this language he asked for alms, he responded to his blood brother Angelo who made fun of him by meeting him in Assisi and above all he expressed his joy and praise to the Most High God. Afterwards, Francis did not abandon this predilection for French, but apparently he reserved it for moments of solitude. He made quite an effort in public communication, in time, to give his Umbrian vernacular the quality and dignity of a literary and spiritual language, as demonstrated by Canticle of Brother Sun. The French, prestige language of the courts and chivalry, it had served to mark a break; to make himself understood by everyone he instead chose everyone's language, giving it beauty. And he adopted a new greeting, which he himself claims to have received from the Lord: «The Lord revealed to me that we should say this greeting: May the Lord give you peace!»⁵. The formula was so particular and unusual for the time that it was disturbing due to its novelty, to the point that some friars were ashamed to pronounce it⁶.
Small hints to underline, returning to our topic, that it wouldn't be that difficult to find words and languages that people, even the most humble, are capable of understanding when speaking about the things of faith, of the Church and how it places itself in the world, without the need to resort to clichés, to standard expressions or to the fashion of the moment. Of course, sensitivity and greatness of soul are needed, as it was for Francesco, but also culture, good reads, ability to give dignity to one's language by putting care and attention into it.
«Words are important!», shouted Nanni Moretti in a famous scene of his film Red Palombella. And they are also and above all for those who have been called to be servants of a greater Word.
From the Hermitage, 23 October 2026
NOTE
¹ R. Beretta, The new little illustrated ecclesiastical book, Milan 2013.
² F.-P. Dreyfus, Exegesis in the Sorbonne, exegesis in the Church, in Bible Review 82 (1975), pp. 321-359.
³ Legend of the three companions, 10, in Franciscan Sources, p. 800.
⁴ S. Pear, Francis and his brothers. A biography, Sellerio, Palermo 2026, p. 75.
⁵ Francis of Assisi, Will, 23.
⁶ Assisi compilation, 101, in Franciscan sources, p. 968.
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