The letter below was e-mailed to me by BusinessWorld
columnist and former MBA professor Oscar P. Lagman Jr. in response to my 2003 essay,“No earthly reason why the clergy should be bad in English grammar,” that I reposted in the Forum last December 28.January 8, 2015
Dear Joe,
Happy New Year!
I found your article on the Catholic clergy’s atrocious English grammar interesting (
“No earthly reason why the clergy should be bad in English grammar”). In my own case, if only doing so would not make me look arrogant or boorish, I would walk out when priests deliver their homilies. The old word “sermons” is more appropriate I think, for that is mostly what their homilies are—sermons or
“sabon” in the local vernacular.
IMAGE CREDIT: AGENCE-FRANCE PRESSE THIS PHOTO OF THE HOLY MASS CELEBRATION IS FOR REPRESENTATION PURPOSES ONLY
So I sit out patiently that part of the Mass, cringing in my seat every time the priest makes a grammatical mistake, which is often. I writhe when the bad grammar is compounded by mispronunciations (as when the “o” and “u” sounds are interchanged, as in
“Huli Yokares”; same with the “e” and “i” sounds, as in
“Pes un ert”). And when the priest discusses the articles of faith, I would get the urge to walk up to him to tell him to just shut up.
The past year, the priest tried to explain the
“Huli Trenete,” the
“Transpegoresyon,” and, of course in December, the
“Emacolet Cunsepsyon.” No, I am not turned off by the subjects or by the articles of faith themselves; instead, I am turned off by the futile attempts of the priest to explain theological matters to the audience, one third of which is usually made up of household help who presumably never went beyond second year high school, and another third composed of village residents who never studied in a Catholic school where the articles of faith are discussed and explained in one whole session, not just once but repeated at every grade level that the student is elevated to.
During the holidays, I visited my only sibling, a sister who is now in her 80s. She lives in Dagupan, and being deeply religious and with declining health, the archbishop had arranged for Mass to be said right in her own home by young priests whose study for the priesthood she had funded. (She is a big benefactor of the archdiocese of Dagupan/Lingayen.) One of the priests who said Mass at my sister’s home delivered a beautiful homily—in good English. After Mass, I complimented him for his homily and took the opportunity to engage him in a conversation about the training priests get for delivering homilies. He and another priest admitted that speech and rhetoric are not given importance in the seminary. They were both of the opinion that their mentors in the seminary do not have the talent and the skill to train the seminarians in those disciplines.
I went to La Salle for practically my entire schooling. My English grammar teachers in grade school and in high school were all Americans. La Salle was then run by La Salle Brothers from the United States. But most of my English Literature and Rhetoric teachers in high school and college were ex-Jesuit seminarians. among them Waldo Perfecto and Armando Baltazar. They made us appreciate English composition. I was with the school paper. The faculty adviser was a true blue Atenean—Tony Manuud, who polished many of my articles. So my English is the product of American and Filipino Jesuit tutorials.
When I was in the faculty of the Asian Institute of Management (1970-75), I wrote business case studies. Then AIM President Jim Culliton, reputedly the guru of casewriting at Harvard Business School, mentored me in structuring a case study. A colleague in the faculty, Fr. James Donelan, S.J., helped me refine my compositions. One could not have had better training in case writing than the one I got in AIM. (It gave me the wherewithal to conduct seminar/workshops on case writing and teaching by the case method to the faculties of the graduate schools of La Salle, Ateneo, UST, St. Scholastica’s, and FEU Makati.)
(By the way, Jim Donelan went to a La Salle Brothers school in New York before entering a Jesuit Seminary.)
Oscar
