Consubstantial with the .... wait, what?

Errant pedantry meets the divine rewrite, and my faith got lost in the revision

I always seem to find myself on reddit late at night when I can’t sleep, and instead have decided to make the situation worse with continued blue light exposure and (let’s be real) what amounts to the definition of doom scrolling. It was especially bad in the weeks after I was first let go.

On a sub for folks in the advertising industry, I came across a comment that was so accurate I was moved to take a screenshot.

“Editors see everything last and have all the deadline pressure, get about zero respect, and are pretty seriously underutilized and undervalued.” Exactly, I thought, feeling a brief flash of vindication.

They went on to say, “Some of which they bring on themselves by being the kind of process driven, pedantic people that become editors.” First of all, it’s process-driven and who become editors, and—wait, they’re (once again) exactly right.

I have yet to meet an indifferent editor. They’re pretty uniformly passionate about words and rules and necessary vs. unnecessary changes. Put a group of editors in a conference room to discuss serial commas and someone may not come out alive. That person just might be me. Former journalists omit that serial comma like it’s their job because it was.

This is the lens I bring to the Catholic Mass. I began to slowly fall away from the faith in 2001. Sometimes I’d go back and hope that I’d have that “coming home” feeling. And occasionally I did, even eerily so. Shoutout to the liturgical minister who chose “Come Back to Me” for Ash Wednesday. Well-played. Then—in 2011, to be exact—the wording of the Mass changed.

In the church I grew up in, relatively minor changes to make the language a bit more inclusive were normal. Namely, “for us men and for our salvation” in the Nicene Creed was changed to, “for us and for our salvation.” The Newman Center I attended in college took it a step further and changed “Him” to God wherever possible. “It is right to give Him thanks and praise” became “It is right to give God thanks and praise.” Occasionally, people grumbled. How dare we make the language more inclusive in an environment that’s already blatantly exclusionary? I was a passionate defender, having felt my heart soar in the space these changes created. The words we say—over and over and over every week—matter deeply.

In 2011, not only did anything like omitting “men” and changing Him to God become absolutely not okay, the Catholic Church announced significant changes to the Mass for the first time since Vatican II. They were implemented to more closely match the original Latin.

It’s somewhat difficult to convey just how jarring these changes were. When the priest says, “The Lord be with you” and you’ve responded, “And also with you” so many times that you might accidentally insert it in everyday small talk, being told that you are now to respond, “And with your spirit” feels a bit like encountering one of those pedantic editors.

If it was just “And with your spirit,” I’d probably have begrudgingly said okay, and updated my mental Catholic style guide. But it wasn’t just that. In the Nicene Creed, which is the longest prayer in the Mass and thus ensures that everyone is really in a reciting sort of rhythm, “one in being with the Father” was changed to “consubstantial with the Father.” And for me, most egregious of all was the change from the beautifully simple, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed” to “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.”

As an editor, it’s not my job to enforce all my own little quibbles and pet peeves or ask everyone I work with not to use serial commas. My job is to read empathetically, which means my priority is how clear the message is for the audience. Prioritizing a closer match to the original Latin was certainly A Choice. But adding wordy language—especially language that basically no one ever says in real life—is far from an empathetic experience for the faithful. You can say serial comma or (if you must) Oxford comma, but if you start saying shit like “the antepenultimate element in the list,” you’re just showing off.

Keep in mind that changes like “for us” instead of “for us men” were happening in the ‘80s, in rural Ohio. This is not new, or even particularly groundbreaking. Why the backwards march in time?

Changing Him to God was actually a bit revolutionary for a Catholic church. And it was the best sort of revolution, one that gave me hope for real, inclusive change.

I deeply miss holding that hope in my heart.