Wednesday 28 May 2014

Linguistic analysis

"Difficult to understand how anyone could think and speak in a language that is not his own." That is true. But it is also important to understand concrete situations. For a Catholic from Goa born and brought up in Mumbai, one has to keep in mind different factors: the language at home might be a mixture of Konkani and English; in school, clearly English; on the street, Marathi, which is the local language, and sometimes Hindi, the national language - Marathi if you are fully accepted as local, Hindi to tell you that you are not completely local. In addition, there are the vestiges of the caste system: the upper classes in Goa learned, with the Portuguese, to regard Konkani as the language of the servants, and adopted Portuguese as their language. The lower classes, with little opportunity for education, remained with Konkani.

New openings, theological and ecumenical, by Pope Francis

From Cloe Taddei-Ferretti, some interesting points made by Pope Francis in an interview in the Civilta' Cattolica:

PADARO, «Intervista a Papa Francesco», in La Civiltà Cattolica 164 (2013)/III 449-477; su "le altre scienze e la loro evoluzione", ivi pp. 475-476; su "ciò che lo Spirito ha seminato negli altri come un dono anche per noi", ivi p. 466.

the first: in dealing with theological issues, the pope says we should take into account exegesis, developments in theology, as well as other sciences and their evolution. The last, according to Cloe, opens up new perspectives, on issues such as women's ordination, etc.

The second is ecumenical: the pope refers to 'other churches' and what the Spirit has 'sowed' in them as a gift for us.