ALDIE, Va. (AP) — At a clapboard church in this Northern Virginia town, a small group gathers to rrrroll their R's and add diversity to their resumes.This is the goal of the church now?
They're members of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia — clergy, seminary students and diocesan employees learning liturgical Spanish. Their goal is to conduct a church service for Hispanics who are considering religions outside their traditional Roman Catholic faith.
For now, Mr. Jones said, many congregations simply accommodate Spanish speakers when they can.This is absurd. Perhaps English services should encourage native spanish-speakers to LEARN our home language.
Rebecca Gibson, a member of Christ Episcopal Church in Winchester and a former high school Spanish teacher, led the four-week liturgical course in Aldie. She stressed the intricacies of Spanish pronunciation.
"We're going to want to say it like we do in English, but we have to make sure the pronunciation is right — kahn-fairrr-may-see-own," she enunciated. Around the room, a few students tried sounding out the Spanish version of "Confirmation," a commitment rite.
Or we could just give them the church! And the kicker:
"If a Spanish-speaking person comes to church and hears somebody trying, but not really knowing what they're doing, that's not going to make them very welcome," Mrs. Gibson said.
2 comments:
So now we're going from wanting to enforce English only in government to English only in private institutions? Perhaps we should also outlaw people from speaking Spanish in their own homes.
I say what that church is doing is damn smart. They are doing what churches have done for almost two thousand years, which is going out into the world and attracting worshipers through various methods.
Hell, the whole point of beautification is to turn local gods into saints for the purpose of converting.
Why not accept the languages of parishioners as well?
I'm not really sure what the problem is here. After all, I believe it wasn't until the middle of the 20th century that the Roman Catholic church started doing masses that weren't in Latin.
The language spoken in Church should really be of nobody's concern. Their goal is very different from that of our government, as it should be.
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