Remember the reporter who confused "crows ear" with crozier?
Well here is a pretty funny one.
VOA’s Jeff Swicord drew an admittedly crummy assignment: reporting on the latest shenanigans put on by the "woman priest" crowd. But what should have been a routine serving of empty drivel went l.o.l. funny when Swicord attributed to an Opus Dei priest the following comment on the maleness and the priesthood: "’The church teaches that he [the priest] does this in what is called insomnia nomini Christa, that he does this in the name and the person of Jesus,’ says [Fr. Arne] Panula. Jesus was male."
A priest acts "insomnia nomini Christa"? That is screamingly funny. It doesn’t mean a thing, folks. The closest I can get is "lack of sleep to/for the name Christina".
But apparently it’s not just Opus Dei priests who don’t know Latin, it’s lady priestettes too: Writes Swicord: "Meehan disagrees. ‘A priest is suppose to be in personi Christa,’ she says. ‘That does not mean taking on male identity.’"
Okay, maybe Father Bridget Mary meant to say "in gobbledy-gook Christina" but I’ll bet she didn’t; she knows the Latin phrase here is "in persona Christi", which correctly translates as "in the person of Christ."
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I always order in pepperoni Calzone when going out for Italian, too.
Poor Fr. Arne. No pun intended, but that’s the kind of thing he could rattle off in his sleep. You’d think the reporters would have enough sense to ask their interview subjects to spell out whatever they didn’t catch the first time, rather than just guessing.
Journalists are hypoeducated producers of fish-wrappers. Why pay attention to them?
‘A priest is suppose to be in personi Christa,’ she says. ‘That does not mean taking on male identity.’
Poor spelling aside, that’s of course correct. The theology of in persona Christi is that the priest must be male already in order to take on the identity of Christ.
I met Father Panula at a retreat about a year ago, and I would guess that the problem is with the reporter’s transcription and not the Father’s words!
what a scream. Great find. I’m still laughing.
Perhaps she is acting in persona Krishna?
I seriously doubt that Fr. Panula would have said something like that. Maybe I’ll print the quote and take it to him when I go to Mass at the Catholic Information Center in DC where he is the director. I have met him for some time now and he is awesome. Great confessor too.
In the linked post by Ed Peters, he says: “…making one wonder how he was assigned to this story in the first place…”
That part’s easy. It’s because religion is one of the two beats at a newspaper (the other is education) that editors routinely assign to reporters who know nothing about it, b/c they assume no knowledge of the subject is necessary.
If a cub reporter wanted to start on the business desk, he’d be asked to show his MBA or his past employment in finance. But religion? Bosh.
I was sitting in Mass this afternoon, and during the Consecration, nearly burst out laughing because I thought “in persona Christi” and then thought of “insomnia nomini Christa” I know it was wrong, but that’s what I get for reading all these blogs. 😉
An nescis, mi fili, quantilla sapientia mundus regatur?
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