Fools Will Give You Reasons

|
Fr. Z. picks apart an NCReporter editorial denouncing the year of the priest. It's too foolish to be worth fisking, really, but I will note that the attack is not ultimately on the Pope, the Church, the Eucharist or the priesthood. It's on Reason itself, by way of an attack on language.

You know the argument: words have meaning. If they don't --if each person gets his own definition of the word Catholic, for example-- then Reason is what is overthrown, not the papacy. Under a set of circumstances in which the meaning of nothing is fixed, there can be no truth, because by the time you get from the major premise to the minor premise, the meaning has changed, so bother with all conclusions and logic itself. You're left with literal crazy talk, of no more significance than infant babble.

If we can't agree on the meaning of words --and Catholicism's basic tenets have been set in stone (some of them literally) for 2000 years-- then no communication is possible. And in that case, as the great Tom Lehrer said, the least you can do is shut up.