Lent, Language, and Faith Work

Many people celebrated Easter with chocolate bunny treats and by enjoying the long weekend. But not as many know the religious significance of this celebration, which is regarded in the Catholic faith as even bigger than Christmas!

What makes Easter extra special is the commemoration of Jesus Christ’s resurrection three days after dying in the hands of Roman soldiers and religious leaders over 2,000 years ago. His rising from death gives hope to his followers that they, too, one day will transition to eternal life.

Christians prepared for this great feast for 40 days, the season of Lent. For Catholics, this is an important time of prayer and fasting, somewhat similar to the observance of Ramadan by our Islamic sisters and brothers. An important difference is the reason for the Lenten fast.

Catholics are exhorted to take up some form of sacrifice, like abstaining from meat on Fridays, saving the money they would usually spend on their favorite fast food to give to the poor, or not using Facebook for 40 days and dedicate scrolling time to prayer. These practices of self-restraint, contemplation, and almsgiving are acts of solidarity with the passion and death of Jesus Christ, the central figure of the Christian faith. Jesus Christ’s free choice to embrace an unjust sentence and lay down his own innocent life to free the sinful is the standard of true love that is the centerpiece of the Christian Gospel. This very important season in the Christian tradition culminates in the Sacred Triduum, the three days leading to Easter Sunday, which are called Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Black Saturday.

In places that are deeply Catholic in number and devotion like the Philippines, Vietnam, and Argentina, these three days are very eventful for priests and priests-in-training (seminarians) as they perform various functions to provide more spiritual support to lay Catholics through sacraments and practices of piety. They preside at longer, elaborate liturgical celebrations and hear more confessions from the lay faithful.

As an active Catholic myself, I especially appreciate how the Holy Week liturgies are not only more solemn and musical but also more beautifully multilingual. In my Parish, the celebrations are mainly in English but with a modicum of Greek, Hebrew, and Tagalog. For instance, we say “Kyrie Eleison” where outside of Lent, we would typically say “Lord, have mercy.” Our Parish Priest gives very passionate homilies where he sometimes mentions Hebrew words like “Mashiach” in place of the more familiar “Messiah.” During communion (the most solemn part of the Mass), the choir sings beautiful songs of repentance, like “Maging Akin Muli” [Be Mine Again]. In other churches in Manila, we also hear other Philippine languages, like Cebuano, incorporated in the liturgical responses or songs.

There seems to be something about Lent that loosens the multilingual tongue and opens the sacred space to accommodate linguistic diversity more than we usually do at any other time of the year. Of course, this openness to other languages is not new in the Catholic Church. After the Second Vatican Council, it became more common practice to use the mother tongue of the community for Mass, which traditionally was said in monolingual Latin (Bennett, 2018).

But the story is a bit different for priests and seminarians from non-English speaking backgrounds who celebrate Catholic liturgies in places like the US, the UK, and Australia, which are still largely Anglophone despite the growing multiculturality and multilingualism of the population. In these Global North countries, religious workers from the Global South are expected to speak in English, the assumed heart language of the community. One can only imagine how challenging it must be for this group of adult migrants to deliver profound yet relatable homilies in this second or foreign language before native speakers who look to them for spiritual inspiration and guidance.

This untold story is what I set out to uncover in my qualitative study about the English language learning experiences in Australia of Catholic missionaries from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. How do they learn English in Australia? What are their struggles as adult language learners? What ideologies do they hold about language learning and languages? (Tenedero, 2023)

These questions were answered thanks to seven Catholic missionaries from non-English speaking backgrounds. Originally from Argentina, Ghana, Madagascar, and Vietnam, these were active members of a big international Catholic missionary society, which sponsored their coming to Australia to complete some English language courses as part of their preparation for missionary work.

Overall, the findings of this new study provide evidence that English language learning Catholic missionaries from the Global South are a distinct Community of Practice. More than the average adult language learner, they are highly invested in learning English fueled by their mostly positive beliefs about English and language learning in general, as well as their imagined future selves. The research also gives a glimpse of how the view of English as language of global affordance has the potential to revise or extend novice missionaries’ vision of themselves as users of English. While learning the language for religious work, they also open themselves to alternative pathways to become global language workers.

This new study demonstrates that language in faith contexts serves evangelical and pastoral purposes, as in multilingual Lenten liturgies. At the same time, language could serve other non-religious aspirations of missionaries. This further demonstrates that while people shape language, it, too, has power to (re)shape us, our practices, the way we see ourselves, and our hopes.

References

Bennett, B. P. (2018). Sacred languages of the world: An introduction. Wiley.
Tenedero, P. P. P. (2023). Learning English for faith work: The Australian experience of non-Anglophone Catholic missionaries. Journal of Language, Identity & Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/15348458.2023.2181813