Welcome to 'Stray Thoughts', where the Eureka Street editorial team muses on ethical and social challenges we've noted throughout the week.
On social media, business cards and the bottom of emails nowadays you will often find a bracket with people’s preferred pronouns (he/him or she/her or they/them). Views on this can range from it being a welcome advance in acknowledging people in all their complexity, acceptance as a simple courtesy, or suspicion about ‘wokeism’ gone mad. I’ve tended to chart the middle course, believing in it as a courtesy — while at times being appreciative of the pointer to the right honorific when it hasn’t been clear from the first name. However, I hadn’t really considered pronouns that important.
Well, that was until I was researching Papal statements from the 1960s and 1970s. Reading Pope John XXIII’s Pacem In Terris and Pope Paul VI’s Gaudium et Spes and Populorum Progressio I was confronted with a sea of the masculine pronouns – he, him, man, and this was not the male pronouns referring to God, which has engendered its own debate (see below).
‘God created man “in His own image and likeness,” endowed him with intelligence and freedom and made him lord of creation.’ ‘But the world’s Creator has stamped man’s inmost being with an order revealed to man by his conscience; and his conscience insists on preserving it. Men “show the work of the law written in their hearts”.’ – Pacem in Terris
The wisdom, beauty and care shown in these encyclicals slammed straight into my 21st century sensibilities. I found myself unable to appreciate them because they did not recognise my gender. Truthfully, this reaction shocked me. I learned French at school — feminine and masculine pronouns and when there’s a mixed group always masculine. Man just means human beings — men and women equal. But does it?
In the past 20 years there has been a profound change to what is acceptable as regards inclusivity. The lay readers at my church use ‘brothers and sisters’, ‘humankind’, ‘children of God . . .’ Without fanfare, gender neutrality has slipped into our 21st century speech and our unconscious, and it is only when we are confronted with the gender specific language that we realise how we’ve changed.
'I’m not sure about the use of they/them either for God or for people, but 30 years ago I would not have blanched at the use of masculine pronouns when referring to all people.'
The subject of God’s pronouns has also been in