You find an old bottle. One label. Two words: Catholic Genie. You rub. A whiff of incense, and before your eyes the gaseous outline of a priestly figure takes form. Cherubic, chubby, roly-poly. Christopher Biggins? No! The popish shape crystalises into that of Pope John XXIII. “I gave you Vatican TWO – now I give you TWO wishes!”
Implausible you say. Well, we leave in scarcely plausible times! Turn the bottle over. What does the small print say? Some stuff about recycling. No wait, here it is. “The finder of this bottle is entitled to two free wishes. One for public life, the other for family life. Offer limited to professing Catholics only.”
Saying grace together becomes a moment of sacralisation that transforms the family dining table into the central focal point of the home.
Because I’m a pleaser, I’d like to pick two wishes that I think might go down well with our unlikely Pontifical genie. In 1962, Saint John – as he became decades later – warned that we should “let no innovator dare to write against the use of Latin.” So how about this for my first wish, a wish that in a tiny way, our public space might pay a little more lip service to its Catholic heritage.
More precisely, my first wish is this: every time another company, charity or council takes on a slogan as part of an expensive rebrand, let them do so with a nod to the language of the old faith. Most of these corporate tag-lines and catchphrases are meaningless anyway, so why not render them meaningfully unintelligible?
Instead of groaning when you walk past another van emblazoned with a vacuous injunction usually starting with the word “Let’s”, let’s actually have it in Latin! Every plumber could honour Europe’s linguistic heritage. Every logistics lorry our original lingua franca. Every municipal authority could signal its commitment to educational aspiration. How inclusive is that!
At the very least it wouldn’t be as bad as some of the ill-conceived sloganeering written in modern English. Remember “Nothing Sucks Like an Electrolux”? Or some of those municipal rebrands: “Incredinburgh”, or Newcastle’s “Having The Tyne of Your Life”. It cost £500,000 to implement “People Make Glasgow”.
And with an impenetrable Latin motto, organisations would be spared the blushes occasioned by altered circumstances. A few weeks ago KFC dropped its tagline “Finger Lickin’ Good” because of coronavirus. Now, if this world-beating fast-food chain had made its logo digitus bonum lambendo, it need never have changed.
The other wish? A wish that would apply to family life. Well that would be to get more families saying grace. Pope John – our Aladdin version – might feel the need to catechise my six children (and me) about our patchy adherence to Catholic doctrine. But the pontiff would – I think – be pleased to see that we still remember to give thanks for our food. Nothing complicated. Just “Bless us, O God as we sit together; bless the food we eat today; bless the hands that made the food; bless us O God, Amen.”
As one of 13 children, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (as-was), would surely have appreciated the need for a ritual pause before everybody tucks in. I know I do. It’s a moment to give thanks. To Him who has taught us that our daily bread can’t be taken for granted. To the person whose turn it was to cook today. And a grateful recognition of what it is to be free of hunger, in a condition of plenty.
Collective meal-times, not TV dinners or Pot Noodles alone in a teenage bedroom, become a school for life.
Saying grace together becomes a moment of sacralisation that transforms the family dining table into the central focal point of the home. A think-tank I’ve enjoyed working with over the years – the Home Renaissance Foundation – understands this. It campaigns through supporters like the chefs Richard Corrigan and Prue Leith for greater understanding of the role played by family meals, at a dining table. They recognise that collective meal-times, not TV dinners or Pot Noodles alone in a teenage bedroom, become a school for life. Here we learn to listen, and speak. Where lessons are imparted and, in the jargon of think-tanks, social capital is transmitted inter-generationally.
Only last month another think tank, Onward, published a report about the UK’s declining social cohesion. It painted a grim portrait of parts of Britain shorn of neighbourliness. It provided lots of metrics. Potential causes. The sad fashion for living alone (8m Britons now do) and the decline in regular church attendance (it halved between 1980 and 2015).
But there was a sliver of hope, a genie wriggling free from the neck of the bottle perhaps. The proportion of 10 to 16 year-olds having dinner regularly with their family rose from a third in 1995 to around half today. I suspect a lot of that increase is among new Britons for whom the home is the place where traditions practised in another part of the world are preserved. Many of these practitioners will not be Christian, never mind Catholic. But whoever’s behind this rise in family dining – Deo gratias!
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