The Intermountain Catholic. (Salt Lake City [Utah] ;) 1899-1920, 1910-08-13
FATHER sMITH-PAsToR JONES. !"

81 notice that Father Curran of Wilkes-Barre
has been entertaining Colonel Roosevelt and John
Mitchell" said a non Catholic gentleman to a
friend of ours whom we encountered the other
morning on First South.
'Now, [ want you to tell something; why
do you Catholics call your priest father"
Our Catholic friend stammered little, recov-
cred himself, then suffered once more and, look
ing his Protestant neghbor straight in the eye,
whispered in his ear: Search me-" Meeting
next morning our Catholic friend drew aside
and said: "Why do we Catholics call our priest
father" And we said to him.
"The word father is used in the New Testa-
ment to mean teacher, or feeder of spiritual
things, and is, in especial manner, applied to
bishop or priest who, as pastor assistant pastor
of parish administers the Sacrament of Baptism,
called by theologians the Sacrament of Regenera-
ton Regeneration means the second spiritual
birth. The baptizing priest, then, through whose
ministry the child is born into supernatural life,
becomes the spiritual father of that child. st.
Paul writing to Philemon, asks him to receive and
be kind to the slave Onesmus whom the Apostle
converted or, as he tells Philemon, whom [ have
begotten in my bonds ST. Paul was in prison at
Rome (in my bondsO when he instructed and bap-
tiled Onesimus, the slave. SO, also, when writing
to his converts at Corinth, he reminds them that
if they had ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet
he is their father, For in Christ Jesus l have be
gotten you'll Cor. iv, Is.
at is to this second birth ST. Peter refers when,
in his first epistle, he reminds the Asiatic Chris
tons of the obligation to love one another by the
obedience of charity infused into your souls when
you were born again, not of corruptible seed, but
of incorruptible, by the Word of God, who liveth
and remaineth forever u Ep. Peter, i, 80.
This is what we told our friend but we would
like to enlarge here little the subject. Protes
tants such as Anglicans and Presbyterians address
their clergymen as parsons" and pastors" Now
taken philologeally, from, let us say, the root
word, the three terms father parson and pastor are
lie same that is, identical. The root, or lingua
word is, Max Mueller tells us, from the Sanskrit
pa" in papa, from which come the words
"pater" Oatin for father), parson, pastor, pas
ture, etc. Now, the Latin word 'pabulum" Good
owes its birth also to the Sanskrit pa" which
carries the idea of provider or feeder But, the
term father given to the priest, and parson, and
pastor applied to a Protestant minister, carries
with it the Office or responsibility of feeding"
The priest, the pastor and the parson are assumed
to give food-that is spiritual food-pabulum-
the members of the flock of Christ, SO that Pro-
testants unconscoiusly using the word father
when they speak of their ministers as "our pastor"
"a feeder-or "our parson"-a proyider.
Blackstone in his Commentaries says the term
"parson" is "the most honorable, the most bene-
fetal title by which an eccesiastic can be desig-
mated, because it is, Persona ecclesiae, the per-
sonfcation of the Church itself" But, in Sir
William Blackstone's time 176O) the study of
philology, that is the science of the origin of Ian
guages in its infancy, and Sir William knew
nothing of the spa" root.
This is not the place to enter upon disgust
ton on the transition of the European root
"pa" into the Teutonic "fa" or how the Latin
"pater" is changed into the English father" 1t