Welcome to inspire: the international Catholic quarterly for young adults

I’m a rotten linguist, all too happy when abroad to speak in hopefully-accented English or simply not to ask for a coffee. I find the exciting part of the Pentecost story not the wind or the fire but the disciples speaking in many tongues, without even a Duolingo streak. The people in Jerusalem were staggered: “Are not all these people speaking Galileans?” (Implying, perhaps, that the fishermen shared the monoglot notoriety of today’s English.)

Yet Day Zero of the early Church wasn’t so much about languages as understanding. The disciples weren’t just finding the right words and vocabulary – they were conveying the meaning of what they had been told. I’ll keep plugging away at my French, but first I need to work out what I mean.

inpire 27 May 2023