I don't quite understand... Could you please expand upon that? What exactly do you mean?
That the Catholic Church had become aware of the fact that people frequently use sacred expressions in their profanities? Is that something new?
Regards,
Well, yes and no. There’s a reason for the otherwise strange tendency to call vulgar words like the f-word, ‘profanities,’ being that “forbidden” words were often sacred words. The usage was just over-extended from words like “damned” to the F bomb.
But in French Canada, using sacred words is as socially off-putting as using sexual words used to be in America. Saying “tabernacle” came to be like saying vulgar terms for a vagina. “Prepare to enter the sanctuary,” a call to repentance and reconciliation with God, thus sort of comes across like, “Prepare to enter the womb,” but with the offensiveness of something more like, “Prepare to enter the c*nt.”
All the more bizarre is the fact that the Catholic Church has described the Temple of Jerusalem as a mere foreshadowing of the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Temple was merely a construction for housing the written word of God, infinitely inferior to the blessed womb of Mary which actually held and gave form to Jesus Christ. Thus, entering the Holy of Holies was something reserved only for one man, the high priest. But as a priestly people unified in Christ, we may now enter the sanctuary... if we have been made pure by the blood of Christ.
This all served to make French speaker feel very weird when the misuse of sacred terms is brought to mind. The subversion of the Holy by the profane was stood on its end: the very same feeling that it’s not right to use words like “c*nt” was used to establish that the sacred should also be set apart.