Saturday, October 22, 2011

You Can't Teach an Old Dog New Tricks (but you sure as heck can try!)

This year (starting this fall), the Catholic Church is instituting a few changes to the usual wording of mass. At our church (St. Brendan's) they're slowly trying to teach the parish by printing booklets with the new wording and going over the new songs and responses prior to some of the masses.

My dad said their (somewhat older) Parish priest, Father Paul, isn't exactly thrilled to have to relearn all the traditional wording. I suppose the older you are, the more you resist change since it's so difficult to break an old habit – which in this instance is having to stop yourself from muttering the same phrases you've been saying since you were a child.

I can totally understand peoples' reluctance to have to learn new wording since this is just another decision made by the Pope that we Catholics have to follow.

When I moved to England in 1998 and started attending mass over there, I noticed slightly different wording in the Profession of Faith and the Our Father. It didn't take me long to relearn those two prayers and took me only a little while to go back to the old way I was used to once I moved back to the U.S. I'm sure it will only be a matter of time before we learn the new wordings.

This week I've also been introduced to a new software package called Office 2010 which consists of Outlook (the e-mail program), Word, Excel and Power Point. I mostly use Outlook and Word, Excel only very occasionally and Power Point never. Although I like the way Word is laid out and it seems more intuitive to me, I have to admit to still hunting and searching for tools that I could grab with a single click of the mouse previously. I hope it doesn't take too long to get used to the new software!

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