For you and for all

Today is the last Sunday of the liturgical year, the feast of Christ the King.  The political reasons behind the creation of this feast day kind of annoy me, but at the same time I love Ignatius's meditation on Christ the King that starts the second week of the exercises.  So I'm a bit ambivalent about the feast.

Of course, it is also the last week with the old missal, the only translation of the Mass that I have ever known.  Or the last week with any vestiges of it, really, since we've been slowly moving to the new language over the last month and or two.

Most of the changes don't bother me much.  I mean, it's weird, and it's hard to describe how disconcerting it can be to have unfamiliar words in the place of words I know and love so well.  But most of the changes are merely awkward, uncomfortable and foreign, more ritual and less poetic simplicity.  Yet there are a couple of changes that really bother me, that make me feel somewhat sick.

Because football is not rape

I had a Feminist Moment during econometrics this morning.

In my program, the first-year econometrics lectures are in 2-hour blocks, so we generally take a 5-minute break in the middle of class.  During the break today, a couple of the guys were talking about football.  We'll call one of them Classmate A and the other Classmate B. (Thankfully, Classmate A does not actually belong to my cohort, meaning he's taking my class but not in my program.)

So they're talking about football, and Classmate A says, "Stanford got raped by Oregon this weekend."