Missing thee.

It's never going to stop being strange to me, how in American churches we spend 99% of the Mass speaking like twentieth-century humans, and then the Lord's Prayer comes up and we're back in the 1600s. "Hallowed be Thy name...."

I think about this from time to time, mainly because I wonder:

1) How did "thee" and "thy" and "thine" and "thou" get shoved aside by "you" and "your" and "yours" and, uh, "you"? You was once the plural form of thee. Nowadays if we want to do a plural version of you we're forced to say youse, you lot, y'all, all y'all, and even sillier things, depending on where you are. (Contrary to popular belief, even the Amish don't use thee, thou, and thy when speaking English.)

2) Why have we stuck with the old construction on the Our Father (and some other ancient prayers like the Hail Mary), but not elsewhere in Mass? I don't know of any churches that use "thee" and "thy" except in the Lord's Prayer, and more modern ones have broken the tradition. Not Catholics! 

3) Is it dumb to keep theeing and thying when we don't speak that way normally? 

Courtesy of BibleInfo

Okay, so, first: What happened to thee? Merriam-Webster asked that musical question, "Why Did We Stop Using 'Thou'?" To quote from their piece:

Formerly we used thou as the second person singular pronoun (which simply means that we would use thou to address another single person). Thee was used in the objective or oblique case (when referring to the object of a verb or preposition), and thou was used in the nominative (when indicating the subject of a verb).

The thing is, one couldn't go saying to the king, "Hey! Thou king!" For some reason the privilege of office -- maybe to stress that one was not just talking to the king, but to everyone in his army sworn to defend him as well -- required the plural. Ah, but as Old English became nuttin' but a cheese and Middle English took over, the democratization of the language brought You to the masses: 

Initially you was used to refer to a person of high social standing (such as royalty, who would be addressed as “your majesty”) but soon came to be used as well when speaking with a social equal.

While dabbling with the Society for Creative Anachronism in college, I learned the classic insult: "I do not bite my thumb at you, m'lord, I bite my thumb at thee." Thee's fightin' words! 

Aside from insults, thou was mostly used for either servants or the socially intimate, but that faded over time as well. 

Okay, so why do we still use the form for the Lord's Prayer? Tradition! 

In the original King James Version, in Matthew 6:9, when Jesus is preaching the Sermon on the Mount, it's rendered in English this way:

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

In Luke 11:1, the prayer is slightly different: 

And he said unto them, When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth. Give us day by day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.

The King James translation was not the first translation of the Bible into English, but it was the premiere English-language Bible available between 1611 and 1769, so its impact had staying power. It was the Bible brought to the American Colonies. Further, when Benjamin Blayney created a revised translation for the Oxford University Press in 1769, he retained the thees and thous. In many houses, if there was any book at all, it was the KJV; if anyone heard any book read aloud anywhere, it was in church. So that's one way to nail down a particular manner of speech, even if the language is changing rapidly outside, by having the language reflected in the most crucial point of culture. 

As modern versions have arisen, using the current idioms such as you and yours, we have found that the thees and thys are so stuck in us culturally that it's hard to change. Even the US Conference of Catholic Bishops uses an updated text, and yet it's almost certain any American Catholic you know will go for the thees and thys. Heck, even people who know nothing of the Bible but have some cultural awareness of the faith will be theeing and thying when they think of the Our Father. 

So: Are we being dumb by using thy for the Our Father? If anything, is it an insult to call God by the singular pronoun, when we wouldn't have done that to Old English kings?

I'm not so sure, actually. We testify that there is "One God, the Father, the Almighty," who although the first of the Holy Trinity, is one God, not a pantheon. In that case, since His Son taught us the prayer to address His Father, it makes sense to not only use but insist on the singular pronoun for the Lord's Prayer. On the other hand, a prayer that addresses the entire Trinity would need to have the plural pronoun. The most prominent one of those is the Glory Be, or Gloria Patri, which names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but uses no pronouns. 

I've decided not to argue with anyone either way about this. People have gotten awfully weird about pronouns lately. 

Yes, we should use the updated language used in the very authorized Bible upon which our English-speaking church relies. But tradition is more important than ever in this era, an era that wants dearly to take every possible tradition, everything from longer ago than the nineties, burn it, and take a dump on the ashes. 

In England, the country that gave us the great King James Version of the Bible, Christians are a minority for the first time in 1500-odd years. What follows when a nation turns from faith in Christ is never good. At this juncture, we'd better hold on to all the great traditions we have.