NewSpeak

One of my themes way back when I wrote about medical ethics was that we were losing our "moral vocabulary", so couldn't discuss things.

So abortion of a normal baby was morphed into "choice" (which ignored that one third of abortions are coerced by boyfriend or parents). And euthanasia was pushed to blur the difference between end of life comfort care and killing.

Father Z points to the problem of how liturgists destroyed the feeling of holiness in the Catholic church by a similar introduction of "newspeak" (Orwell's term from 1984).

For example, they made us – and no one asked them to do this, by the way – give up talking about “sacrifice”. And when we lost “sacrifice”, we therefore lost a clear understanding of “priesthood”. No “sacrifice”, no “priest”. Today, “minister” dominates. We are losing or have, in some places, lost the words “worship” and “adoration”. Now we talk about “celebration”. We “gather”. We still “pray”. But do we? Really? To whom or what?
“Sin”?  It is to laugh. “Hell”?  What’s that?
“Worship” and “adoration” had to go, of course. They smack too much of Tantum ergo, and all that stuff. You can see why the now aging-hippies tried to do away with those words. In seminary, after all, the same generation of Richard McBrien types incessantly crammed down our throats “Jesus said ‘Take and eat’, not ‘sit and look’!”
“Altar” is now associated more with protestant “altar calls”. Catholics, talk about “table”. Altars are connected with “sacrifice”. Thus, the concept of altar had to go. “Tables” are us!
It is not, I think, that they were trying to find new ways to express old and fundamentally Catholic concepts to a new generation in modern terms. They were trying to destroy the old and fundamentally Catholic concepts for a new generation.
We must recover our terms.
Unless you recover the words, you can’t recover the concepts.