Just something I was always curious about…
Why are Catholic Cardinals referred to with Cardinal as their middle name, as in John Cardinal O’Connor. I find it odd, because IIRC (and please correct me if I’m wrong), Bishops aren’t referred to as John Bishop Smith. Neither are priests called “Father” as a middle name. So, why are Cardinals’ titles handled in this way?
Zev Steinhardt
I distinctly remember some language maven or other deploring this usage. I can’t remember which one. I’ll try to find a reference. IIRC he said it was as silly as “George President Bush,” so it was a few years ago that I read it.
“Cardinal” between the given name and surname seems to be the American standard. News outlets here seem to use that form exclusively. Both my dictionary and the Encyclopedia Americana sanction it. The Encyclopaedia Britannica uses that form. But the BBC uses Cardinal + given name + surname (or it has used it at least once).
I can’t find the reference I mentioned above about the language maven. Evidently I don’t own a copy of the book I saw it in. I’ll look for it the next time I’m at the library.
Thanks for the info ** bibliophage**. I was curious whether it was a church matter or not, but it seems from your research, that it isn’t.
If that’s the case, I’m curious as to how that started.
Zev Steinhardt
It is up to the Cardinal. We don’t refer to “Mark Cardinal McGwire” because he prefers “Mark McGwire, Cardinal.”
Is it possible that instead of it being “John Cardinal O’Connor”, that it is actually “John, Cardinal O’Connor” (think “Alfred, Lord Tennyson”)? Just a thought.
The “John, Cardinal O’Connor” seems plausible to me because in the Catholic Church the refer to everybody by their first name like in “Let us pray for our brother John (Cardinal O’Connor)…”
But it is odd that in “civilian” life this is used only with cardinals.
One more note of useless trivia: The word Cardinal means something like crux, or of main importance, in Latin. Hence the four geographic directions are the cardinal points etc. The Cardinals of the church wear purple robes. The bird has a (sort of) similar color and was called a Cardinal for that reason.
It’s not odd; it depends how accustomed one is to current Briticisms.
References to “Alfred Lord Tennyson” and “John Duke of Bedford” are common in British English now (you’ll find that they were far less common a half century ago).
I’ve seen a suggestion that the relative lack of punctuation is a conspiracy by senior civil servants in the Home Office to save on typewriter ribbons, but I think that that’s a little over the top, even for conspiracy theories.
I believe that there is significance to the presence or absence of commas in Continental titles (which, of course, “cardinal” essentially is), but I’m not sure if I’m right or, if so, what the significance is. I’ll look it up.
Everything you ever wanted to know about cardinals. As a Protestant, I am not familiar with the different ranks–evidently they come in three different kinds, cardinal bishops, cardinal priests, and cardinal deacons.
The College of Cardinals is second in authority to the Pope himself, and are the ones to elect a new Pope. They are appointed by the Pope.
I would surmise that the use of the term “cardinal” in between the man’s first name and patronymic may have arisen in order to keep straight who was a “cardinal” bishop and who was a “regular” bishop, ditto for “priests” and “deacons”.
I quote from the Associated Press Stylebook. The AP prefers the style “Cardinal John Smith.”
“The usage John Cardinal Smith, a practice traceable to the nobility’s custom of identifications such as William, Duke of Norfolk, is still used in formal documents, but otherwise is considered archaic.”
I am just back from the library where I found 2 books by William Safire that discuss this problem, Coming to Terms and You Could Look it up.
The form John Cardinal Smith is older and is considered to be more formal. Most Cardinals themselves use that form (unless they use the abbreviation, as in John Card. Smith). The Vatican however, appears more often to use the newer, more informal form, Cardinal John Smith. This is the form used in Annuario Pontifico and L’Osservatore Romano, two official or semi-official Vatican publications. The Chicago Manual permits either form but calls the new one more informal. Most newspapers in the U.S. are adopting the new form, influenced by the AP standard that kunilou mentioned. But they sometimes make exceptions. I suspect the news media were bowing to the wishes of the deceased (or of the diocese) when they referred to him as John Cardinal O’Connor. Neither form is official, as far as I can tell. There is never a comma after the given name, to the best of my knowledge.
It was one of Safire’s correspondents, not Safire himself, who said the old form is as silly as “Ronald President Reagan” (not George President Bush as I misremembered it).