I only discovered the last day that Monsignor is not a rank, but a title of respect given to some deserving priests.
And that his Holiness has stopped awarding it except to his diplomat priests, since he thinks it careerist.
Yeah, literally “My Lord”. It’s one of many titles of respect or forms of address which have a feudal background.
Nope, to be literally “my lord” it would have to have a root in Latin dominus. In fact it has its root in Latin senior, older. It started out as a title of respect pr deference accorded to people based on their age/seniority and therefore there presumed wisdom/experience.
It’s true that in the middle ages titles from the senior root were employed in a feudal context, and you get titles like seigneur associated with particular feudal landholdings, and concepts like seigneurage (a kind of tax or duty). But that’s not the origin of the title, and I don’t know whether the church usage derives from the feudal usage or from the antecedent usage which refers to age or seniority.
It’s from French mon seigneur, which means “my lord”, indicating not just respect but personal allegiance; from French it passed to Italian and from Italian to other languages. The meaning changed between Latin and French (and Italian signore, and Spanish señor, and Catalan senyor, and Portugues senhor…). Senior may have referred exclusively to an elder at some point, but by the time Romance languages came around, it had the meaning of “someone to whom I owe respect” or even “allegiance”. The allegiance part is indicated by the “my”.
Look at English usage itself: a person who is in a senior position or whose job title has senior in the name isn’t necessarily older than someone in a junior position, but he is considered more experienced in their field, or has been with the company for longer, may be the junior’s hierarchical superior and trainer…
Mexico is IIRC (based on the World Values Survey) one of the few countries where people are actually getting more religious, as the older generation who was inculcated into militant secularism is dying off.
(Massively less fertile and also less Catholic, but also a bit more likely to be spiritual / religious).