While Pope Leo’s address to the diplomatic corps occurred a few days before the SCOTUS argument and Senate hearing, it is a correction of both.
“Today, the meaning of words is ever more fluid and the concepts they represent are increasingly ambiguous,” the Pope observes. In the “contortions of semantic ambiguity, language is becoming more and more a weapon with which to deceive, or to strike and offend opponents.” This is not a mere academic problem. Rather, it has profound practical implications about the way we view the world, and how we live peaceably together. “When words lose their connection to reality,” Pope Leo continues, “reality itself becomes debatable and ultimately incommunicable.”