The Faithful

[Chris]

Around this time every year I hear the term "the Faithful" as though it's a plural noun. Can anyone explain this to me?

[Haruo]

Can you provide a little context? It's an adjective, but with an implied plural referent, like "the quick and the dead"...

[William Thornton]

I think Chris means a noun, as in "the Faithful will gather at sunrise on Easter" like a "team". I'm bothered somewhat by capitalizing the term in mid sentence. I may get with the faithful at sunrise Sunday. The team gets breakfast afterward.

[Dave Roberts]

I'm afraid that I hear in this the kind of put down to those who don't come. If the faithful make the sunrise service, those who don't come, are they "the unfaithful?"

[Chris]

T he context I hear is "The faithful will gather outside St. Peter's Basilica for mass....."

[Ed Pettibone]

[Chris]

That explains it. It's a Catholic thing. {I sorta expected that.}

[Haruo]

Well, at any time of year I would think it rather odd for large numbers of faithful Baptists (our predominantly irregular lack of confirmation notwithstanding) to gather in front of St. Peter's Basilica. But I think it's frequently used as William suggested, and often with the subtextual put-down of others that David heard, in non-Catholic circles.

[Ed Pettibone]

They are doing it again this Year at Gore Mountain. http://www.goremountain.com/events/east ... se-service I never made that trek even when we lived at the foot of Gore, just too cold for me. I did attend some great sunrise services while living in Ft. Myers Florida.

[Tim Bonney]

[Haruo]

My guess is it is most often used by nonreligious journalists describing mass religious events in secular media. Be fun to see if you could devise a Google query to test my hypothesis.

[Ed Pettibone]

[Haruo]

No, I don't think that that quite does it, Ed. For one thing, "Faithful" in that list is followed by its noun, "Citizenship", and not preceded by the article "the". For another, all the adjectives in the list are capitalized. And for a third, it's one instance in an Information-Superhighwaysized bucket of instances.

[Tim Bonney]

I did a search for "a meeting of the faithful" and a large percentage were RCC. But there was a Promise Keepers site that used the term, a Jewish site, an Orthodox site and a smattering of other sites including a political site or two.

I didn't see it used by Protestants.

[Haruo]

What does that say about Protestant fidelity?

[Tim Bonney]