ROME: 13th October '04 --  A headline bound to gain attention.  If you think it concerns two US contenders for high office, then you are wrong.....but also right!  It is not the contenders, but the 'high office' which is the object of concern.

    'Presidency' is a word to be a little careful with.  Of course it is an English word, and applies very nicely to the high office of president, but that's the point.  It is predominantly intended to apply either to the role held by an individual, or the period of time of that individual in office.  It is not, normally, applied to group leadership, not in English.  In Italian, yes.  The equivalent term 'presidenza' may apply equally to the office of an individual, or to the leadership group surrounding that individual.

    You see, it has begun to creep into Salesian English usage only in the last thirty years or so: R. 121-4, to begin with, all in reference to General Chapters.  No surprise, then, to also find it used this way in the Acts of GC25 in the Rector Major's introductory comments.  All these uses of the term translate the Italian 'presidenza', some correctly, others (R. 124) not so.  It also appears in R. 163 but in its correct application to the presidency of the Rector, and in the Ratio, the translator could have used it, also correctly, but neatly side-stepped with the verb 'preside' (Ratio10.5.4.1).

    What is occurring here, one suspects, is a simple case of 'false friends'.  The -za ending of many Italian words finds a -cy equivalent in English.  But people overlook another reality - the semantic breadth of those apparently equivalent terms can differ, and often does.

    Now, having said all that, the Mormons have contributed the wider sense to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.  That Church has a Presidency comprising president and several councillors.  There are already indications that the EU is heading this way with a 'rotating presidency', which involves more than one person, obviously, the difference being that only one is actually 'president' at any given moment.  Switzerland, not a part of the EU, has a similar setup, but they don't use English!  Hobson Jobson (India's famous Anglo-English dictionary) stays with British usage  - the restricted meaning.

    So once again we Salesians are in the vanguard of progress, pushing words into places where they need to tread gingerly, at least for now!  Should we be concerned?  I think so.  At a recent gathering of the Salesian Family, the Italian word 'Giunta' was in regular use to describe the next level down from the 'presidenza' - a steering committee, for all practical purposes.  In Italian there is absolutely no problem with this word, same for Portuguese where it becomes, yes, 'Junta'.  Now if that word slips into English as easily as 'presidency' we are really in trouble!