Capitalizing pronouns (e.g. he, him, his, you, your etc.) referring to the Blessed Trinity has not been a widespread practice in Christian tradition. In fact, these pronouns are never capitalized in the source documents. They are not capitalized in the Greek text of the Scriptures. Neither did St. Jerome capitalize them when he translated these texts into Latin Vulgate.
Even as the biblical texts were translated into English, the pronouns remained in the lower case. This is true of both Catholic and Protestant translation to the Bible. The Douai Reims Bible did not use them, neither did the King James. Neither do over thirty current or old translations that I consulted online. Outside the Scriptures, official English translations of Church documents and texts do not use the upper case for the pronouns either. For example the English translation of the Catechism of the Council of Trent used lowercase, as does the current Catechism of the Catholic Church. Thus we see that the use of the lowercase for pronouns, even pronouns referring to the Divine Persons are always in the lowercase, beginning with the very biblical text. Some years ago, at least in English-speaking countries, there was a pious practice set up of using the upper case for pronouns referring to members of the Trinity. However this practice was neither widespread nor ancient. As for God's name being holy, this is absolutely true. When referring to God by name, or proper title, we should capitalize these proper nouns. Thus, Father, Son and Holy Spirit are capitalized, as is the name of Jesus. But pronouns are not proper names, they are by definition, words that stand for, or point back to proper nouns. One may well argue that such pronouns should be capitalized, but given the widespread and ancient practice to the contrary, one ought to be careful not to impugn motives of impiety for those who do not do so. |
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