Let's swear off swearing.

Thanks to The Sopranos and rapper Eminem, four-letter words barely seem to shock anyone anymore. But plenty of Catholics find all this blue language pretty offensive. Mike Latona suggests our society needs its collective mouth washed out with soap.

"DO I BELIEVE MY EYES?" THE ELDERLY LADY remarked, shaking her head, after we exchanged the sign of peace. My wife and I had been wondering the same thing for the past 45 minutes. Two rows in front of us was a boy, about 13 years old, wearing a T-shirt laced with profanities.

In church. At Sunday Mass.

At first, I hadn't taken particular notice of the boy. He sat with his mother, father, and two brothers--and, if you removed the shirt from the equation, you might have thought, "What a nice Catholic family?"

The T-shirt told the fictitious story of a man with an Italian accent so thick, his attempts at conversation were taken as cursing. For instance, when he said "Norfolk, Virginia," others thought he was saying he didn't you-know-what with a woman named Virginia. And so on.

Even at the age of 40, I now realize that it's still possible for my innocence to be shattered. To encounter vulgar language at church? It did more than anger me. It hurt.

As it so happened, the incident occurred at my childhood parish in Rochester, New York. My parents were in town last summer from Florida, and we thought it would be nice to visit the church that held so many warm memories.

How ironic, I thought, that this scene unfolded right next to the confessionals. The same ones where, some 30 years earlier, I had been expected to tell Monsignor Duffy if I had used bad language. I was to be sorry for those sins and say some Hail Marys and Our Fathers.

As Mass began, I tried to get the boy's attention but he wouldn't turn around. I told one of his brothers how I felt about the shirt. What happened after Mass was equally upsetting. The mother came up and semi-apologized, agreeing that her boy shouldn't have worn the shirt to church--but she was angry that I had voiced my displeasure. "You should have come to me; you made him feel bad," she said. Gee, how did she suppose my family and the people around me had felt throughout Mass?

What, exactly, is going on here?

I READILY ADMIT THAT I CURSE OCCASIONALLY. I'M NOT proud of it, and I don't preplan it. Usually these words fly out in anger or some other agitated state. In fact, some of the most virtuous, mild-mannered people I know have cursed in my presence, priests included. For that matter, I'm sure that many a Sunday churchgoer has uttered some fancy language even before leaving the parking lot, if post-Mass traffic is moving too slowly for his or her liking.

People who swear have a long list of available verbiage, some of which goes back to biblical times. Cursing, as it was regarded then, meant wishing a curse on someone--invoking supernatural forces to bring harm to an enemy. To swear was, in religious terms, to take the Lord's name in vain--to be blasphemous. Most words that would be considered profanity, vulgarity, obscenity, cussing, or cursing have existed for many centuries.

So I'm not expecting the world to immediately cease this behavior. As my good friend Father John Reif said many years ago, "Michael, most people who hit their thumb with a hammer aren't likely to say, `Oh golly, well, that sure hurt.'"

On the other hand, I was raised to believe that any kind of swearing is just plain wrong, so I didn't swear as a child. Once I began living in college dorms, though, I realized that a lot of people didn't believe what I did. I also learned that it's as easy to catch the swearing bug as the common cold. Just hang around long enough with people who do it, and soon the words are apt to slip past your own lips.

The epidemic, so to speak, has spread greatly in the United States, contends author James V. O'Connor. In his book Cuss Control: The Complete Book on How to Curb Your Cursing, O'Connor argues that in recent decades swearing has risen "from the gutters and drifted into offices, and shifted from street corners into schools."

O'Connor says that swearing, once reserved socially for adult men, has become second nature for women and children as well. I tend to agree, as the incident at Mass seems to prove.

HAS OUR CULTURE REALLY BECOME SO DESENSITIZED THAT swearing makes its way through the doors of a church and people are oblivious to its impact? Maybe I shouldn't be all that surprised. Between cable television, videotape rentals, the Internet, and Hollywood's determination to continually test ethical boundaries, there's far more access to foul language than ever before.

We've come a long way from "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," wouldn't you say? Even as recently as the 1970s, it was still a big deal when "damn" and "hell" were uttered on All in the Family. But these days, "ass," "bitch," "bastard," "pissed off," and "sucks" are all over TV.

With the birth of cable TV's South Park, vulgarities now fly out of the mouths of child cartoon characters. The show is a hit, incidentally. Tune in to The Jerry Springer Show, and the bleeper goes off for seemingly every other word. There's not much left to the imagination. Just read the guests' lips. How long before the bleeper is phased out? When the language turns blue, audiences whoop and holler and laugh and applaud. What is it we're celebrating?

"Swearing is access to status, to belonging, to doing something provocative," says Father Fred Betti, S.J., religious studies chairman at McQuaid Jesuit High School in Rochester. However, he adds, "Cursing and wishing a person ill comes back to the general concept of not respecting others, or respecting one's self."

Each year Betti plays an obscenity-laden tape of comedian Andrew Dice Clay and asks his students at the all-male school what they think. Most boys, he reports, initially laugh but become bored by the tape's end. This proves, he maintains, that there isn't much to enjoy about swearing once the shock value wears off.

O'Connor goes a few steps further, writing that foul language causes harm to yourself and those around you: "It doesn't earn us respect and admiration, enhance our reputation, exhibit an intelligence and maturity, display even a fraction of our accepted vocabulary, reflect strong character, get us romantically connected, help us solve disagreements, set a positive example, or help get us hired or promoted."

Catholics, Betti says, should weigh all kinds of foul language while taking their examination of conscience before Confession. He adds that adults are not exempt from what is commonly called "adult" language: "It never really is acceptable."

Which raises a key point. We may be offended at what comes out of the mouths--or off the shirts--of babes. But who makes the movies? Who produces the TV shows? Adults. Good or bad, subtle or blatant, intentionally or not, we set the example.

There's a great scene in the 1983 movie A Christmas Story, where the principal character, Ralphie, is being punished for saying the "F" word. He muses that even though his dad uses the word 10 times a day, it is he, Ralphie, who gets his mouth washed out with soap.

Difficult as it may be, fellow adults, let's consider biting our tongues the next time we're tempted to swear. Look around and see if there are kids within hearing distance. Are there other people, as well, who would find your language offensive? Do you really need to swear at all? Does it really make you feel better?

I also suggest monitoring the entertainment that comes into your home for language content. Discuss the effects of foul language in detail with your children; don't just threaten to stick a bar of soap in their mouths.

Meanwhile, O'Connor suggests that an attitude adjustment--being more optimistic and patient, monitoring anger control--can greatly help to reduce your own swearing quotient.

From my perspective, it's worth the effort to avoid caving in to this societal trend. Let's not take the easy,way out by conceding that foul language is so pervasive that it's not worth fighting.

"That's an excuse," Betti says. "Do you lower the standards of decency just because that's what people do?"

Not in my book.

Advance copies of Sounding Board are mailed to a sample of U.S. CATHOLIC subscribers. Their answers to questions on the topic of this Sounding Board article and a representative selection of their comments follow in Feedbock.

By MIKE LATONA, a staff writer at the Catholic Courier in Rochester, New York.