From a reader:
Sometimes you write that we should pray for strength for the Pope but confusion for his enemies. Shouldn’t you pray for the conversion the his enemies?
Okay. Pray for conversion. By all means.
Perhaps I have read 19th century English novels, Patrick O’Brien, and both the King James and Douay versions of the Bible enough that some of turns of phrase stick in my head.
“Confusion to one’s enemies” is a constant prayer in the Scriptures and it is what God inflicts on those who are doing something in defiance of His will. It also came to be a standard expression in English, probably because of the KJV.
“Confusion” and the related “confound” are both from Latin, of course. Confundo means basically “to pour, mingle, or mix together”. By extension it means that, when things are poured together they become jumbled and confused, disordered. Thus there is a moral notion of dissaray, intellectual confusion, ineffectiveness. Someone who has been “confounded” has been thwarted in his scheme, has been demonstrated to be wrong.
This is what God did to the people who built the Tower of Babel: he confused them and their wicked goal by scrambling their speech. In English, “confound” concerns making someone confused or defeating them, or even refuting a bad argument.
In the Psalms we have myriad references to confusion and confounding.
Thus, in Psalms 70:13 in the older numbering we find: “Let them be confounded and come to nothing that detract my soul; let them be covered with confusion and blame that seek my hurt.”
In Jeremiah 8:12 we have this confounded confusion: “They are confounded, because they have committed abomination: yea rather they are not confounded with confusion, and they have not known how to blush: therefore shall they fall among them that fall; in the time of their visitation they shall fall, saith the Lord.”
In Acts 9:22 St. Paul gets to confuse people: “But Saul increased much more in strength and confounded the Jews who dwelt at Damascus, affirming that this is the Christ.”
And to the Corinthians Paul wrote (1 Cor 1:27): “But the foolish things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the wise: and the weak things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the strong.”
In the Douay Bible you can find all sorts of uses of confound.
So, in sum, sometimes I use archaic language.
But by all means, pray that the Pope’s enemies, after being confounded, be converted as well.