Some Mindset List items are so horrific that they break the bounds of the English language:

A Catholic Pope has always visited a mosque. (Class of 2023, #55)

This is not an idiomatic English sentence. A normal native speaker of English would never string these words together. It hurts the head of this native English speaker to read them.

Yet this strange word combination showed up on the Marist Mindset List—the product of at least seven people, some of whom must be native English speakers, viz. the three usual suspects from Beloit, Marist’s School of Liberal Arts dean Martin Shaffer, director media relations Julia Fishman, and “a group of faculty members at Marist.”

I don’t expect a college administrator to write coherent English sentences, but shouldn’t a director media relations be able to spot a problem with item #55?

Although a native speaker may have trouble with that sentence, anyone familiar with the Mindset List can translate it into acceptable English: Approximately 18 years ago, the pope visited a mosque.

Indeed, in May 2001, Pope John Paul II visited the Great Omayyad Mosque in Damascus, Syria.

Learning of this event, a curious person might ask questions such as these: Did this incident lead Pope John Paul II or his successors to visit other mosques? Did this visit change Catholic-Islamic relationships, decreasing tension between two faiths or increasing dialogue? Did the experience of growing up as a Catholic or Muslim change because of this visit or its aftermath? Do 18-year-olds care about this event? Do they even know about it?

If any of these questions occured to you, I can say definitively that you are not involved in creating the Mindset List.

Such questions are completely beside the point of the Mindset List, which is to list things that happened 18 years ago. That’s how the Beloit MIndset List worked and, sadly, it’s now how the Marist Mindset List works as well.