Liturgy

You know, as a child, I loved finally *understanding* the words in common mass prayers and decoding them. This was true for some of the language of songs, too, because some of it was archaic and just older, mysterious. But always there was the beautiful poetic language.

My husband, probably within the last year "decoded" the Nicene Creed for me and how it proclaimed many of the ideas decided at the Council of Nicea that were far from settled ideas prior to that time and at the time of the Council.

This brings not just new understanding to what we say in the Nicene Creed but an awareness that for all times, as the church changed and evolved, there have been people who won and who lost the discussion on what would be our cherished ideals.

I could sense as a young child that as the church went through Vatican II, my mother particularly felt like something was being lost in the church. Now I look regretfully at what is being lost.

But what is happening? Are we railing against change because change is inherently hard? I'm going to plug the current edition of _National Catholic Reporter_. I thought it was a homerun edition. The article _Can we Talk?_ gives an over-view of a Dominican conference that focused on preaching. It quotes Fr. Timothy Radcliffe reprising his book and talking about two broad camps of Catholicism:

"Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, master of the order from 1992 to 2001 and now a member of the Dominican community at Blackfriars, Oxford, England, led the symposium by invoking the nonviolent spirituality and strategy of Gandhi’s Satyagraha -- truth force combined with love force -- to effect transformation on behalf of human liberation. Radcliffe’s trademark flying hair and rumpled clothing -- evidence that he had just stepped off one airplane and was about to depart on another -- distracted only momentarily from the charm and intellectual precision that have made him a global voice for church unity and an end to violence, including the verbal violence that has characterized so much recent church conflict.

In a reprise of his 2006 book What Is the Point of Being a Christian? Radcliffe described the struggle in the post-Vatican II church as between conservative “Communio Catholics,” who fear the loss of doctrinal clarity, tradition and identity, and progressive “Kingdom Catholics,” who fear getting stuck or going backward after living in the hope of a transformed church.

For Radcliffe, the church has always been about both preserving tradition and expanding mission. The Eucharist itself expresses the essential balance between gathering the faithful into the one bread (communio) and the mission to the world (kingdom). This single act of worship is never either/or, always both/and, a shared life that is always both coming home and going forth. The one eucharistic table shared by traditionalist and progressive Catholics is both home base and a point of departure for the church.

This balance is threatened by the internal quarrels now consuming the church. For Radcliffe, the primary sin that infiltrates humanity in the Book of Genesis is rivalry leading to fratricide, competition that justifies violence, often in the name of religion. For Jesus, to be holy as God is holy is to purge the heart of competition and distrust, subdue the ego and engage one another with love. True dialogue opens us to listen to others, seek common ground and feel empathy while we work out our differences."

See, I think poetman detects the coded messages of Radcliffe's "Communio Catholics". I think he's probably right about that. He misses the messages from the post-Vatican II text that were aimed at "Kingdom Catholics".

I hope the church is big enough to put something there for all of us. We are two halves of the whole; we complement and complete each other.

I agree with Bishop Trautman that our liturgical prayers should be in good American language. The key word here is "good." I also agree in part with the poet who said we should give ourselves some credit for understanding "big" words. Yes, the language of our prayers should be both understandable and beautiful.

I do not have any objection in principle to changes in the wording of the Mass prayers. I only fear that this is being done to reign in the churches of the English speaking world.

The creed is full of theoreticals spelled out as absolutes,It wou;d be helpful if the church understood it's limits in the workings of the divine. What is left is poetical and the church does as well in that field. What's with 'the right hand of the Father'. It is just a meaningless ,grounds for excommunication,ritual.
What about 'I accept the obligation to help the poor' 'I have a mission to create peace' 'I accept that paternal and maternal activities come with obligations' 'I will boycott companies who exploit labor in foreign lands'or ' I will educate my self in Christian values'
If there has to be a commitment prayer after tha Gospel and Homily let it be meaningful.

AMERICA
MAY 21, 2007

How Accessible Are the New Mass Translations?
By Donald W. Trautman

The International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) proposes the following translated text:

Accept, O Lord, these gifts,
and by your power change them
into the sacrament of salvation,
in which the prefiguring sacrifices of the Fathers have an end
and the true Lamb is offered,
he who was born ineffably of the inviolate Virgin.
—Prayer over the gifts,
Season of Advent

Can We Participate?

The above citation is a proclaimed prayer. What will the person in the pew hear and comprehend? Will the words “prefiguring sacrifices of the Fathers” and “born ineffably of the inviolate Virgin,” for example, resonate with John and Mary Catholic? Is this prayer intelligible, proclaimable, reflective of a vocabulary and linguistic style from the contemporary mainstream of U.S. Catholics? Is the liturgical language accessible to the average Catholic and our youth? Does this translated text lead to full, conscious and active participation? I think not.

This prayer is not an isolated example. While the latest ICEL translations for the proper of the saints and the commons are improved, we still encounter the following: “O God, who suffused blessed John with the spirit of mercy” (Collect for March 8) and “Cyril, an unvanquished champion of the divine motherhood” (Collect for June 27) and odd expressions like “What you have charged us to believe will taste sweet to the heart” (Collect for April 21). Does the heart “taste?”

The Right Language

All liturgy is pastoral. If translated texts are to be the authentic prayer of the people, they must be owned by the people and expressed in the contemporary language of their culture. To what extent are the new prayers of the Missal truly pastoral? Do these new texts communicate in the living language of the worshiping assembly? How will John and Mary Catholic relate to the new words of the Creed: “consubstantial to the Father” and “incarnate of the Virgin Mary”? Will they understand these words from the various new Collects: “sullied,” “unfeigned,” “ineffable,” “gibbet,” “wrought,” “thwart”? Will the assembly understand the fourth paragraph of the Blessing of Baptismal Water, which has 56 words (in 11 lines) in one sentence? In the preface of the chrism Mass, one sentence runs on for 10 lines. How pastoral are the new collects, when they all consist of a single sentence, containing a jumble of subordinate clauses and commas?

Will the priest and people understand the words of Eucharistic Prayer 2: “Make holy these gifts, we pray, by the dew of your Spirit”? This translation was among the top 10 texts that the U.S. bishops in their consultation considered most problematic, but still ICEL did not change it.

In the new missal you will hear awkward phrases like “We pray you bid.” This is not American English. Ponder these concrete examples and judge for yourself.

What happened to the liturgical principles of the “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy”? The council fathers of Vatican II stated: “Texts and rites should be drawn up so that they express more clearly the holy things which they signify; the Christian people, as far as possible, should be able to understand them with ease and to take part in them fully, actively and as it befits a community” (No. 21). Note the words “with ease.” This is the norm, the expressed wish in the constitution. This is a prerequisite that calls not just for the accuracy of translated texts but for the easy understanding of those texts.

The council fathers of Vatican II had a pastoral sense and focused on John and Mary Catholic. Why have the new translations become so problematic, so non-pastoral? What is the basic difficulty?

Consult and Communicate!

The drafting of principles and norms of translation for vernacular languages should have involved the broadest consultation of episcopal conferences as well as liturgical and biblical scholars. But the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments in 2001 issued a 36-page instruction on liturgical translation without collegial or collaborative effort. The cardinal and bishop members of the congregation were not consulted by mail or in a plenary session. The Pontifical Biblical Commission was not formally consulted. The episcopal conferences were not consulted.

When the instruction Liturgiam Authenticam (On the Use of Vernacular Languages in the Publication of the Books of the Roman Liturgy) was issued in 2001, the executive board of the Catholic Biblical Association stated that the document “contains provisions detrimental to solid biblical scholarship…and advocates policies that make it difficult to produce good vernacular translations.” Those were prophetic words that have now been verified. Did anyone listen?

Liturgiam Authenticam rightly stresses fidelity and exactness in rendering liturgical and biblical texts into the vernacular. For the authors of Liturgiam Authenticam, however, that means “as literal as possible.” That was not the mind of St. Jerome, the greatest Doctor of the Sacred Scriptures. Jerome was a precise translator but not a literalist. He himself said, “If I translate word by word, it sounds absurd.”

Liturgical translations must communicate. If liturgical language is divorced from the reality of culture, communication is impossible.

What is missing in the present moment, unfortunately, is the voice of liturgical scholars and the voice of the laity, the assembly. I was dismayed when I recently learned that our liturgists—professionals with degrees and experience, teaching at our academic institutions—did not have access to the work of ICEL. No wonder there has been such limited public scrutiny of these translated texts. Some bishops have consulted individual liturgical experts, but the learned societies of liturgists have been excluded. It would be pastorally prudent and so beneficial to translated texts destined for the worshiping assembly if the laity were involved in the preliminary process for judging the ICEL texts. The proposed translated liturgical prayers, for example, could be proclaimed to lay groups to elicit their initial reactions: What did they hear; what did they understand; did these texts lift their minds and hearts to God? Such input would be helpful to translators in perfecting the proclaimability of texts.

If the language of the liturgy is inaccessible, how can liturgy catechize and convey the reality of the living, risen Son of God in the Eucharist? If the language of the liturgy is a stumbling block to intelligibility and proclaimability, then the principle lex orandi, lex credendi is severely compromised. If the language of the liturgy does not communicate, how can people fall in love with the greatest gift of God, the Eucharist?

Church of God, judge for yourselves. Speak up, speak up!

The Most Rev. Donald W. Trautman, bishop of Erie, Pa., is chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy.

Love, John

See my website: Sacred Quest at www.torchlake.com/poetman

I would compare the use of such words as 'consubstantial' and 'incarnate' to the use of specific terms here, that have sent some to the dictionary. These words have a more precise meaning, and it would not hurt anyone to look them up. (incarnate for example, means made flesh, not born. With the belief that life starts before birth, the distinction is important.)

As far as the more archaic words or phrases ('wrought', 'dew of your Spirit') I have confidence that the average American is not so dense as Bishop Trautman seems to believe. Yes, our education system may be that bad, but we really do have the ability to understand big words (as a poet I would think that you would embrace the range of the language, the fuller expression and nuance that the "American" language has sacrificed.)

BTW, much of the good bishop's concern in mute, as the ICEL draft of the ordinary has been approved, both by the Vatican and (with few amendments) by the USCCB.

My common understanding of substance is material. What is the material of God? But if truth be told, there are probably fewer than five words in the whole creed that I understand anyway.