The Mass of John XXIII?

Fox News in St.Louis reports an upsurge in the traditional mass in Latin among younger Catholics. The New Liturgical Movement reports this and provides a link to the actual broadcast.

The broadcast seems to be talking about the pre-1969 Latin liturgy not the current mass (sometimes referred to as the Novus Ordo mass) celebrated in Latin. It is not always 100% clear. The broadcast is pretty good however. Anytime I have been quoted in the media and they got half of it right, I have considered it a victory. The perfunctory "balance" by Fr. Richard McBrien is predictable. Like so many aging "progressives," he is increasingly irrelevant.

That said, there is a real difficulty in nomenclature.

The current mass is based on the missal that was issued in 1969 by Pope Paul VI. It was claimed to be necessary to implement the reforms mandated by the Second Vatican Council. It is variously called the Mass of Paul VI, the Novus Ordo mass, or the mass of the Missal of 1969. Fr. Martin Fox (Bonfire of the Vanities) even suggests at one point calling it the Pauline Mass. (Read Fr. Fox's very useful discussion of the issue.)

Referring to the "Latin mass" is ambiguous. The current mass can be celebrated in Latin, in fact that is the clear intent of Vatican II. Certainly the current mass in Latin with both the people and the priest facing God together would be a vast improvement over what many people suffer through in too many parishes today.

Many people want the restoration of the so called "Tridentine mass," typically by reverting to the Missal of 1962. This mass is sometimes called the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM), the Pian mass (after Pius V who issued the Missal implementing the reforms of the Council of Trent) or the Tridentine mass. The 1962 Missal was the latest (prior to Vatican II) revision of the mass in the form it took under Pius V's reforms. But do not be deceived. There was not some new rite developed after the Council of Trent. Calling it "Tridentine" is misleading. Pius V modestly and respectfully pared back to basics a 1,000+ year old rite. There was no break with the past. It developed organically from the practices of the Church in Rome in Peter and Paul's time and from the Jewish ritual that preceded it.

After the second Vatican council, a new missal was issued in 1965. One could argue that this Missal issued in 1965 (right after the Council) already met the requirements of the Council. If you hold to this position, you would argue that the very dramatic changes made in 1969, were not necessary.

Traditionalists who argue for going back to "The old Latin mass" typically call for restoring the Missal of 1962. This Missal was promulgated by Pope John XXIII. This was the mass as it was celebrated during Vatican II.

Rather than calling this the "Tridentine Mass," maybe we should refer to it as the Mass of John XXIII!

Why Is Benedict Popular?

Image from the Diocese of Penbroke (Ontario.)


My good friend Matt pointed out that our new pope does not smile as much as John Paul the Great. While my default image of Benedict has him smiling, much of the time his pictures show him quite intent, typically listening.

Yet we have on a good source, Sandro Magister, that he is even more popular that John Paul. (See Magister's post by clicking on the tittle link.)

How is that possible?

Pope Benedict XVI must be a press secretary's nightmare. Key talks he insists on writing himself and delivering unvetted. He normally speaks without notes quoting scripture and the church fathers from memory. If some American bishops use the word "pastoral" as a synonym for "a good manager and fund raiser," Benedict exemplifies a pastoral bishop in a way the early fathers would have recognized. He focuses on the person in front of him, he listens, and teaches in questions and answers. And his teaching is always rooted in Jesus and the scriptures.

He leads with his prose.

As Magister points out, he is the first theologian to become pope. Benedict told his fellow theologians, "the fundamental virtue for the theologian ... [is] the discipline of obedience to the truth." Explaining the words of his predecessor (1Pt 1:22) to his fellow theologians, he taught, "In other words, speaking in the hope of being applauded, governed by what people want to hear out of obedience to the dictatorship of current opinion, is considered to be a sort of prostitution: of words and of the soul. The ‘purity’ to which the Apostle Peter is referring means not submitting to these standards, not seeking applause, but rather, seeking obedience to the truth."

Oddly enough in this world where Pontius Pilate seems to rule ("Truth? What is that?") and where a Gresham's Law of words seems to prevail, the clarity of truth has appeal. "[F]or it is not we who speak in today's river of words, but it is the truth which speaks in us."

Why Did Jesus Need a "Host" That First Christmas?

The "heavenly host" as presented on Bible Universe. If you are fond of this image of the First Christmas, you may not want to read on.

Why Did Jesus Need a "Host" That First Christmas?

We know from Luke's gospel, as well as from many a Christmas carol, that Jesus was greeted by a "heavenly host." It was a member of that armed force who told the shepherds that He had been born.

"Host" is a most peculiar word. It and its cognates in our language and its brother and sister languages can have quite opposite meanings. Think of "hostile," hospitality," "She was a good and gracious host," "a hostile host confronted the king." In that last sentence, "host" means "army." It is precisely that meaning that is meant in English translations of Luke 2:13.

While the word "peace" most frequently comes to mind on the commemoration of the Prince of Peace's nativity, it was a most warlike bunch that announced his birth. Indeed I tempted to think that Luke 2:14 is a challenge and response: "Glory to God in the Highest!" "And peace to men of good will!" In other words, the first set of angel guards demanded a password from the next.

If these celestial warriors were singing, it was to keep in step as any army until modern times did. (Luke does not say they sang by the way.)

Why did Jesus need an armed guard? There were more than baaing sheep and curious shepherds abroad. The Prince of this World and his allies in it play for keeps. Ask the Holy Innocents.

Do not be misled by pictures of the pretty angels in flowing gauze on Christmas cards. These angels were armed to the hilt!

Did You Know Robison Caruso was Bowdlerized?

Did you know Robison Caruso was bowdlerized? No? Read Zaleski's "The Strange Shipwreck of Robinson Crusoe" published some years back in First Things by clicking on the link in the tittle of this post. We must protect our childr!n from obscene things like God, religion, and moral improvement.

Barth, the Protestant Rejection of Natural Law and English Gardens

J. Daryl Charles writes on Protestantism and Natural Law in the December First Things. I gained an interesting insight. With the Enlightenment came a wholly different view of nature. Nature is no longer an unruly, dangerous thing that is beautiful because it reflects the creative power of its Creator. Rather it is like an English garden: tidy and orderly, the work of man.

Whereas Issac Newton believed he could find orderly laws in the chaos of nature because he believe they reflected the work of nature's God, modern man believes nature is submissive because it obeys his own laws. Nature is made in Man's own image!

Modern man has a hard time believing that Aslan is not a tame animal. Indeed modern man does not believe anything disorderly or non-man made can happen in his English garden. Consequently, he, like Jesus' neighbors in Nazareth (Mt 13,53-8; Mk 6,1-6), does not believe in miracles. As a result, miracles happen mostly in places like Africa and Kansas.

Benedict: A Nightmarish Vision

A month or two ago, I had a dream or a vision.

Benedict was visiting somewhere, most likely the Holy Land or somewhere in the Mid-East. There were the usual crowds and media enterouage that accompany such a papal trip. Then before the world's cameras, a suicide bomber approached. While most of the crowd froze, Benedict ran to him and embraced him. tackling him to the ground, he said "I love you."

The scene dissolved into a horrendous melange of red and white.

Please pray for him on his trip to Turkey.

Vote: What kind of priests do you want?

Commonwealth has written an editorial about "Tomorrow’s Priests." It is based on a set of sociological studies about recently ordained priests.

One study contrasts two types of seminarians. The first (Commonwealth's good guys?) are described as: "A 'servant-leader' model ... emphasizes the collaborative elements of clerical leadership within the community. But the popularity of that model, ascendant in the 1960s, has waned.'"

The second type of seminarian (Commonwealth's bad guys?): "Recently ordained priests adhere to a 'cultic' model of the priesthood that stresses the essential difference between clergy and laity; the priest ... is seen as 'a man set apart whose job is providing the sacraments, teaching the Catholic Church’s doctrine, and being a model of faith and devotion.'”

I plan a thorough critique of the sociological studies underlying Commonwealth's editorial. Father John Trigilio, who appears on ETWN and is president of the Confraternity of Catholic Clergy, has given his own reply.

What type of priest do you think the church needs?

Booms, Technological Babbles and Busts

Milton Friedman died yesterday.

When I was in graduate school in the late 1960s, many of my peers were disciples of Mao and romanticized that thug Che Guevara. They carried around with them The Thoughts of Chairman Mao ("The Little Red Book") as if it were a badge of honor. I vividly remember the ugliness at the American Economic Association meetings when Friedman gave his Nobel Laureate lecture amid angry prrotests and demonstrations.

The "Little Green Book" (his Capitalism and Freedom) was the first book that made me think critically and creatively in economics. From today's vantage point, it appears to have won the long war with "The Little Red Book." His ideas have seized the commanding heights. It is a great irony that the best words to put on his tomestone would be those of John Maynard Keynes, the dominant intellectual force in economics from 1936 to the 1970s and the king whom Friedman deposed:

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood . . . Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."

- J.M. Keynes, General Theory, ch. 24.

Today's Wall Street Journal is a must read. Not only is there a lead editorial on Uncle Milton (no surprise) and a front page article, but they published a new article by Friedman himself ("Why Money Matters") on the editorial page that is a gem. It could as easily have been titled "Booms, Technological Babbles and Busts." Personally, I can't imaging still writing so lucidly and perceptively at 94. In fact, still breathing would be an accomplishment.

Fellow economist Michael Boskin leaves us with the image of Milton and Rose dancing at her birthday. The perfect signature on a full and fruitful life!

Pray for his soul and the wife who has lost a soulmate. May he be smiling down at us from the true commanding heights.

Death Comes For the Archbishop IV

"He was soon to be done with calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensive." -363." Willa Cather, Death Comes For the Archbishop (Thorndike, Me: Thorndike Press, 1984) p. 62.

Death Comes For the Archbishop III

I have just finished Willa Cather's Death Comes For the Archbishop. It is a shame I took thirty years to read it. Cather, who died the year after I was born, creates a Santa Fe I recognize and, in Bishop Latour, a character worthy of Bishop Lamy.

Cather draws an insightful contrast between Fr. Joseph Vaillant and his companion and bishop, Jean Latour. Early in the book, she puts a most memorable sentence in the down-to-earth Fr. joseph Vaillant's mouth: "I noticed that scholars always manage to dig out something belittling." Willa Cather, Death Comes For the Archbishop (Thorndike, Me: Thorndike Press, 1984) p. 62.

Too true.

Death Comes For the Archbishop II: The New Mexico Sky

Willa Cather's description is clear, vibrant, and true. Images of New Mexico came tumbling back into my consciousness as I read her words. Consider how she captures that enormous sky:

"The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath was monotonous and still, – and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there under one's feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere anthills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!" Willa Cather, Death Comes For the Archbishop (Thorndike, Me: Thorndike Press, 1984) pp. 292-3.

Death Comes For the Archbishop I

I have just finished Willa Cather's Death Comes For the Archbishop. It is a shame I took thirty years to read it. Cather, who died the year after I was born, creates a Santa Fe I recognize and, in Bishop Latour, a character worthy of Bishop Lamy.

Cather draws an insightful contrast between Fr. Vaillant and his companion and bishop, Jean Latour. Early in the book, she puts a most memorable sentence in the down-to-earth Vaillant's mouth: "I noticed that scholars always manage to dig out something belittling." Willa Cather, Death Comes For the Archbishop (Thorndike, Me: Thorndike Press, 1984) p. 62.

Too true.

Thirty Eight Mulims respond to Benedict/Benedikt XVI

Pope Benedikt challenged both Muslims and secularists in address to the faculties at Regensburg on "Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections." The initial reaction from the Islamic world seemed negative and violent. A more reflective response came from a group of thirty eight moslem thought leaders from a variety of countries and including some very prominent names. As Sandro Magister puts it: "A Sprig of Dialogue Has Sprouted in Regensburg." Should a hymn of that tittle be set to Palistrina?

Are Liberals Intolerant?

I have often felt that liberals are not very liberal. That is too much of a generalization, true. But whether we are talking of Catholics who characterize themselves as "liberal' or "progressive," or we are speaking of liberals in the sense of those on the left side of the American political spectrum, far too many get rapidly wroth at the very mention of opposing views or the opponents who might hold them.

Two weeks ago I was graced with meeting some marvelous young theology faculty of orthodox inclinations who teach at Catholic institutions. They were in dread that they might be forced out of their intellectual closets. They perceived the consequences for tenure, promotion, and feeding their families to be dire. Those who control the commanding heights of academe "in the Catholic tradition," define diversity in purely demographic terms.

In the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, Peggy Noonan observes that those on the political left "don't always recognize themselves to be bullying. So full of their righteousness are they that they have lost the ability to judge themselves and their manner." She notes"What is most missing from the left in America is an element of grace -- of civic grace, democratic grace, the kind that assumes disagreements are part of the fabric, but we can make the fabric hold together."

Noonan goes on to say "all this continues to come more from the left than the right in America." I believe that such behavior results from the triumph of ideology over our common humanity. Perhaps the left is more susceptible to the virus of ideology, but neither seems inoculated against it.

Certainly, the right too can fall under the Siren's spell. The only true prophylactic against her song is grace and the truth that St. Martin learned on that bitter cold night in Gaul: how we treat each other is how we treat Christ. Ideological man lets his model of the world blind himself to God's grace in the form of his fellow man. He is no longer restrained by the existential reality of the man or woman in front of him. He then ceases acting with that grace of civility due a fellow creature made in the divine image.

Ultimately, the civil order itself rests on "things unseen."

Peggy Noonan on Bob Woodward's new book

Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan's chief wordsmith reviewed Bob Woodward's new book, State of Denial in the Wall Street Journal. She writes, "This is a primer on how the executive branch of the United States works, or rather doesn't work, in the early years of the 21st century."

Particularly interesting is her insight into the attitude of key administration folks toward the State Department: "The young Reagan guys at the table grew up to be the heavyweights of the Bush era." When Reagan took on the Evil Empire, it was always the State Department that fought him and turned out wrong. I grew up reading National Review. I thought Bill Buckley made up "Foggy Bottom" as a derogatory nickname for the State Department. Little did I dream there was an actual piece of our national capital's geography with that name. The possiblity that the State Department might be right for once never occured to those "young Reagan guys!!"

The Word from KC: "Misappropriations of... the Council"

Whispers in the Logia noted Bishop Finn's homily to the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.

Is Reasonablesness Fundamental to the Faith?

Pope Benedikt's address at University of Regensburg, Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections, has created a firestorm of protest. Perhaps a Financial Times headline caught it best: "Dry speech that snowballed around the world."


In his lecture to his old colleagues, the pope quoted a dialogue between a fourteenth century Byzantine emperor (Manuel II "Palaeologus" or "Ancient Reason") and a Persian Moslem scholar. Palaeologus's six hundred year old words offended some Moslems. Their extreme, even violent, reaction is tragically ironic.

Benedikt's speech is both a plea for reasonableness and a warning to the West against its exclusion of religion from public dialogue. The pope told the university faculty: "In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions.

"A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realms of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures."

Benedikt quotes Manuel II Palaeologos as an occasion for citing his ancient argument that "Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. 'God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably ("syn logo") is contrary to God's nature.' "

The extremists who burned churches and who martyred Sister Leonella (Rosa Sgorbati) seem intent on confirming Manuel II's accusations. They reject the pope's call for a dialogue between cultures based on the inherent dignity of man and his fundamental right to life. Perhaps must offensive to these blood lusting fanatics is the pope's own fundamentalism: the proposition that "reason" or "reasonableness" (the German word is "Vernunft") is fundamental to faith because "Not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature."

To link to the original text in German, click on the title of this post.

My Song

"The Lord is my strength and my song;" Psalm 118

This verse caught me this morning. It is from yesterday's Office. The Psalm is building up to a rousing affirmation that the Lord (Yahweh) is the Psalmist's savior in a very martial sense. The victory in verse fifteen ("There are shouts of joy and victory in the tents of the just.") is a military victory.

I asked myself how then is "song" the parallel equivalent of "strength?" The image must be a troop of soldiers going to battle singing as they march: their song feeds their will to fight; the words and the melody motivate their deeds.

In times past, songs unified men in work. This is how gangs of men build the rhythm to work in unison. Think of sea shanties! Each crew member pulled on the beat to heave the anchor.

We have lost something. In the factory, it is the discordant noise of machinery that divides us. We have mechanized the battlefield. The liturgists after Vatican II industrialized the mass.

In the liturgy, the role of chant is to join us in the rhythm of prayer: the common work of praising the transcendent God. We must relearn to pray like men.

You Are a Blessing

My children are from that generation for whom their life was legally a choice. We have gone from the biblical "Honor thy Father and Mother to "Thanks Mom for not killing me."

Julia Gorin brings this existential poignancy to our hearts and minds with her column in the August 17th Wall Street Journal.

Read. Weep. Pray and say "Thanks."



Thanks to Grace and Generations for Life for this link.

Are the Shia and The Sunnis the Real Story?

Policy Making Toward The Mid-East

At the creation of Israel, U.S. policy in the Mid-East seemed dominated by drift and the demands of demestic politics. Over the next five decades our perceived self interest in the Cold War dictated our policy. Lately, terrorism, domestic politics, and the ideology of democracy have dominated our policy.

The time has come to understand the theological substance that lies beneath the vagaries of the region's politics. This would provide policymakers a much firmer foundation for understanding the dynamics of the Mid-East. This post gives you, my reader, a jumpstart.

The Reading List

Masood Farivar reviewed Vali Nasr's new book The Shia Revival in today's Wall Street Journal. The Iranian born Nasr teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. His father, Seyyed Hosein Nasr teaches at GW.

Vali Nasr has made quite a splash lately. He has briefed some of the movers and shakers in Washington (an event reported on the front page of the Wall Street Journal) and published a major article in Foreign Affairs. Sandro Magister, one of the keenest observors of international affairs and the leading vaticanologist, provides a helpful analysis and summary of Nasr's arguments.

Magister adds an useful analysis in Repubblica, "Iran's Hegemony" by Khaled Fouad Allam, translated from the Italian. He tells us that "Khaled Fouad Allam is an Algerian-born expert on Islam who now lives in Italy where he teaches at the universities of Trieste and Urbino. He is held in high esteem by the Church of Rome and what he has to say easily finds ears that listen."

I doubt that it has occurred to either the realists or the idealists that make policy in Foggy Bottom and on Pennsylvania Avenue they need to know theology. As professor Kirk exclaimed to the Pevensies, "What do they teach them in those schools these days?"

Will Liberals Go the Way of the Shakers?

Someone has now done the numbers: Liberals have fewer children than conservatives.


The data are based on the 2004 General Social Survey. Professor Arthur C. Brooks (Maxwell School of Public Affairs, Syracuse University) calculates a "'fertility gap' of 41%." Professor Brooks' statistical vision of the future is enough to give Howard Dean strategic nightmares.

There are more fundamental things than politics. The Survey classifies people as politically liberal or conservative, yet my hunch is that analyzing the fecundity of theologically liberal and theologically traditional Americans would produce a similar result.

Why the difference?

One explanation can be found in Professor Brooks' quote from San Francisco Chronicle columnist, Mark Morford, who opines, "Maybe the scales are tipping to the neoconservative, homogenous right in our culture simply because they tend not to give much of a damn for the ramifications of wanton breeding and environmental destruction and pious sanctimony, whereas those on the left actually seem to give a whit for the health of the planet and the dire effects of overpopulation." In his Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, Brooks does not attribute the quotation, presumably to protect the guilty.

Perhaps a better explanation is optimism. Dr. George Richmond was a dear friend and true neighbor of mine when we lived in New Britain. We agreed on virtually nothing having to do with politics or religion, but never had a rancorous word. George once told me that it was a great act of courage to bring a child "into this world." (Grace was born in New Britain.)

Two views from the shed

If you see this world now as the only garden the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve will ever have, the future may seem bleak and children a pollution of that garden. If this world is a play and God is the screenwriter however, there is cause for optimism. More importantly, there is a world that becomes more and real than this poor imitation, if only we have the grace to follow Aslan higher up and higher in and we have the will and the courage to accept that grace.

Sacrosanctum Concilium and the Reform of the Liturgy

The Fellowship of Catholic Scholars’ 29th Annual Convention will be in Kansas City, MO Sept 22-24, 2006. Sacrosanctum Concilium and the Reform of the Liturgy is the title and theme of the 2006 meeting. It will be held at the Hilton Kansas City (MO) Airport Hotel. All sessions will focus on the liturgy: sacred music, art and architecture, liturgical texts and translation, and the theology and mission of Catholic liturgy.

It will start with mass at noon, Friday, with Bishop Robert Finn (Kansas City and St. Joseph) presiding and the principal homilist. Closing prayers will be 11:30 Sunday.

There will be an address by Malcolm Ranjith (it is not clear to me whether that is in person.) Among the other speakers are Hellen Hull Hitchcock, James Maroney (Executive Director of the Bishops' Committee on the Liturgy), Russell Shaw, James Hitchcock, and Duncan Stroik. Duncan Stroik is my favorite architect. They are also recruiting a schola if any of you would be willing lend your voice.

You can find it all on the Fellowship’s website:

Fellowship of Catholic Scholars

Kansas City was the site of the first Fellowship meeting. I felt privileged at the Arlington meeting a few years ago to kneel next to the Hitchcocks while Fr. Ronald Lawler, OFM Cap and 36 other priests concelebrated mass. That was one of the last times I saw Fr. Lawler. Monsignor George Kelly was too ill to attend. Both can now intercede for the Fellowship from a much better vantage point, nearer the Father’s throne.

Bishop Roche Reminds Us that the New Translation is Back-to-Basics

Amy Welborn (http://amywelborn.typepad.com/openbook/2006/08/truth_and_poetr.html ) points us to an article in the Tablet by Bishop Arthur Roche. Bishop Roche is the bishop of Leeds, England, and Chairman of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy. In the Tablet article, he tells us why we needed a new translation of the Roman liturgy.

Too many of the new translation's critics forget something: the original rendering into English which we have now used (and been abused by) these last thirty five years was a stopgap measure at best.

If you own your own place, you know how stopgap fixes work. A cabinet door breaks. You nail a board across it to hold it until you can get the proper stuff from the hardware store to fix it. One trip, two trips, three trips to your local hardware store and somehow there is always the one item you forget to get. Ten years pass and what was supposed to be temporary has literally become part of the woodwork.

Unfortunately these things get fixed properly when it comes time to sell the house. Thus it is someone else who enjoys the fruit of our labor. Or to borrow Jesus' even more rural metaphor: someone else reaps where we have sown.

Our children will prosper with the newer, more solemn, and more accurate translation, while we live with the ugly makeshift one.

From the Spirit of the Liturgy

After the second Vatican Council there were a great many changes (“reforms”) made to the Roman Catholic mass and the church’s liturgy. Now there is a growing momentum for a reform of the reform and support appears to coming from the very top of the hierarchy. Pope Benedikt (the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) is the intellectual father of the reform of the reform.

Why do we need a reform of the reform? What can we expect from the call by Vatican II to reform the liturgy of the Roman Rite? Here is some background from a very personal point of view.

Through most of the twentieth century, there was something called the liturgical movement (in German, die Liturgische Bewegung.) In the years prior to the Council, a great many good things were being done. Scholars were rediscovering the depths of meaning in the liturgy. They were studying the history of the liturgy. Sacred music was being rediscovered and reformed. Here and there the liturgical movement was spreading to a few churches. I was in high school 1959-63. We did dialogue masses in Latin with the congregation doing the responses aloud. Chant was being revived. Unfortunately this spread of the movement to the pews was much less than a mustard seed and a far cry from a mustard tree.

The bishops of the world met with the Pope in an ecumenical council from 1962-1965 at the Vatican. The first major document adopted by the Council was Sacrosanctum Concilium ( http://www.adoremus.org/SacrosanctumConcilium.html ), the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. In 1969 the Vatican issued a new missal and General Instruction to reform the Roman Catholic liturgy. This was translated into English in 1970. These changes, the translation, and the actual implementation of the new mass and liturgy were directed by the “experts,” middle level bureaucrats in the dioceses and their counterparts in the universities and in the national ecclesiastical organizations. These liturgists took no quarter.

My comments to these “reforms” grow from my own personal experience of the mass as translated into English in the U.S. Personally I feel the bureaucrats who implemented the Constitution on the Liturgy betrayed the liturgical movement and defiled the liturgy itself. I have shed many tears over the vandalism that was done in the name of the Council.

Still I have no illusions: the mass as performed in the U.S. in my youth was in need of reform. Not the radical reform of Paul V after the Council of Trent nor the vandalism of the liturgists after Vatican II, but the organic growth, pruning and restoration that would have made richer and more meaningful the relationship between the people (the "plebs" to use the Council's word) and the clergy and their God as expressed in their praise and adoration. I believe the people’s parts needed to be restored to them (in Latin.) The masses should all be sung (chanted.) The rest of the family is skeptical that the mass would be more meaningful in Latin and using chant (both advocated in Sacrosanctum Concilium.) My daughter Brigid has just returned from Slovakia. There she was a fellow at the Slovak Seminar on the Free Society with Michael Novak. She told me they had mass every day sung in Latin. Experiencing done well convinced her that there may be something to this after all.

The reform of the reform is a new liturgical movement that seeks to do what the Council actually said should be done as opposed to what the liturgists actually did do.

But the promise of the liturgical movement was more than just renewing the liturgy. The liturgy should join scripture as a source of our spiritual life and our theological understanding. According to then Cardinal Ratzinger, the liturgical movement in Germany was started by one little book by Fr. Romano Guardini, S.J., Vom Geist der Liturgie. The German means “From the Spirit of the Liturgy.”

There is a Latin phrase, lex orandi lex credendi, that is often misused. Search the Internet and you will be overwhelmed with the number of hits. It has come to mean “What we pray is what we believe.” The implication is that liturgists can change what we do in liturgy and replace what we believe from revelation with what we “experience” in our “community celebrations.” Quite the contrary, the Latin maxim was first proposed as an argument against heresy. What we pray in the mass provides proof of what we believe in. The original quote attributed to Pope St. Celestine in 422 A.D. and probably written by Prosper of Aquataine was “Legem credendi statuit lex orandi.” In other words, the ancient rites give us evidence of what we believe in. Guardini says this quite plainly: “The liturgy, the lex orandi, is, according to the old proverb, the law of faith—the lex credendi—as well. It is the treasure-house of Revelation.”

Thus there is a very personal payoff from studying the liturgy. Prayerful reading and meditating on the liturgical texts will deepen our faith. This goal was at the very heart of the liturgical movement before the vandals hijacked it. This is the ultimate pastoral promise of the reform of the reform.

Hope is a theological virtue and thus I am an optimist. I believe in Christ’s promise that the Spirit will be our paraclete. The first Vatican Council did not bear fruit until forty years after it ended. We are now experiencing the blossoming of the fruits of the second Vatican Council. We are now led by the last great man of the Council, a man deeply in love with the liturgy of the Roman Rite. Benedikt, before he became Pope, wrote very thoughtfully and beautifully about the liturgy.

Please pray for him.

[Originally posted 7-18-06, republished 7-20-06]

The Irish Factor in the Translation Wars

Note: The U.S. Catholic bishops voted to adopt with numerous amendments the translation of the mass proposed by the International Commission for English in the Liturgy. Amy Welborn explains the issues well. The NCR has a rather unfriendly editorial on the subject.

Let’s say you are a church bureaucrat. You don’t like the new international translation of the mass. You want to influence your bishop against it. What do you whisper in his ear?

First, you tell him that those meddlesome bureaucrats in Rome are trying to tell him and his fellow American bishops how to translate the mass. You could also tell him that it is that pope isolated in the Vatican that is the problem. But you better know your audience before trying any such risky tactics. Of course, if you have been managing your boss well, he would never think of you as a meddlesome bureaucrat.

Second, remind him of how mad the folks in the pews got when all the changes in the mass were made thirty five years ago. He will not want to repeat that again! Of course, couch it in terms of his pastoral concern for his flock. Don’t remind him that you (and maybe he) were on the side of the bureaucrats who made a hash of the original translation in the first place.

Third, and this is the ultimate winner, tell him that the new translation is “so very British!” The American hierarchy traditionally was dominated by the Irish and their descendants. Like the old political bosses, the sons of the old sod had the advantage of language in an immigrant church and they were excellent infighters in ecclesiastical politics. The odds are still good that any given bishop is at least partly of Irish descent. The one thing they all have in common is a dislike for the British.

Moreover the English have a way with their native language. Perhaps theirs is an unfair advantage, but that advantage is wont to create an unconscious inferiority among some Americans.

Consider these remarks about the new translation by the Bishop of St. Petersburg, Florida, Robert N. Lynch (a fine Irish name that): “The text is highly anglicized (that is to say, replete with words more likely heard spoken in England than the United States), somewhat wordy when compared to common parlance in the U.S., and also occasionally inconsistent in the application of the principles of translation.”

This is odd. From what I have seen of the new translation, there is nothing particularly British about it. True, it is not written in standard American bureaucratic English. Deo gratias! You do not know what I mean? Consider Bishop Lynch’s next two sentences: “We made some minor changes or amendments to the text, which other countries will not use, even if they are ultimately approved by the Holy See. But in answer to the question where will this text be used, the answer would not be inappropriate to say throughout the English-speaking world.” If this style is the alternative to “highly anglicized” English, I’ll take the latter. You can read all of the good bishop’s letter on the web.

Do tell me if I have done him any injustice.

[Originally posted 7-2-06, republished 7-20-06]

The Battle of the "Dew."

The Catholic bishops of the United States votes to approve a new translation of the words of the mass. Adopting a new translation was long overdue (I almost typed "overdew!")

In their unseemly haste to translate the mass into English in the 1970s, the delegated experts made a hash of it. Why do I say that? A little event in my life crystallized my grasp of the issue: It was after we moved to Virginia in 1994. Late that year we settled into St. Leo's Parish. A great parish. Each first Sunday, the "new mass" was said in Latin at 8:30. I had to try it! Beforehand, I had thought there was no ounce of emotion left in me to be scandalized. The scabs had hardened and shallowed into pale almost invisible shapes on my psyche. Then I read the Latin words next to the English words we said each mass. The wounds reopened. It had never occurred to me that the Latin and the English could be so far apart. Was I really praying the divine liturgy, when the two texts diverged so much?

Eventually the Vatican responded to the cries of the faithful and started the long campaign to reform the institutions responsible and to call forth a new translation both faithful to the actual words of the original and fleshed in sacred language. You can read that history on the Adoremus site. Well the good bishops of the United States could not stand the thought of using the word "dew." "Dew" induces a wealth of concrete and scriptural allusions. (Bishop Roche's defense of the proposed new translation is well worth reading. It displays a scholarship, a love of words and their power to move, and a love of the liturgy that every diocese should be graced with. Read especially his exegesis of this phrase.) To me this pregnant little word, "dew," evokes an image of the Spirit's working invisibly, yet tangibly. It is both concrete and evocative. But rest assured. "Dew" has been censored by our shepherds and the folks in the pews have been saved from its baneful influence.

I was once accused of having "the soul of a bureaucrat." The phrase cut me to the quick. Now among our bishops we have been blessed with many men of action. They are well trained in administration. They have studied management and absorbed the lessons of the social sciences. They know how to lead and to delegate. Above all, they get things done. If you should meet one of these, there is one thing you should never do! Do not accuse him of having the "soul of a poet." They do not like to be mocked.

[originally posted 6-21-06, republished 7-20-06]