- Fr. Dwight Longenecker, "Is the New Translation More Reverent?" (Standing on my Head, February 2, 2011)
- Jeffrey A. Tucker, "Down to the Wire on New Missal" (New Liturgical Movement, November 15, 2011)
The first, while appreciative of the improvements in translation, is doubtful that these changes alone will make Catholic worship more reverent. What is more important than the words, says Fr. Longenecker, is how the Mass is celebrated by both the priest and the people:
I am quite sure that when the new Mass is introduced that Fr. Folkmass will still celebrate Mass in his usual game show host style while other priests will celebrate the Mass casually and carelessly. Many Americans will still shuffle into Mass late wearing shorts and flip flops. Comfort hymns and crooners with hand held microphones will still lead the music and politically correct former nuns will still bully everyone into singing protest anthems instead of hymns.The second piece is more hopeful and more detailed in its analysis. Tucker acknowledges that the new translation is "serious, solemn, dignified, and even a bit remote in the way that mysterious and awesome things really should be," and that the sentence formulations, unlike typical vernacular, are elevated without being affected. The language, however, is not the most significant part of the new Missal, he claims:
Mass isn't reverent simply because you start using lofty language that 'sounds religious'. True reverence is the fruit of a condition of heart. Reverence in worship is a by product of a certain type of Catholic mindset. It is not the automatic product of a particular form of words.
This is why I am not that optimistic about the new translation making Catholic worship more reverent. To understand the irreverence in much Catholic worship we have to probe much deeper than the form of words we use for worship. Catholic worship is too often irreverent because Catholics (priests and people) have stopped really believing the Catholic faith.
I'm sorry to call a spade a spade, but far too many Catholics don't actually believe in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. They believe in the fellowship meal. They don't believe in transubstantiation. They believe in 'the real presence' (a vague and flexible term which can mean practically anything)....
The biggest evidence of this change concerns the music. There is a long history in the Catholic Church of missteps in this regard. The people who produce the Missals don’t think much about the music question.... There is a tendency to focus on the words alone while forgetting that the Roman Rite really is a sung ritual and has been since the beginning.After reading these two reflections on the new Novus Ordo Missal, I was appreciative of the insights of each writer, as different as they are. Each also provoked a number of questions for further thought.
The people involved in the production of the English version of the Third Edition of the Roman Missal got it right. They embedded the music as part of the text. You can hardly turn a page in this Missal without bumping into musical notation. This is just fantastic because it establishes a norm for both tunes and for the preferred style of the music to be used at Mass. This style is call[ed] chant. The prayers are all chant. The people’s parts are chanted. There is a provision for all the parts of the Mass to be sung from beginning to end. We won’t have to wait 50 years or 300 years for the music question to be settled. It is already settled with the printing of the Missal itself.
This is just great because it solves a serious and major problem that currently exists within the Catholic Church: the music that is commonly employed in the liturgy works at cross purposes with the ritual itself. The establishment of a new (actually old) musical norm will have a gradual effect on the choices that the musicians make in the future. Pop music will not fit in well with a chanted Mass. There will be a gravitational pull toward making the entire Mass a chanted event, thereby fulfilling one of the goals of the Second Vatican Council to grant chant “first place” at Mass.
Fr. Longenecker's piece raised the question: What if Fr. Folkmass continued "to celebrate Mass in his usual game show host style," but the parishioners hearts were miraculously converted to embrace the Gospel? Wouldn't there still be a problem? Is it not also of some significance that the form of worship is reverent and that the liturgy is recognizably Catholic?
Jeffrey Tucker's piece raised the question, once raised by one of my commentators: Isn't a Ford Pinto, even with a shiny new coat of paint, still a Ford Pinto? Is it not, as the Holy Father himself has suggested more than once, the product of a hijacked liturgical reform that was animated by a hermeneutic of rupture from Catholic liturgical tradition?
Your thoughts?
[Hat tip to J.M.]
10 comments:
They are right, but here is the deeper truth being unraveled: the liturgical experimentation of the last few decades has flopped, and this improved translation is a death knell to a liberal agenda. This is why the liberals are up in arms: despite the fact Fr Folkmass wont be changing much, he'll being seeing the liberal revolution fading away before his very eyes. It's really Providence putting the breaks on all that stuff.
People need to stop using the term "new" traslation, because it gives the impression there is another round of messing around. Instead it is the "improved" translation, reflecting the fact there has to be greater fidelity.
The efforts of the local church to 'sell' the new translation of the Roman Missal have been interesting. No one says, "It was a bad translation and needed to be straightened out." They tell us, instead, how this translation is "more" faithful to the Latin and how it will help connect us with the tradition and pray more thoughtfully. The positive spin is understandable, but it is still a spin and it diverts attention from the obvious.
If the ICEL had done a semantically driven translation in the first place a new translation would not have been necessary.
That being said there are good reasons for the positive approach in terms of avoiding opposition and resistance. Peace rather than conflict.
Then again, the hard sell could be aimed at conservatives as well, with the idea of pleasing everyone so as to have the reform of the reform end with a new translation rather than proceed to its logical conclusion in a return to, or at least major incorporation of, the ancient rite (read LATIN)into the ordinary liturgy of the Church.
It seems that the ecclesiastical authorities are under the impression that they can recapture tradition without actually restoring it.
To give them their due, they probably think that the majority in the pews are thoroughly conditioned to the idea of English being preferable to a real liturgical language. They may be right in this.
This is, of course, all pure speculation. It is very hard to read minds but it is interesting to watch this playing out.
Why do these Novus Ordo improvements, like the agenda of the Adoremus Society, look so much like a desperate attempt to reinvent the wheel?
The Church already has a perfectly serviceable Mass: the traditional Latin Mass. It's the Rolls Royce of liturgies. If some auto detail staff want to try out a new car wax on her, let them at it. But why try to re-invent a Rolls Royce with the auto parts for that proverbial Ford Pinto? Is there anyone here with money on the Ford Pinto? Let it go the way of the Edsel, and I'd say good riddance.
This is a bit of the 2008 text (may have changed since) - nothing great about it:
May this Sacrifice of our reconciliation, we pray, O Lord,
advance the peace and salvation of all the world.
Be pleased to confirm in faith and charity
your pilgrim Church on earth,
with your servant N. our Pope and N. our Bishop,*
the Order of Bishops, all the clergy,
and the entire people you have gained for your own.
Listen graciously to the prayers of this family,
whom you have summoned before you:
in your compassion, O merciful Father,
gather to yourself all your children
scattered throughout the earth.
To our departed brothers and sisters
and to all who were pleasing to you
at their passing from this life,
give kind admittance to your kingdom.
As one who attends both Novus Ordo and Tridentine Liturgies, I am both optimistic and pessimistic about how much will change. I am extremely happy with the adjusted translations which are now more faithful to the Latin, but I'm worried about Father Folkmass & others in control, of not moving toward a reverent celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. I am prayind daily for priests (good & bad)and for the churches they are part of. May God pour out his spirit on both Priests and their flocks. Lord Have Mercy!
Pieta
That bit from the 2008 text is taken from the Third Eucharistic prayer, which has always been among my least favorite, despite it's " ... from East to West ..." and sea-to-shining-sea cosmopolitan correctness. Among other things, it's petition that the Eucharistic Sacrifice "advance the peace and salvation of the whole world" just sounds way too much like a United Nations UNESCO injunction of some sort.
It is like watching Dr Frankenstein at work tweaking his golem.
Let's tweak the language lobe. There -- more reverence -- ZAAAP! Literal translation -- ZAAAP! -- oops too much, ease up on the power, Cardinal Igor! ZAAP! Ah, better. Now the music lobe. Less corn syrup, more protein. No, Igor, the stuff from Wesley's Farm will do just as well. Now let's work on hand eye coordination -- the hands, but REVERENTLY -- must be careful here -- zaap!
Yes, Cdl Igor, can you see?? It's alive!! IT'S ALIVE!! IT'S . . . .
Ah well, back to the drawing board.
EP3 is not the problem -- EP1 is just as "clunky" in its new guise:
To you, therefore, most merciful Father, we make humble prayer and petition, through Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord, THAT you accept and bless these gifts, these offerings, these holy and unblemished sacrifices, which we offer you firstly for your holy catholic Church. Be pleased to grant her peace, to guard, unite and govern her throughout the whole world, together with your servant N. our Pope and N. our Bishop, and all those who, holding to the truth, hand on the catholic and apostolic faith.
In this particular comment string (among so many others) you can see clear as day what Mosebach was talking about when he fretted that the NO had devolved the Mass into a theatrical experience (or in this case a literary one) to be critiqued, rather than a prayer to be said, or a sacrifice to be witnessed. It will always be this way with the NO. All the tittering about ad orientem, communion in the hand/on the tongue, the quality of translations, etc, obscures the root insight, which is that the NO is ruinously flawed: it is a liturgical parody, an anti-liturgy. It will never be what the TLM has never ceased to be, and will serve the Church only with the minimalistic fig leaf of validity which seems to be preferred, even sought after, by today's leaders, in the interest of serving modern man and his panoply of "needs."
Thanks for that last comment, Ralph. Not merely brilliant, as always, but utterly incisive, cutting to the heart of the issue. I think you speak for more than a few others who would either not have had the courage or the insight to put it quite so. Thank you for the clarity, even if it may ruffle more than a few feathers.
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