The other day I got into a conversation about the upcoming English translation of the 3rd edition Roman Missal. Some say that its fancier language will be the beginning of our salvation from our endemic problems of casualness and lack of liturgical decorum. Others say that it will ruin the ease of speaking to God accomplished by the liturgical reforms following Vatican II. I suspect that both of these cases are generally overstated.
Nevertheless, I am somewhat amused when I hear priests saying that this new translation will be obfuscating and a jarring hardship for the laity assisting at Mass. My suspicion is that this translation will be a good deal harder for the clergy than the people of God. Sure, it won't be easy for any of us, but my guess is that by Easter 2012 the laity will be accustomed to saying 'and with your spirit' and 'consubstantial' and won't even have think about it.
Priests, I imagine, will be another story. I think of a little example, and an average priest. Father has been saying Mass with our current translation for thirty or forty years. It is much more ingrained in him than he may realize. Even more, he is even more attached to certain of the current texts. For example, he uses Eucharistic Prayer II for the overwhelming majority of his Masses. He might use III on Sundays or other big days (and in fairness, the general instruction recommends this), but he almost never uses the Roman Canon, either because he was taught to disparage it (as I was) or because he feels it backward, and almost never uses Eucharistic Prayer IV, because it requires so many grammatical gymnastics to rearrange the verbiage to make it 'gender inclusive.' So, Eucharistic Prayer II is planted firmly and deeply in this man's praying self. When he finds out--and he doesn't know this yet--that he is supposed to say "dewfall" in the newly translated epiclesis of this prayer, he's going to flip out.
Other things are going to be trouble for the clergy as well. Because he has either forgotten about or never knew the classic rubrical language of the Roman rite in Latin, he will be confused by literally translated rubrics when he comes to use the Roman Canon once a year or so, perhaps on Holy Thursday evening. More specifically, he will wonder what it means when it says, "within the action" before the Communicantes.
Finally, I would hardly be surprised to see a lot of priestly noncompliance around the pro multis as "for many" rather than the "for all" as we have it now. The little troubles that will arise around this will be have to be discerned carefully. Some of the complaints will come from legitimate concerns about translation, but others will come from the creeping universalism and atmosphere of religious indifferentism that trouble our historical moment. The complaints of many may include both of these, so all conversations, especially heated ones, will have to be approached with studied discretion.
February 9, 2011
February 8, 2011
Hominem Tres Personas Esse Concedamus
I had a humbling laugh at myself today. It shows that despite whatever I say, I have been properly trained in so-called "inclusive language" and have internalized its demands.
I spent the morning banging my head against the section of Peter Abelard's Theologia 'Summi Boni' I was assigned for attempted translation for the Trinity seminar this week. It was all about the senses of 'person' in grammar and how they do or don't correspond to the Persons of the Blessed Trinity.
Rolling right along, I came to a sentence in which Abelard makes some kind of point about the ways in which a human being is called a person. Without thinking about it, as if I were adjusting the lectionary on the fly (as is expected in some settings) I translated "homo" not as "man" but as "person." As I went on, this led me into great confusion, as is easy to imagine. I couldn't figure out what Abelard was trying to say about the grammatical or metaphysical sense of 'person,' because he wasn't talking about this at all, but about the simple case of a man.
Now I'll still walk out of church if I hear "Son of Man" commuted into "Person of God" (No really. And I did walk out) but let it never be said I have not internalized the commitment to inclusive language.
I spent the morning banging my head against the section of Peter Abelard's Theologia 'Summi Boni' I was assigned for attempted translation for the Trinity seminar this week. It was all about the senses of 'person' in grammar and how they do or don't correspond to the Persons of the Blessed Trinity.
Rolling right along, I came to a sentence in which Abelard makes some kind of point about the ways in which a human being is called a person. Without thinking about it, as if I were adjusting the lectionary on the fly (as is expected in some settings) I translated "homo" not as "man" but as "person." As I went on, this led me into great confusion, as is easy to imagine. I couldn't figure out what Abelard was trying to say about the grammatical or metaphysical sense of 'person,' because he wasn't talking about this at all, but about the simple case of a man.
Now I'll still walk out of church if I hear "Son of Man" commuted into "Person of God" (No really. And I did walk out) but let it never be said I have not internalized the commitment to inclusive language.
Friary Quote of the Day
Today I'm going to risk the vanity of giving myself the quote of the day:
"Yes, Father, perhaps I would be willing to admit that 'common sense' could be an arbiter of liturgical dilemmas, had I not encountered so little of it thus far in my Catholic life."
"Yes, Father, perhaps I would be willing to admit that 'common sense' could be an arbiter of liturgical dilemmas, had I not encountered so little of it thus far in my Catholic life."
February 7, 2011
Be Creative
I decided to walk to the Poor Clare monastery for Mass this morning, both because it was almost warm enough, and because I needed to have two homilies ready. You see, I wasn't sure if Colette of Corbie would be a feast or a memorial for them. If it was to be a feast, there would be proper readings for the Mass, and if a memorial, we would use the readings from Monday of the fifth week of Ordinary Time. As it turned out, even though my ordo indicates that St. Colette should be a feast for Second Order Nuns, which these ladies surely are (and an obligatory memorial for us of the First Order), their ordo indicated that it's only a feast for Colettine Poor Clares, and was just a memorial otherwise.
So we had the readings for the day, in which we begin today at the beginning, with the first creation account in Genesis, shifting from four weeks of trudging through the letter to the Hebrews. As I was reflecting on the creation story on the walk over (and it was just about dawn, perfectly) I started to think about creativity, and the necessity of creativity for happiness and thus for salvation.
If the creation, and us in it, comes to be by God's speech, "God said...and so it happened," and we confess that this same Word of God became flesh in Jesus Christ in order to draw our common humanity into the blessed life of the Trinity, then it seems like our own salvation and happiness is very much bound up with our being united to the creativity of God.
This is plainly seen by common sense. Our greatest joys and satisfactions in life derive from our creativity and generativity. From parenthood, whether it be in the historical or spiritual order, to teaching and mentoring, and to the writing, music, and art by which we give 'grandchildren' back to God, our greatest happiness is our imitation of and assimilation to the divine creativity.
So we had the readings for the day, in which we begin today at the beginning, with the first creation account in Genesis, shifting from four weeks of trudging through the letter to the Hebrews. As I was reflecting on the creation story on the walk over (and it was just about dawn, perfectly) I started to think about creativity, and the necessity of creativity for happiness and thus for salvation.
If the creation, and us in it, comes to be by God's speech, "God said...and so it happened," and we confess that this same Word of God became flesh in Jesus Christ in order to draw our common humanity into the blessed life of the Trinity, then it seems like our own salvation and happiness is very much bound up with our being united to the creativity of God.
This is plainly seen by common sense. Our greatest joys and satisfactions in life derive from our creativity and generativity. From parenthood, whether it be in the historical or spiritual order, to teaching and mentoring, and to the writing, music, and art by which we give 'grandchildren' back to God, our greatest happiness is our imitation of and assimilation to the divine creativity.
February 6, 2011
The Super Bowl in Religious Life
I know I write a a version of this post most every year, but it seems to me a compelling insight:
The Super Bowl is to religious life as Christmas is to the secular world.
It is a given that there will be a traditional celebration. The particulars of food and drink are dictated by this tradition, though not in a rigid way as to make the menu entirely predictable. Even a passing interest in the actual event at the origin of the celebration is entirely optional, and enthusiasm and close interest in the same can even seem jarring and out of place.
The Super Bowl is to religious life as Christmas is to the secular world.
It is a given that there will be a traditional celebration. The particulars of food and drink are dictated by this tradition, though not in a rigid way as to make the menu entirely predictable. Even a passing interest in the actual event at the origin of the celebration is entirely optional, and enthusiasm and close interest in the same can even seem jarring and out of place.
February 4, 2011
Who Am I?
As readers may have noticed, a couple of posts disappeared yesterday. Not that I thought there was anything objectionable about them per se, but a couple of other conversations had me wondering whether perhaps they were expressive of an interior struggle that I had not yet discerned well.
As I took my usually contemplative walk down Hammond St. from the Chestnut Hill T station to the BC campus for the Medieval Trinitarian Theology seminar yesterday, I imagined that I would write a big post about this, a sort of grand examination of conscience about how I am as a Catholic and how I got that way. But it's too much. It would have to include the latest insights into my conversion, the formative aspects of the twists and detours of my religious vocation, the appearance of new sorts of external authority that have come into my life since I started blogging (i.e. priesthood, licentiate in sacred theology) and how they have changed my perspectives, the formative experience of sharing in pastoral power as a parochial vicar for three years, and the still-in-discernment sense that I am called to do something at some level to make my vocation a response to the sexual abuse crisis.
That's too much for one post. So instead of that I'll just relate one little iconic moment in my Catholic life, and explain how it relates to the current edges of my interior discernment.
When I was a neophyte I wanted to learn the Mass as best I could. I discovered that there was such a thing as a hand missal, and of course I bought one right away. I would pray through and review the prayers and readings before Mass, and have my ribbons all set to pray along. At one Sunday Mass we didn't say the Creed. I was confused; my book said that the Creed was said on Sundays and solemnities. So I approached the priest and asked him about it. He explained to me that the Creed was optional. So I thought to myself, he's a priest, he knows these things better than me. This became the form of my sense of myself as a Catholic; I learned to second-guess myself. More things didn't match up with my reading, with what the saints and the Church said in their books. And I'm not talking just about liturgy, though liturgy forms the simplest sorts of examples. Some of the implosion of my first effort at religious life came about because this second-guessing of myself reached such a point that I hardly knew who I was.
In some ways, the story of my Christian life since then has been a progressive ownership and self-possession against this pattern of thought.
But this in itself is only the occasion of the fundamental question at hand. To take up the example again, I formulate one expression of the question like this: does it matter to God whether or not we say the Creed at Sunday Mass?
Of course the answer is both yes and no.
Yes because we believe that just as the Holy Spirit conceived Jesus Christ in the womb of Mary, the same Spirit--who is God--is the principle of the Church which is the abiding presence of the Body of Christ to the world, extended, as it were, through history from Pentecost until the End. (This is why, of course, Mary has become our Blessed Mother.) So the Church is the Body of Christ conceived by Holy Spirit, and what she has decided through her Ecumenical Councils and the living tradition of her liturgy matters very much. To remove the Creed or to tamper with the liturgy is thus to cut oneself--and the worshipers in one's care--from God.
On the other hand, we have to say that in some senses it does not matter to God whether we say the Creed on Sundays. Jesus Christ has delivered us from a religion based in rules and regulations. Indeed, in a certain sense we have to say that Jesus Christ has delivered us from religion altogether, so long as we think of "religion" in a certain human sense. Even more, a basic principle of ecclesiology and sacramental theology reminds us that though Jesus has guaranteed us that his saving grace comes to us in the sacramental economy he has established for us, his grace and salvation is not bounded or limited by this economy.
This Creed thing is just an example, but discerning the depths and particular contours of the "yes" and "no" of this question gets at something of a struggle both theological and personal to which I perhaps have to pay more attention.
So thanks for your prayers, and for all of the friendship and encouragement I have been able to receive and give through this blog. Also, if you have never scrolled all the way down to my disclaimer, it's something which I'm proud to display.
As I took my usually contemplative walk down Hammond St. from the Chestnut Hill T station to the BC campus for the Medieval Trinitarian Theology seminar yesterday, I imagined that I would write a big post about this, a sort of grand examination of conscience about how I am as a Catholic and how I got that way. But it's too much. It would have to include the latest insights into my conversion, the formative aspects of the twists and detours of my religious vocation, the appearance of new sorts of external authority that have come into my life since I started blogging (i.e. priesthood, licentiate in sacred theology) and how they have changed my perspectives, the formative experience of sharing in pastoral power as a parochial vicar for three years, and the still-in-discernment sense that I am called to do something at some level to make my vocation a response to the sexual abuse crisis.
That's too much for one post. So instead of that I'll just relate one little iconic moment in my Catholic life, and explain how it relates to the current edges of my interior discernment.
When I was a neophyte I wanted to learn the Mass as best I could. I discovered that there was such a thing as a hand missal, and of course I bought one right away. I would pray through and review the prayers and readings before Mass, and have my ribbons all set to pray along. At one Sunday Mass we didn't say the Creed. I was confused; my book said that the Creed was said on Sundays and solemnities. So I approached the priest and asked him about it. He explained to me that the Creed was optional. So I thought to myself, he's a priest, he knows these things better than me. This became the form of my sense of myself as a Catholic; I learned to second-guess myself. More things didn't match up with my reading, with what the saints and the Church said in their books. And I'm not talking just about liturgy, though liturgy forms the simplest sorts of examples. Some of the implosion of my first effort at religious life came about because this second-guessing of myself reached such a point that I hardly knew who I was.
In some ways, the story of my Christian life since then has been a progressive ownership and self-possession against this pattern of thought.
But this in itself is only the occasion of the fundamental question at hand. To take up the example again, I formulate one expression of the question like this: does it matter to God whether or not we say the Creed at Sunday Mass?
Of course the answer is both yes and no.
Yes because we believe that just as the Holy Spirit conceived Jesus Christ in the womb of Mary, the same Spirit--who is God--is the principle of the Church which is the abiding presence of the Body of Christ to the world, extended, as it were, through history from Pentecost until the End. (This is why, of course, Mary has become our Blessed Mother.) So the Church is the Body of Christ conceived by Holy Spirit, and what she has decided through her Ecumenical Councils and the living tradition of her liturgy matters very much. To remove the Creed or to tamper with the liturgy is thus to cut oneself--and the worshipers in one's care--from God.
On the other hand, we have to say that in some senses it does not matter to God whether we say the Creed on Sundays. Jesus Christ has delivered us from a religion based in rules and regulations. Indeed, in a certain sense we have to say that Jesus Christ has delivered us from religion altogether, so long as we think of "religion" in a certain human sense. Even more, a basic principle of ecclesiology and sacramental theology reminds us that though Jesus has guaranteed us that his saving grace comes to us in the sacramental economy he has established for us, his grace and salvation is not bounded or limited by this economy.
This Creed thing is just an example, but discerning the depths and particular contours of the "yes" and "no" of this question gets at something of a struggle both theological and personal to which I perhaps have to pay more attention.
So thanks for your prayers, and for all of the friendship and encouragement I have been able to receive and give through this blog. Also, if you have never scrolled all the way down to my disclaimer, it's something which I'm proud to display.
February 1, 2011
St.. Brigid
Back in 2009, the first of February fell on a Sunday. As I returned to the sacristy after celebrating the Mass of whatever Sunday in Ordinary Time it was, one of the old friars began to chide me for not somehow commemorating the feast of St. Brigid. Of course he had no case; though she is one of the secondary patrons of Ireland, and her day is a liturgical feast in the dioceses therein, Brigid appears neither on the general Roman calendar nor on the calendar for the United States. The complaint of my elderly confrere was an example of many Irish sighs I heard and felt over my time at the parish. A once-robust Irish-American stronghold had slipped into a far more assimilated and multicultural reality, and one often felt the stings of grief and denial.
I was thinking of this last night as I prepared for Mass this morning, and it was then that I remembered that I had only recently recovered my Commonwealth English breviary after a loan of several years. My own adventure with the Liturgy of the Hours began back in the spring of 1993 when I was (alleged to be) studying philosophy in Ireland and I picked up the one-volume Daily Prayer (Dublin: Talbot, 1974) one day at Galway Cathedral, where I often went for confession. We had a daily Mass at the university, each night at 10 pm. When I think of that I have to laugh; at this point it's almost impossible for me to imagine a lifestyle in which a 10 pm daily Mass would make any sense! The Daily Prayer is analogous to the one-volume Christian Prayer we have here in the States. I was pretty lost with it at the beginning, back in those days. I didn't really manage to get started with the Hours until I returned home for my senior year of college and started to use the Shorter Christian Prayer. Based on my own experience, that's how I recommend getting started with the Hours: start with the simplest breviary and then move up as comfort and mastery arrive.
In any case, realizing that I had recovered this breviary from my past, and thinking of my old confrere last night, I couldn't help looking up the collect for St. Brigid:
Lord,
you inspired in Saint Brigid such whole-hearted dedication to your work
that she is known as Mary of the Gael;
through her intercession bless our country;
may we follow the example of her life
and be united with her and the Virgin Mary in your presence
We make our prayer through our Lord...
I was thinking of this last night as I prepared for Mass this morning, and it was then that I remembered that I had only recently recovered my Commonwealth English breviary after a loan of several years. My own adventure with the Liturgy of the Hours began back in the spring of 1993 when I was (alleged to be) studying philosophy in Ireland and I picked up the one-volume Daily Prayer (Dublin: Talbot, 1974) one day at Galway Cathedral, where I often went for confession. We had a daily Mass at the university, each night at 10 pm. When I think of that I have to laugh; at this point it's almost impossible for me to imagine a lifestyle in which a 10 pm daily Mass would make any sense! The Daily Prayer is analogous to the one-volume Christian Prayer we have here in the States. I was pretty lost with it at the beginning, back in those days. I didn't really manage to get started with the Hours until I returned home for my senior year of college and started to use the Shorter Christian Prayer. Based on my own experience, that's how I recommend getting started with the Hours: start with the simplest breviary and then move up as comfort and mastery arrive.
In any case, realizing that I had recovered this breviary from my past, and thinking of my old confrere last night, I couldn't help looking up the collect for St. Brigid:
Lord,
you inspired in Saint Brigid such whole-hearted dedication to your work
that she is known as Mary of the Gael;
through her intercession bless our country;
may we follow the example of her life
and be united with her and the Virgin Mary in your presence
We make our prayer through our Lord...
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