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A New Translation and an Old Fight

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 01:56:00 -0400

For most Protestants in America, “Church shopping” has become a staple of religious life, and this is no less true for Catholics, on the parish level at least. Once the shopping is done, we settle into our regular communities, and have very little experience of the different ways our co-religionists practice the faith. We go in peace to love and serve the Lord, each in our own worlds.

Often our decisions of parish are driven by aesthetics, such as taste in music. For my own part, I will admit that the sight of a drum kit in a church stops me cold and that any music written by a certain “Marty” presents me with a near occasion of sin. As my brother says, whatever St. Boniface suffered from the Frankish church, it wasn’t amplified. But I also know that people with far more profound spiritual lives than mine find contemporary music almost necessary to their faith. To that degree this is merely a matter of taste.

However, there is often much more to our decision than aesthetics. I was reminded of this on a recent visit to Seattle where I attended a downtown parish with my family. The first thing I must say about the parish is that it was the most welcoming one I have ever visited. I have never met so many people eager to help find parking, find a seat, distribute the order of service, and so many people that, in general, understand their role in the outreach of the parish. The second thing I must say is that it was the most disorienting service I have attended in years.

Where do I start? There was the mandatory meet and greet, the aggressively gender-inclusive language, the bizarre procession of all to offer money into (or ambiguously hover open hands over) the offertory basket. The angry looks and frustration on the part of the ushers”their reaction to our confusion”was not in keeping with the earlier cheerful welcome. In this context, diversity, even if caused by confusion, was not welcome.

The changes wrought upon the order and language of the service were not merely aesthetic. These were ideological changes. Everyone knows this, and it is part of the modus vivendi of modern Catholic parishes that developed since Vatican II. You have liberal parishes and conservative ones. I made the mistake of finding myself in a liberal parish.

Normally I would think no more about our experience, but the new translation of the Order of the Mass will be introduced and used in parishes on November 27th, the First Sunday of Advent. What will this Seattle parish, and many others like it, do on that date? It has taken them years to develop a service with which they are comfortable.

There will certainly be challenges with the new translation for everyone. For instance, “And with your spirit” is not idiomatic, nor is the word “consubstantial” familiar to most parishioners. But we all know what the real disagreements will be. There is an online petition asking the Bishops not to demand the use of the new translation, and in the comments you can see the points of contention.

There is, of course, the procedural argument: The change is being imposed from above and does not reflect the views of the laity because it was not produced by a democratic process. This is the constant tension over the hierarchy. But there is also a theological argument, a dispute over what the language is for. According to one South African Bishop, the very reason for the new translation was based, among other things, upon “a purely arbitrary decision to demand that the English text had to faithfully represent the Latin . . . ” Well, quite.

Both of these concerns, and there are others, highlight the deep fissure in contemporary Catholic life between the right and the left. It is familiar to anyone who has church shopped and it is the same one that caught me in that Seattle parish. What is the Church and what is the Mass? The question of hierarchy and obedience is familiar to most people. But this question about the Mass is going to arise with the new translation.

The “left” is willing to embrace external, cultural features because of the need to bring new people into the churches and keep others from leaving. Why throw up barriers, they ask, when there are so many hungry souls needing to be fed? If dropping all of the references to God as “He” can bring people in or keeps them here, who really cares? To paraphrase Henry IV of France, the Mass is well worth a pronoun.

The “right” is concerned that willy-nilly changes in the language could, in the most extreme cases, invalidate the Mass. Wherever we might be on the spectrum, most Catholics will agree that some ceremonies are valid Masses and some are not. Where is the dividing line? Faithful representation of the Latin is not arbitrary in such an important rite, and in such cases it would seem prudent to defer to exactitude. Moreover, how can we claim to be catholic (universal) when the service differs so much from parish to parish?

Stuck in the middle are the American bishops. Will they penalize pastors and parishes for non-compliance or will they tacitly accept that any local changes to the Order of the Mass are acceptable? And what sorts of sanctions can they use? Forced laicization was not used in cases of child abuse. Would they dare do this now, for this? It would only play into the hands of their critics.

But to do nothing, to allow parishes to use whichever translation they wish and even to change them at will, is to capitulate and to abandon the very idea of hierarchy. What role does the Magisterium have if a directive of the Pope in Rome, fulfilled by a Vatican commission and implemented under the bishops is allowed to be ignored? Who is in charge? Has the Catholic Church become a church of bishops (episcopal) or priests (presbyteral) and not popes?

Because the reaction of the bishops will be key, the familiar disputes on the hierarchy will play themselves out. But a dispute about the Mass is about much more; it is about the very heart of worship and what it means to be a Catholic, as defined by oneself, by others, and by the Church.

Although some parishes have been talking about the new translation, most will be receiving instructional materials only this month. Few but the most active seem to know that anything is coming. As a result, a lot of Catholics are in for a big surprise. And the Catholic community of the English speaking world is in for a very rough ride. The modus vivendi that has allowed left and right to live apart in peace may be over.

Geoffrey M. Vaughan is an Associate Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Fortin and Gonthier Foundations of Western Civilization Program at Assumption College.

RESOURCES

Now is the Time to Prepare for the Roman Missal, Third Edition

Bishop Kevin Dowling, “Why The Liturgical Anger is Fair”

Liturgiam authenticam - On The Use Of Vernacular Languages in The Publication Of The Books of The Roman Liturgy

ICEL “ A Joint Commission of Catholic Bishops Conferences

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Our Egalitarian Elitism

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 02:41:00 -0500

Americans everywhere are now preparing for the festivities of the Super Bowl. Even tepid sports fans will probably watch the game, or at least the commercials. More so than the commemorations of the victims of the shootings in Tucson, let alone any religious observance, this is the most shared experience Americans will have all year.

In the history of cultures, sports have probably never played as large a role in any society as they do now. Outside of the United States and Canada, soccer is almost universally the passion”excepting those few places where cricket holds pride of place. Football, baseball and basketball are the big ones here”with hockey and soccer surging in some areas. Organized leagues take on children at increasingly early ages and other leagues are reserved for remarkably fit seniors. From nonage to dotage, sports are everywhere.

Of course, there are always a few holdouts who will refuse to participate. You can find someone who will cite as outrageous the sums individuals are paid either to play or coach. (I am always taken with the statistic that the highest paid public employee in a state is often the football or basketball coach at the flagship university.) And the general barbarity that is now common after major events unmasks the ideal of the sporting gentleman.

Responses to such heretics come quickly: Sports teach the virtues of discipline, teamwork, and determination. While these are neither cardinal nor theological virtues, they are worth having. And sooner or later you will be reminded of Wellington’s claim: “The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton.”

Whatever the individual value of sports for the player, I am struck by the social value to the country. In the very years of forced egalitarianism”when we believe that every child must go to college, every person own his home, and every traditional institution topple”the most brutal elitism is permitted and praised if only it is committed in the context of a physical challenge. Yes, in elementary school every player gets a trophy, but soon the superiority of the best athletes is not hidden but celebrated.

And this is right, because as Tocqueville warned, the passion for equality can produce the most desperate inequality. The passion for equality and the passion of envy are remarkably similar, and in our zeal to obtain equality we’ll blindly give up other goods. In the extreme, we will give up freedom, preferring to be equally subject to one power and safe from being proved inferior to another than free to exercise our unequal abilities.

The widespread attraction to sports at every social level provides a uniquely egalitarian way of resisting what Tocqueville warned would become a soft despotism. There is nothing else in the country today that can act as a common language between the boardroom and the bingo hall, the classroom and the union hall. Sports, and most importantly talking about sports, is the only activity just about all Americans share regardless of age, education, or wealth. When the electrician shows up at the doctor’s house they can always talk about one of the local teams. This is not as often the case in other countries where interest in sports is closely associated with class.

Could we achieve the same sort of social cohesion through some other, less brutal, means? Yes and no. In theory we could have a nation devoted to literature and the debates of public intellectuals. Many Americans think this is what France is like or, indeed, all of Europe. There was a time when America approached such a common passion. Reader’s Digest responded to and encouraged an attempt by a generation of Americans to acquire the education that time and circumstance would otherwise make impossible.

The intellectuals have always disdained these efforts of the striving middle classes . (This disdain, incidentally, is much more the reality in Europe than is often admitted.) More recently, Oprah’s book club tried to make some movements in this direction, but it was also derided as a little déclassé . This is always the problem when people try to pull themselves up and improve. Egalitarianism is always easier to achieve through reaching down than reaching up.

Sports achieve just such an egalitarianism of interest by reaching down. The achievement of the sports culture in America is that it permits a clear recognition that some people are better than others”elitism”without producing a cultural divide between those who can truly appreciate it and those who cannot. Everyone, rich and poor, intellectual and uneducated, can appreciate the achievement of elite athletes: Everyone is equal compared with Aaron Rodgers and Troy Polomalu. Even more, everyone is equal in front of the TV.

Snobbery among sports fans does not break down along social lines as so many other cultural efforts do. Reading Oprah’s latest middlebrow selection marks you as an embarrassing striver after a culture you can’t reach. Watching the Super Bowl marks you as a normal American.

Will the courts, the gridirons, and diamonds of America win for us the battles of the future? I cannot say, and there are undoubtedly many cultural perversions wrought by the hegemony of sports. But the shared experience of this most egalitarian of elitism is no small achievement, and is even one in keeping with the Spirit of ’76. So enjoy the Super Bowl, but be sure to talk about it with people.

Geoffrey M. Vaughan is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Fortin and Gonthier Foundations of Western Civilization Program at Assumption College, Worcester MA.

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