The New Liturgy

About a year ago now the Roman Catholic church introduced a 'New Translation' of the liturgy. For the uninitiated in the dark arts and terminology of Holy Mother Church the liturgy is the prayers that are said by the priest and the congregation during Mass.  It was supposed to be a more accurate translation but still keep with the post Vatican II tradition of Mass in the vernacular.

In the weeks and months leading up to the introduction different churches appeared to handle things differently. My local parish at the time announced the changes in a series of articles explaining what the new language was, how it had changed and how it was better than the language which we had been using for the better part of half a century.  I am not opposed to change by any manner of means. I think change handled well can be good a thing. The problem is that the Catholic Church doesn't change very often and when it does it isn't usually handled very well.

I am old enough to have learned the Latin mass. The parish I grew up in held Latin mass once a week and once a month had a special choir come in to sing the mass. Once a year there was a special Missa Cantata. I loved the Latin but was perfectly content with the Mass in English.  In my youth the mass books had Latin on one side of the page and English on the other. Over time either by rote, by osmosis or in my case by having a  semi-photographic memory I managed to work out how the translations compared. They weren't strict word for word translations but the translation still got the essential meaning behind the original text.

The introduction of the Mass in the vernacular has had an unintended outcome. When the Mass was in Latin it was the same everywhere. No matter where you would go you could understand the Mass. The Second Vatican Council seems to have been taken by many within the church as an excuse to have regional variation. Now for McDonalds that is OK you are simply catering to your clientele. The Catholic Church proclaims itself to be the universal church. This is problematic if Mass is not the same at two churches in the same town let alone between two countries.

The 'New' translation it turns out is not actually new. A friend of mine showed me a missal that had the exact translation in. That missal was 40 or so years old. So the church was being slightly disingenuous.  Another of my friends argues quite rightly that words like 'consubstantial' which replaced the phrase 'of one being' are not exactly vernacular. If you want to move the Mass to a more liturgical translation that is fine but at least be honest and say so. If you want to have the Mass in the vernacular don't use terms like 'consubstantial'. This is an example of the church not handling change well.

A more effective change would have been to stop the obsession with singing everything. Simplify the liturgy. The liturgy is a thing of beauty and the words are powerful and have meaning. The problem is that we rarely focus on what we are saying. I question the point of singing 'Amen' 8-times. It is better, surely, to say it once with feeling and mean it than gabble it.  The church has forgotten this one simple truth at the expense of giving work to musicians, and in many cases I use the term loosely.

It will probably take the church another 50 years to realise that this was a mistake and it will then go about irritating already dwindling congregations by changing it back again. The only winners will be the publishers of missals.