A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Woot! New Mass Translation approved! August 20, 2010

We’ll be enjoying a much better English translation of the Mass starting next year with Advent!  Bishop Troutman plans to set himself on fire in protest.

The Vatican has given final approval for a new English-language translation of the Roman Missal. The new translation will introduced in the US beginning in Advent of 2011.

“From that date forward, no other edition of the Roman Missal may be used in the dioceses of the United States of America,” announced Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, the president of the US bishops’ conference.

Formal Vatican approval came in a June 23 letter from Cardinal Antonio Cañizares Llovera, the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship. The translation had already won approval from the US bishops, after a long and lively debate.

The publication of a revised English translation concludes a lengthy and often controversial process that saw numerous clashes between proponents of differing approaches to translation. Critics of the new translation continue to complain that it contains obscure language, while its defenders note that the revisions eliminate errors and ambiguities in the liturgical translation that is now in use.

The critics are wrong.  The new translation will elevate, as opposed to stoop down.  This is going to be huge. “Lex credendi, Lex orandi” – we proclaim what we believe.  By changing how we pray in Mass, this will have effects all through the Church – effects for the good.

Perhaps you think I’m too rude, crude, and judgemental? August 20, 2010

I know there are some who really don’t like alot of what I write.  I know some who think me far too judgemental, as well as being prideful and hypocritical – they’re right, and what’s more, there is a whole litany of things wrong with me, but that’s not the point of this post.  There’s been a great deal of talk lately about what is ‘charitable’ correction and what is not, what is ‘appropriate’ for a given situation and what is not.  For instance, I know there are some who think I am  too hard on the LCWR sisters, that I am uncharitable in my coverage of them.  As a sort of comparison, since it is the Feast day of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, let’s see what he had to say to a wayward nun who had stopped living by the rule of her community and had attempted to satisfy the ravenous demands of the world:

While you were trying to live as one of the world under the habit and name of religion, you alone had rejected God by your own will.  But you found that you were not able to do what you stupidly thought you could: the world rejected you, but not you the world.  So while you turned away from God, the world turned away from you, and you fell, as the saying goes, between two stools.   You did not live for God, because you did not wish to, nor for the world, because you were not able to.  You were dead both to God and to the world, to the former willingly and to the latter unwillingly.  This is  what is apt to happen to those who make vows and do not keep them, who according to their profession are one thing and in their heart another…..Why did you feign by the veil on your head a gravity that your impudent glances belied?  The veil you wore covered a haughty brow; under the outward guise of modesty, you carried a saucy tongue in your head…..(Letter 114)

Ouch.  I wonder what St. Bernard of Clairvaux would have had to say about Dr. G’s talk at the LCWR conference last week?  Would good St. Bernard take apart Dr. G’s ‘theology’ as he did Peter Abelard, referring to it as “fool-ology?”  Well, that’s speaking to somewhat of an equal, surely St. Bernard would not be overly critical of a superior, right?  From a letter to Pope Blessed Eugene III:

Brush aside the deceit of the fugitive honor, despise the glitter of painted pomp, and think of thyself simply as naked, even as thou camest from they mother’s womb!  Art thou ornamented with badges, shining with jewels, brilliant in skills, corwned with plumes, stuffed out with golden and sliver embroideries?  If thou shalt expel from contemplation all these things, so swiftly passing and soon utterly to vanish like the morning mists, there will appear to thee a man naked, poor, needy, miserable, grieving because he is a man, blushing at his nakedness, deploring his birth; a man born to labor, not to honor; born of a woman, and so under condemnation; living only a little while, and therefore full of fear; replete with miseries, and weeping because of them.

Bear in mind, these quotes are from the man known as the “mellifluous Doctor,” that is, the doctor of sweet words.  None of the above is to draw any comparisons between myself and the good Saint Bernard – he is a saint, and I am infinitely far from that.  But it is to remind that using very strident language is not without precedent in the Church – numerous Saints described their opponents in the Church as “vipers,” “serpents,” “scorpions with dove’s head,” etc.  It is interesting to me that I wrote a few weeks ago of ‘circular firing squads’ between various defenders of the Church, and then God has shown me in the writings of numerous great Saints of the past just how “vituperative,” “uncharitable,” and “unpastoral” they could be.  They were strident, because they had the Holy Spirit burning within them, an incandescence of belief that cast Truth and falsehood in the sharpest relief.  They were filled with the Light, and could not stand the darkness. 

As I’ve said, in general I try to stay out of blog on blog warfare.  But in this age when so many in our Church, and I must say especially among our leadership, seem very afraid to make a bold stand for the Truth, to rein in error, to squash bad ‘theology,’ I think we may do well to be reminded of the examples of these great Saints of the past.  All I have quoted recently are all Doctors of the Church, the brightest lights the Church has ever produced.  Where would the Church be today if they had not lived the lives they did?