Throughout last week liturgists from across the country gathered in Perth to consider, familiarise themselves with – and argue over – the new prayers of the Mass Catholics will soon be reciting. One of the most senior liturgists in Australia delivered some straight-shooting talk on its importance,
history and process.
By Anthony Barich
National Reporter
PERTH, Australia (CNS) – The newly translated Roman Missal to be issued by Easter 2011 in Australian parishes will help address the serious theological problems of the 1973 Mass currently in use, one of Australia’s most senior liturgists has told a 4-7 February national gathering of liturgists in Perth.
In the process, it will more faithfully implement the liturgical vision of the Second Vatican Council and also fulfill the reforms of the much-maligned 1570 Council of Trent, he said, in a hard hitting and often-surprisingly frank speech.
It will have the power to renew the Church to carry out its work in the world, Archbishop Mark Coleridge told approximately 200 liturgists gathered from around the nation at the conference which focused heavily, but not exclusively on the issue of the looming implementation of new translations of the Roman Rite, the form of the Mass celebrated in most ordinary Australian Catholic parishes.
In recent decades liturgy has often become a powder-keg issue in the Church and Australia with numerous claims and complaints from baptised Catholics and clergy at novelties and inventions carried out by over-enthusiastic liturgists, clergy and schools on a widespread scale. Archbishop Coleridge of Canberra-Goulburn, a former chaplain to Pope John Paul II, is also one of the most senior liturgists in the Church globally, holding the position of chair of the Roman Missal Editorial Committee of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL); he is also chair of the Australian Bishops’ Liturgy Commission
While he acknowledged that the Missal used since 1973 has made gains in accessibility, participation, Scripture, adaptation and enculturation, he said it also has “serious problems theologically” and “consistently bleaches out metaphor which does scant justice to the highly metaphoric discourse” of Scripture and of the Church Fathers.
This is the result of a misunderstanding of Vatican II’s reforms, he said.
Occasional claims of the reforms being a “merely political right-wing plot of the Church” to turn the clock back miss the point of reform and of the purpose of the Mass, which is primarily Christ’s action, not just that of the faithful; and that it is a gift from God, not something to be manipulated,” he said.
“Nothing will happen unless we move beyond ideology and reducing the Church to politics and the slogans that go with them, which are unhelpful,” he said. “Drinking from the wells of tradition passed on supremely in the liturgy is what this new moment of renewal is all about.”
Archbishop Coleridge’s speech came just a fortnight after Fr Anscar Chupungco OSB, a former consulter to the Congregation for Divine Worship, told a Broken Bay Institute event in North Sydney on 22 January that the reforms were part of an attempt to turn the clock back 50 years.
Archbishop Coleridge said that one of the ironies is that “we can fail to attend to history even though perhaps the most fundamental achievement of Vatican II was the restoration of historical consciousness to the life of the Catholic Church”.
“A claim that troubles me is that this initiative is somehow a retreat from all that Vatican II tried to promote and enact, and a betrayal therefore of the Council and, by implication, the Holy Spirit,” Archbishop Coleridge said. “If I thought that were remotely true I would not have shed the blood, sweat and tears of the last seven years and the thousands who have been involved in this process. We would have saved ourselves a lot of time and money if we’d just stuck with the Latin, but that’s not what the Spirit is saying to the Church.”
He noted that the Vatican II document Sacrosanctum Concilium explicitly affirms Trent and uses the very words used by Pope Pius V in his encyclical Quo Primum that accompanied the Missal of Pius V – including that some rites were to be restored to the original norm of the Church Fathers.
Quoting the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, he said: “If the elements of this tradition are reflected upon, it becomes clear how outstandingly and felicitously the old Missal of 1570 is brought to fulfilment in the new.”
Trent enacted relatively few changes from the 1474 Missal – which in turn looked back to the Missal of Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) – due to “convulsive cultural change and radical attack” at the time and the lack of manuscripts to look at the norms of the Fathers of the Church to reform the liturgy.
In 1570, the sacrificial nature of the Mass, the ministerial priesthood and the real and permanent presence of Christ in the Eucharistic species were under attack in the Reformation, as was the use of Latin and silence – hence why Trent considered but decided against the vernacular and receiving Communion under only one kind, the bread but not the wine.
Vatican II came in the wake of the collapse of Western Christian civilisation after the two World Wars and, by this time, countless hitherto unknown texts became available.
However, the Second Vatican Council’s reforms were not properly implemented and taken too far, he said, after the Latin texts were translated in 1973 with “breathtaking speed”.
Since then, the liturgy has largely lost the sense of the liturgy as primarily Christ’s action, as something received, “not just what we do; a mystery into which we are drawn”.
“We can’t just tamper with it,” he said. “Celebrants sometimes act as if it’s their own personal property to do with what they like. You can’t. You also need to find the balance to make it something we do as well. But it’s not something we control because of our supposed superior liturgical perceptions.”
An overly cerebral approach to liturgy, loss of ritual, over-simplification of rites, loss of a sense of silence, beauty and an unwitting clericalisation have all led to the Mass lacking its full potential to catechise the faithful and renew the Church.
The Second Vatican Council’s “catechetical thrust” that encouraged priests to catechise in the process of celebration has led to the Mass “drowning under the weight of supposed catechetical verbosity”.
There will be an attempt in the new translations, he said, to control “clerical verbosity and, dare I say, clerical idiosyncrasy”. There will also be an attempt to render the texts in a way that’s less overtly catechetical.
“Let the texts stand as (they are) and let catechesis draw out from the texts in a way that communicates to the community, rather than trying to build into the texts a catechesis that runs the risk of corrupting the texts or diluting their power,” he said.