By Anthony Barich
National Reporter
The newly translated Roman Missal expected to hit Australian parishes by Easter 2010 needs to be phased in over a number of months, an expert in “change management” told The Record at a national gathering of liturgists in Perth last week.
Clare Johnson, senior lecturer in Sacramental Theology and Liturgical Studies at Australian Catholic University in Sydney, recommended rolling out the revised texts in several stages, taking up to eight weeks to learn each stage.
“The change should go over six to eight weeks, having prepared and catechised them about why it’s being done and making them understand what their role is, then getting them to practise it within the context of liturgy for six to eight weeks before you introduce the next stage,” she said.
She said the catechesis should start well before the Missal is introduced, with a leader needing to “step up and take some bullets” in explaining the changes and taking questions during a meeting held preferably in a non-liturgical setting.
This should be done with the resource One Body One Spirit in Christ, the interactive DVD to be released in April and produced by Fraynework under the direction of Fr Peter Williams, director of the Australian Bishops’ National Liturgical Office.
This out-of-Mass meeting can decide how the parish or community will implement the text – either by “ripping off the band-aid by changing everything at once”, or in a phased process.
This meeting can be facilitated by a liturgical specialist provided either by the National Liturgical Council or the diocese.
While admitting it would be hard convincing ordinary parishioners to attend such a meeting outside the Mass setting which constitutes many people’s only interaction with the Church apart from schools, Ms Johnson stressed that “this is the biggest change since Vatican II, and it needs to be taken with seriousness by all people”.
For ‘Generation X’ (born after the Baby Boom ended) and ‘Generation Y’ (born in the late 1980s and in the 1990s), this is the biggest change since the Mass changed from Latin to English in 1973. “I don’t think we can underestimate the grief and pain that my generation will feel with this; but we also need to not dwell too much on that,” she said.
Fr Williams told The Record that the old texts have clearly been “deficient”. “Anybody who knows Latin and looks at the Latin texts and our English texts will see they’re not very good translations. Yet like anything in life, people have come accustomed to them, got used to the cadences, rhythms, and have been part of people’s spiritual prayer for the last 40 years,” he said.
The first step, then, Miss Johnson said, is to advise people that changes are happening, as some Catholics are unaware the new translations are coming.
The few seconds or minutes before Mass, a popular teaching moment where new songs are often explained and briefly taught and rehearsed, is an opportune time to explain the changes to be made at a particular Mass, she said.
Congregations also need to be properly resourced, either by being provided with pew cards, a bulletin insert or a power-point slide.
“It’s going to take repetition before it becomes natural,” she said.
“But if we do it in stages, where they get used to one section in a small bite to digest, then the transition will happen fairly smoothly and it will be done within a matter of some months.
“It needs to take that long to give people a chance to let go of the old translations, and ease into the new ones. People need to be given a chance to own the change in the process. They haven’t been given a chance to do that as they haven’t been consulted about the fact that change is happening.”
Archbishop Mark Coleridge, chair of the Australian Bishops’ Liturgy Commission, told the national conference last week that all Bishops in the English-speaking world were given the texts for suggestions and were open to show it to anyone.
He said it was logistically impossible to show it to everyone. While one liturgist stood up during the conference to say it would still be seen by many as a fait accompli with no consultation, Miss Johnson agreed that “the reality is the majority of people couldn’t be a part of the process simply because they couldn’t have been. It was logistically impossible”.
“Where they can have a say is how it happens in their local parish, saying ‘we have to work out a way together to implement this here’ is absolutely crucial,” she said.