Posted on 02/14/2006 1:07:51 PM PST by sionnsar
The following is excerpted from and article on Catholic News Service. Cardinal Arinze is the Vatican’s top liturgist.
Cardinal Arinze said the main challenge facing his congregation is to encourage a spirit of prayer, which must grow out of faith. He said bringing people to Mass regularly is essential, and it hinges largely on two factors: catechesis and high-quality, faith-filled liturgies.
Celebrating Mass well involves lay ministers, but primarily the priest, who sets a tone through every word and gesture, the cardinal said.
"Suppose a priest comes at the beginning of Mass and says: 'Good morning, everybody, did your team win last night?' That's not a liturgical greeting. If you can find it in any liturgical book, I'll give you a turkey," Cardinal Arinze said.
Likewise, a priest has to preach well, making sure that his homily offers theological and scriptural enlightenment, and not merely verbal "acrobatics" to show off how many books he's read, he said.
The cardinal said that if done well Sunday Mass will not be experienced as a heavy obligation, but as a spiritual banquet, a celebration appreciated by the faithful who are hungry for spiritual nourishment and want to adore God.
"You should not need a commandment to enter such a banquet hall," he said.
I think I like this guy. His comments seem to bode well for some real improvements in the services endured experienced by most Roman Catholics. (The Eastern Catholic churches never went over the liturgical cliff the way so many Latin Rite churches did. Go to a “modern” Latin Rite church, then go to Our Lady’s Maronite – it will blow you away.) It also bodes well for Episcopalians (ECUSA), since the 1979 Rite II communion service is very much a Lite Beer version of the Roman Novus Ordo mass. If they copied the abuses, maybe they’ll copy the corrections.
Lex orandi, lex credendi. “The rule of prayer is the rule of belief” or, as the perpetrators authors of modern liturgies might phrase it, “if we control the liturgy, we can get them to believe whatever we want.”
Bad liturgy makes for faulty beliefs, and it doesn’t take a lot of effort to see that. Show me a church that has gone theologically squishy, and I’ll show you a church where the service and the preaching have departed from historical Christian norms. Good liturgy, on the other hand, makes for orthodox belief. St. Francis uses the old 1928 Episcopal Prayer Book. I’m no big fan of Elizabethan English, or of hanging on to the old for its own sake. But when I first came there from a 1979 Rite II ECUSA church, the theological differences in the prayers were glaring. And you can see those differences reflected in the eyes of the parishioners as well. Hey, hey – A-Rin-Zey! Go, Cardinal!
Traditional Anglican ping, continued in memory of its founder Arlin Adams. I think one of the deacons at my parish could use a homily refresher course.
Indeed. The 79 BCP and the ICEL Novus Ordo foolishly opted to translate from scratch instead of relying on the hallowed style that had already been part of English liturgy for centuries.
I share your hope for better times for the Latin Rite sionssar, but even though the latest draft translation that leaked out was unquestionably better than the ICEL monstrosity, it still, disappointingly, was not very beautiful. The language was still very modern and flat, with nothing of the thee's and thou's that really make English so poetic.
There are many reasons to hold on to liturgical English. One is the fact that only with thee/thou and ye/you are the differences between 2nd person plural/singular and subjective/objective (found in nearly all other modern languages, and in all of the old liturgical languages we are translating from), another is beauty, and perhaps most important is that liturgical English is a stable liturgical "dialect" or language that doesn't vary from century to century.
Anyone who is well versed in traditional language falls right into prayer and worship when the cadences and familiar verbage comes along. It doesn't matter if one is reading Cranmer's prayer book or modern Orthodox translations done into traditional liturgical English. And our great-great grandchildren will be able to pray with any of the above.
If you look at the main liturgical languages in use in the Orthodox world (liturgical Greek and Church Slavonic), neither is the modern vernacular, and both take a little effort to learn.
Precisely. And the same goes for Syriac, Coptic, Ge'ez, and even the languages of other religions--Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, etc. When Rome was being threatened by the barbarians in 476, some Etruscan priests came forward to offer say some prayers in Etruscan--despite the fact that the language been extinct for probably 400 years by then. Religion has a natural conservative instinct that naturally tries to hold on to the ancient expressions.
Although Mike the Geek wrote the above, I do rather hope for better times for the Latin Rite. Though I have never heard it and do not know it, I am presuming that (I may have been told this) it is more beautiful and powerful, even if you have to learn Latin, than what replaced it.
My experience exactly when I re-encountered the 1928 BCP Order for Holy Communion after 15 years of the '79 and its trial-liturgy predecessors!
And you're 100% right about the old Latin liturgy. I attend it every week when I can, and its beauty and power is undeniable. I see much of the very same qualities in high Anglican liturgies (including the Anglican Use authorized by Rome not too long ago), and it has left me convinced that the vernacular was never the problem--it was how the vernacular was done.
Ahh, but our bishops don't seem to see this as a problem, sadly. So no thees and thous for the foreseeable future.
"...it has left me convinced that the vernacular was never the problem--it was how the vernacular was done."
Precisely. I would strongly argue that the vernacular is necessary, with the vernacular being defined as a liturgical language closely related enough to one's own native tongue to be able to be assimilated with little or no formal study by someone who attends the services regularly.
Russian and Serbian peasants with little or no education understood very well what the services were saying, even though they didn't speak in Church Slavonic.
The same was doubtless true of Italian and Spanish peasants vis a vis Latin -- but I daresay much less so for illiterate English or Polish peasants, especially with regard to variable propers.
This is of course of much greater importance in the Orthodox Church, where the full cycle of services tends to be done on a parish level, and where the volume of variable material is huge. These services simply can't be followed with the equivalent of a missal/libretto. One has to be able to understand the language "on the fly."
But one would hope that the Catholic Church will begin to recover its own daily office for parish use... with good liturgical vernaculars, of course... :-)
No insult taken here. Though "Mike the Geek" (he's a FReeper too) might. *\;-)
And you're 100% right about the old Latin liturgy. I attend it every week when I can, and its beauty and power is undeniable.
Some day I shall have to arrange to attend/observe, though my one year of Latin is almost completely faded. The goodwife knows it though (Latin is among her dozen-odd languages).
Yeah, it's not a bad policy. For whatever reason it didn't happen that way in the West, and though we had, for instance, the Gothic Bible of Wulfilas, the liturgy never made the transition. Given the grief Cyril and Methodius got (from Germans no less!), it's probably because language like Gothic/Slavonic etc. carried a cultural stigma that we can't readily understand today. Might have been like translating the liturgy into Brooklynese or something.
Interestingly enough, here in North America from the 1600s on, even in the Latin Church there was an uncharacteristic emphasis on translating parts of the liturgy into local Indian languages. Presumably, the utter cultural foreignness of Latin to the Indians contributed to that.
You are most correct that only Southerners have had the good sense to create a 2nd person plural where none existed in the English language. I am a bit of a Southern-o-phile, even though I was born and raised in the intermountain west. I even had the good sense to marry a southern girl (and she had the good sense to move out to the mountains with me.)
But I think there are just too few people who would be willing to use "y'all" in the liturgy, even if it seemed to work.
I would add that even good Southerners wouldn't use it, since they have tended to hold on to traditional liturgical English longer than those in other areas of the country. This may be because they just have good sense, or it may be because they are more naturally comfortable with Early Modern English because of its similarities to Southern speech cadences.
I'm afraid that the Yankees would be just as prejudiced toward the use of Southernese in the liturgy as apparently Latins were toward the use of Germanic languages.
P.S. Wasn't the Wulfilas Bible the product of the Gothic church in their Arian era? I'm not sure that the Western Patriarchate can even take credit for that. As so, historically, we are left with the curious oddity of the Indian languages in North America (but apparently not other non-Indo-European languages in, say, India or the far East.
Whoa...now a wait a minute here folks! LOL
Justly proud though ye may be in y'all, here in urban Yankee land (Philly, NJ, NYC, Boston), we invented the perfectly servicable plural "youse" = "Are youse going?". And out west just a little ways in Pittsburgh and the Appalachians, they have "y'uns"--Pittsburghers even call themselves "yinzers" it's so ubiquitous in their speech.
I just looked up Wulfilas and you're right--he was an Arian.
It is unfortunate that the career of Ulfilas was marred by his adherence to the Arian heresy. It may be said in extenuation of this fault that he was a victim of circumstances in coming under none but Arian and semi-Arian influences during his residence at Constantinople; but he persisted in the error until the end of his life. The lack of orthodoxy deprived the work of Ulfilas of permanent influence and wrought havoc among some of his Teutonic converts.Indeed, this article alleges that it was the translator's very Arianism that doomed it. Perhaps had he been orthodox, a Gothic church may well have emerged.
Pinging Antoninus, for his wisdom in things Gothic. Any thoughts?
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