What Does The Prayer Really Say?
W D T P R S

Today during the traditional Sunday Regina Caeli audience in St. Peter’s Square, the Holy Father spoke in Latin to a group of young people, Latinists, in attendance.  I will get the text for you later.  Today is a busy day.

What Does the Prayer Really Say? 5th Sunday of Easter

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2006

A priest friend in the USA sent encouraging news.  Fr. WS of Omaha (NE) relates he is going to implement in one of the parishes entrusted to his charge a Holy Mass each Sunday sung in Latin.  Both his parish council and the local archbishop were happy for him to do so.  Fr. WS had many years ago frequented the famous St. Agnes Church in St. Paul (MN) where the long-time pastor Msgr. Richard Schuler had founded the flourishing program of sacred orchestral music for proper use in the celebration of Holy Mass with the Novus Ordo Missae.  St. Agnes had been founded for German speaking immigrants, but shifting demographics had changed the area dramatically.  The use of Latin and the marvelous treasury of the Church’s music on Sundays assured not only that the actual desires of the Second Vatican Council were being respected more in the observance than the breach but also that many people would come from far and wide to attend Holy Mass there on Sundays and feasts. 

Many priests have taken a page from Msgr. Schuler’s playbook, and his influence is felt in wonderful places like Assumption Grotto Church in Detroit and St. John Cantius in Chicago.  Here is some of what of Fr. WS wrote (edited):

“You already know that I was trained at the St. Agnes School of Liturgy under Monsignor Schuler and that I was the ‘voice’ on St. Agnes’ original recordings of the Masses for Christmas, Easter and Pentecost made back in the 80’s. …  St. Francis was a Polish national parish until about four years ago.  To preserve this heritage the hymns will be in English, Polish and Latin.  Now the parish is Anglo/Hispanic (with Hispanics making up the largest segment of the parish).  There is a Spanish Mass Sundays at noon.  We will have a sung High Mass on the major feasts.  The scripture readings, homily and prayers of the faithful will be in English.  The Mass will be ‘ad orientem’.  Eventually I hope to add a communion rail.  The parish is over 100 years old; this building was put up in 1968.  It has a beautiful mosaic of Christ rising from the tomb; the tabernacle is centered prominently on the back wall of the sanctuary.  Soon we will be revising the shrines of Our Lady and St. Joseph to improve their appearance.  The sanctuary is thrust-type with 6 banks of pews arranged in a u-shape.  The church seats around 400.”

Please join me in thanking Fr. WS for his efforts on behalf of the souls of the people entrusted to his care.  Father told me by phone he is hopeful the Latin will also be a unifying force for the different groups represented in his parish.  Furthermore, Father is obeying what the Council commanded: steps should taken to see that people are able both to sing and to speak in both Latin and their mother tongue those parts of the Mass that pertain to them (cf. Sacrosanctum Concilium 54). 

Friends, we need a new translation of the Roman Missal and we need it soon.  We also need more Latin.  We need a generous opening of the enormous treasury of the Church’s sacred music in Latin.  We need generosity in regard to the magnificent heritage we have a claim to as Catholics.  The Church must also foster new forms of music and art. This is beyond question.  Holy Church has for centuries given to humanity two great gifts reflecting God’s glory: saints and art.  Saints are living examples of the truth and beauty of God.  Sacred arts reflect God in non-living things, almost as if they were God’s grandchildren. 

The Catholic Church has ever been the greatest patroness of the arts the world has ever known.  Bishops and priests hold the keys to the treasury.  Laypeople should plead pressure and provide, but the clergy authorize what is integrated into the liturgical celebrations in our churches.   For this reason, seminarians need formation in these matters before ordination.  Steps should be taken in Catholic centers of high learning to offer training in all the sacred arts.  For two millennia, each generation of Catholics has given to the next precious artistic gifts.  They bequeathed to us their very best.  When future generations look back at us, what shall they say we gave them?
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SUPER OBLATA (2002MR): 
Deus, qui nos, per huius sacrificii veneranda commercia,
unius summaeque divinitatis participes effecisti,
praesta, quaesumus, ut, sicut tuam cognovimus veritatem,
sic eam dignis moribus assequamur.

This prayer was originally in the 1962MR as the secret of the 18^th Sunday after Pentecost.  The ancient Gelasian Sacramentary had a similar prayer.

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Lord God,
by this holy exchange of gifts
you share with us your divine life.
Grant that everything we do
may be directed by the knowledge of your truth.

Is this what the Latin really says?   Let’s look at vocabulary using the mighty Lewis & Short Dictionary. 

Before that, I must share something.  Last night I was gently mocked for this regular feature of these WDTPRS columns.  I was out to eat Chinese with the head of a Roman institute together with an official of a Vatican congregation.  They poked more than a little fun at me about all the vocabulary and details in these articles.  “I can just picture,” said one of them mirthfully, “the little old ladies in Minnesota reading with rapt attention about the Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine.”  Picking up on this, the other guy added, “I can just hear someone saying ‘Rats.  Father Z says to look this up, but I lent Volume Seven of the Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament to Gladys last week!’”  Folks, I try to provide a little something for everyone in this series.  So, let’s get back to work.

Latin assequor is “to reach by pursuing” and “to attain to by an effort of the understanding”.  Mos means in the plural, as we have it today, “manners, morals, character” in the sense of “behavior, conduct.”  Think of the English word “mores”.  “O tempora, O mores!”, cried the consul M. Tullius Cicero (+43 BC) in his second oration against the dissolute L. Sergius Catilina or “Catiline”, who conspired with others like himself to unmake the authority of the senate, plunder the treasury of the Roman people, and set Rome ablaze.
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The Lewis & Short Dictionary, which is so precious you would never lend it to Gladys or anyone else for that matter, says that commercium means “trade, traffic, commerce” but also “intercourse, communication, correspondence, fellowship.”  Every student of Latin knows that epistolarum commercium is an exchange of letters, correspondence back and forth.  Perhaps you will recall the phrase O admirabile commercium - “O wonderous exchange!”, the famous antiphon of Vespers and Lauds of the octave day of Christmas which has been set to glorious sacred music by composers of every age. 

This commercium is an Old Testament reference to the way in which man entered with God into a covenant, a contract and exchange (though between unequal partners).  Our new covenant with God is a commercium, the mysterious participation of the divine Second Person of the Trinity in our humanity, the way that the Son of God became the Son of Man so that we might be made the sons of God.

There is a strong juridical/legal overtone to the word commercium.  Ancient Romans classified people in roughly three different categories, cives (citizens), latini (those closely tied to Rome but without full status), and peregrini (foreign residents).  A civis had the rights, among other things, of connubium et commercium, the right to contract legal marriage and to conduct business and commerce (Latini had commercium and the peregrini had neither).   This also included inheritance rights.  Eventually in the dissolution of the Republic into the Empire these were the only truly valuable rights in the civitas (the body-politic, the body of the citizens united in a community including all the integrated cities, etc. – think of St. Augustine’s City of God…De civitate Dei).    

Returning to commercium Eamon Duffy gives us some food for thought (emphasis mine):

In marked contrast to many of the longer and more discursive prayers of other rites, especially those of the East, these crisp and often tightly structured prayers (read: Collect, “secret”, post-Communion) offer a unique glimpse of Roman tradition at its most profound and most memorable. Fidelity to the tradition would demand faithfulness in transmitting something at least of the quality of these prayers into the vernacular. In discussing the distinctive theological merits of the Roman liturgy, Cipriano Vagaggini, one of the key figures in the production of the Post-Conciliar Mass, singled out the notion of a "sacrum commercium", a holy exchange, in the eucharistic offering, which is so central in the Roman canon. Bread and wine, he wrote, "are chosen from among the gifts God has given us and are offered to him as a symbol of the offering of ourselves, of what we possess and of the whole of material creation. In this offering we pray God to accept them, to bless them and to transform them through his Spirit into the Body and Blood of Christ, asking him to give them back to us transformed in such a way that through them we may, in the Spirit, be united to Christ and to one another, sharing in fact in the divine nature."  Vagaggini was discussing the theological focus of the Roman Canon, but this notion of a "holy exchange" in fact underlies many of the most characteristic prayers of the Roman Rite, and could even be claimed, I think, as one of its defining features…. In the Missal its characteristic form is binary: prayers over the offerings or after Communion repeatedly explore the paradox that earthly and temporal things become, by the power of God, vehicles of eternal life. The Missal is never tired of this dialectic, and prayer after prayer rings the changes on it (cf. The Tablet of 6 July 1996, pp. 882-3).

The translation in preparation is of critical importance.  However, as I have repeatedly reminded you faithful WDTPRSers, a campaign is being waged against the norms established by the Holy See.  The norms found in Liturgiam authenticam from the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments uphold precisely what Fr. Duffy spoke to above.  However, there are Catilines resisting these norms and working to usurp the process.  They want a style of liturgical language reflecting how people actually talk today, which is ever shifting and which tends to the lower denominators rather than the higher.  In contrast, the norms foresee a sacral style rooted in the structure of the prayers and the deeper traditions of English literature.  I want for you and for me a translation which will give us our inheritance, deep and beautiful prayers which sprang forth from the early Church and were written even in the blood of martyrs.  Even the newly composed Latin prayers are rooted in this living tradition. They too echo with our forbears’ deepest aspirations. 

SLAVISHLY LITERAL TRANSLATION:
O God, who through the exchanges of this sacrifice which are to be venerated,
made us participants of the one and supreme Godhead,
grant, we beg, that, just as we have come to the knowledge of Your truth,
we may grasp it by means of worthy practices of life.

Our response to the wondrous gift that God offers us must be met with a response on our part that compels us in love and gratitude to conform our outward lives to what we have inwardly recognized as the Truth.  Lip service is not enough.  Action is required.

What Does the Prayer Really Say?  5th Sunday of Easter

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2003

Dare we to hope?  The 2 May 2003 edition of the Catholic Herald published in the UK provides a story by Simon Caldwell that the Pope is preparing “to lift restrictions on Tridentine Mass: English bishops request secret report from Latin Mass Society”.  According to the story, “John Paul II is understood to be ready to grant a "universal indult" by the end of the year to permit all priests to choose freely between the celebration of Mass in the so-called Tridentine rite used up to 1962 – before the disciplinary reforms of the Second Vatican Council – and the novus ordo Mass used after 1970.”   This document has been around for years waiting for a signature from the Holy Father.  It was scuttled once, in the late ‘80’s when the heads of European episcopal conferences caught wind of it and complained.  Apparently this is now seen as a useful tool, in keeping with the Pope’s commands in his Motu Proprio of 1988 Ecclesia Dei.  Also, in the story is the encouraging news that, “Last month, the Holy Father, who celebrated a Tridentine Mass last summer, published a command called Rescriptum ex Audientia to authorise the celebration of the old rite Mass in St Peter’s Basilica, Rome, by any priest who possessed an indult.”  This author is in Rome right now and will test this at the Vatican Basilica.  During the years I lived in Rome, I constantly witnessed rudeness and flak offered by the sacristans of the Basilica to anyone who used or intended to use the older form of Mass.  Complaints were made, of course, to no effect.  The word from those in charge of the Basilica under now retired Virgilio Card. Noè was that the older, “Tridentine”, form of Mass (and I am not making this up), “might confuse the laity.”   Aside from the fact that this condescension shows little grasp of the intelligence of laypeople, it is also divorced from reality.  On any given morning in the Vatican basilica you will see simultaneously at different altars, the Divine Liturgy celebrated by Ukrainian Catholics, the Syro-Malabar Rite from India, individual celebrations, mass con-celebrations, and the Novus Ordo Mass (with greater or lesser degrees of “making it up as you go”) in every language of the world including Latin.  My personal experience is that people know how to respond very well and properly to everything that pertained to them when the older form was used but were without a clue at certain points (without booklets or aids) during spoken Masses in Latin with the Novus Ordo (e.g., the response after the Mysterium Fidei or after the Our Father).  So, this Rescript is a piece of good news.

The Catholic Herald also claims that “the Vatican also asked the Scottish bishops, ahead of their five-yearly ad limina visit to Rome in March, to reveal what provisions they made for the celebration of the old rite Mass in their dioceses. Since the meeting, the Scottish bishops have stepped up their provision from just four a year in the whole of the country to at least one a month in Glasgow and Edinburgh.”  It looks to me as it there is a strong effort being made to create an ecclesial atmosphere conducive to talks with the SSPX and possible reconciliation. 

According to a report in the Adoremus Bulletin (vol. IX, no. 2 – April 2003) there was a plenary meeting in Rome of the Vox Clara committee (VC) from 12-14 March at the offices of the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments (CDW).  This committee was set up in July 2001 to ride shot-gun, er um, act as a liaison between ICEL and the CDW to ensure that the new translation norms of Liturgiam authenticam (LA) are properly observed when the new liturgical books are prepared.    The VC considered a draft of document, called a ratio translationis which will guide the specific application of LA and provide the guiding principles of English translation work.  VC also looked at some translations of parts of the Missale Romanum.  So, everyone, the work is moving forward.  Would it be too much to ask you to offer some fasting and prayers for the VC committee and those who will be doing the work?  This is so important to our future worship in our churches, my friends.  In the meantime, the Holy See approved the English edition of the revised (1990) Rites of Ordination.  You might remember that it was, in my opinion, an earlier wretched translation of these all-important rites that served as ICEL’s Waterloo.  The rejection of that translation and the subsequent actions of the CDW marked the beginning of the dismantling of the “old” ICEL and its reshaping into a “new” entity.

When you are in Rome, you pick up all sorts in interesting tidbits.  For those of you who think that Latin is nearly dead everywhere, I learned yesterday that after Holy Week liturgies in the cathedral of Bamberg, Germany the whole congregation sang Compline in Latin.  Also, in Antwerp, Belgium at the Church of St. James (Greater) Mass is offered every Sunday in the language of our heritage replete with Gregorian chant.

POST COMMUNIONEM

LATIN (2002 Missale Romanum):
Populo tuo, quaesumus, Domine, adesto propitius,
et, quem mysteriis caelestibus imbuisti,
fac ad novitatem vitae de vetustate transire.

This was mostly based on the Postcommunio of Monday in the Octave of Pentecost in the 1962MR: Adesto, quaesumus, Domine, populo tuo; et, quem mysteriis caelestibus imbuisti, ab hostium furore defende.  I guess that last part, “…defend (us) from the rage of enemies…” smacked a little too much of the diabolical, and therefore the Devil, and therefore hell and, clearly, it had to go. 

The vocabulary for our prayer today is rather straightforward.  Still, we can consult the azure-bound Lewis & Short Dictionary and deepen our knowledge of some of the familiar (at least to students of Latin) words.  The verb imbuo denotes, “to wet, moisten, dip, tinge, touch” and thus “to fill, tinge, stain, taint, infect, imbue, imbrue with any thing” and by extension “to inspire or impress early, to accustom, inure, initiate, instruct, imbue.”  Transeo is, “to go over or across, to cross over, pass over, pass by, pass” or also “to go or pass over into any thing by transformation, to be changed or transformed into a thing.”  For example, you might like the proverbial chicken “cross over” the road  or like the shepherds in Luke 2:15 “go over” to Bethlehem to see what had happened.  Were you to cross over a river, surely you would get wet and your clothes would be tinged and imbued with water.  Anything that passes through dye is certainly tinged.  Our souls are tinged and permanently marked with the Christian character when we are baptized.  We “transit” from old death over to new life. We “put on the new man” with our baptismal garments.  There is a prayer that may be said when putting on a surplice: “Indue me, Domine, novum hominem… O Lord, clothe me with ‘the new man’….”

The noun vestustas means, “old age, age, long existence” and novitas, “a being new, newness, novelty.”  By extension novitas also means “the condition of a homo novus, newness of rank.”  A novus homo or “new man” was a political and social upstart, a man without pedigree or ancient family background such as Gaius Marius (157-86 BC), the great military reformer, seven-time consul and eventual dictator of Rome.  He did not come from a patrician background and was thus sneered at by the Senatorial class as a “new man”.  Still, when there was no one else who could be put in the field against the chieftain Jugurtha rampaging in North Africa, whom no one had been able to subjugate, Marius raised an army from the poorer classes of Rome (capite censi or “head count”) and not from the land owner class as was always done in the past, and he paid for their equipment himself.   When the action was over, he secured public land to be distributed to them and thus secured their loyalty to him, and not to the Senate, forever.   His chief aide de camp was the notorious Lucius Cornelius Sulla (138-78 BC) who also became a dictator, a ruthless one.  Marius, now with a record as an effective general, would be asked to battle the Germanic Cimbri and Teuton tribes who had soundly pasted six generals and their legions.  Marius was successful in two major campaigns and thus came to be regarded as the savior of and “Third Founder” of Rome.    By securing the loyalty of the military to himself personally, Marius changed the face of Rome forever and paved the way for Julius Caesar and the following Empire.  However, all in all the idea of novus anything was pejorative.  In fact the term for “revolution”, a very much despised concept by the entrenched Roman autocracy, was res novae…. “new things”.  Pope Leo XIII would begin his famous encyclical of 15 May 1891 on social issues and the condition of workers and against the alarming rise of strange atheistic theories with the gloriously sculpted and ringing words, “Rerum novarum semel excitata cupidine,... Once the passion for revolutionary change was aroused—a passion long disturbing governments—it was bound to follow sooner or later that eagerness for change would pass from the political sphere over into the related field of economics.”  In ancient Latin terms, the novum was looked at with suspicion.

That is the way the novus homo and res novae were conceived of in worldly terms.  But our prayer today was clearly inspired by St. Jerome’s Vulgate version of Romans 6:4-5: “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory (gloria) of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life (nos in novitate vitae ambulemus)” (RSV), and also Romans 7:6: “But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we serve not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit (in novitate spiritus et non in vetustate litterae)” (RSV).  Concerning novitas as the “condition of the novus homo” we can consult also Ephesians 2:14-15: “For he is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man (novum hominem) in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end” (RSV) as well as Ephesians 4:23-25: “And be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new nature (lit. “new man” – novum hominem), created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.  Therefore, putting away falsehood, let every one speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another” (RSV).  Paul’s view of the old covenant and the freedom of the new covenant shape our Holy Communion this Sunday.

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Merciful Father,
may these mysteries give us new purpose
and bring us to a new life in you.

Perhaps we can do a little better than this even if we eschew trying to make a lovely version suitable for the liturgy itself and just stick closely to a…

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
We beg you, O Lord, propitiously to stand by your people,
and cause them, whom you have imbued with heavenly sacramental mysteries,
to cross over from the old state of being unto a new condition of life.

The imbuo (“moisten, tinge, imbue”) calls to mind several things.  At this time of year where I live there is a great deal of preparation for planting going on.  Seeds are being planted and seedlings raised (in a greenhouse) in preparation for transferal out of doors when the ground finally thaws and the threat of frost is over.  These seeds and baby plants must be kept warm and moist at all times and given good light.    I see older, dormant plants sprouting leaves and flowers and coming back to life.  Our heavenly Father loves us.   When we die in sin we are like cut-off branches or life-less sticks still rooted but pointing vainly to the sky.  While there is earthly life, however, there is hope of spiritual renewal.  We must avoid the threats and killing effect of the frost of near occasions of sin.  When we draw near to the source of all life, both physical and spiritual, our God like a master gardener tends us, moistens our dry souls, and brings us from a death-like state into a new and fruitful condition of living.  When we hear today’s prayer, conscious of the Real Presence within us at that moment and mindful of the progress of the Easter season moving towards the descent of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost, we can be confident indeed that God is standing with us.

What Does the Prayer Really Say?  Fifth Sunday of Easter

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2002

In WDTPRS last week I said we might review the translation controversy surrounding the now-in-force General Instruction of the Roman Missal’s (2002GIRM) paragraph #299, about the placement of the altar and the direction of celebration of Holy Mass.   Background: the U.S. Bishops’ Conference issued on 16 November 2000 a document called "Built of Living Stones: Art, Architecture, and Worship" (BLS).  BLS was intended to replace the heinous 1978 statement Environment and Art in Catholic Worship which served at the foundation for the “denovation” of countless churches even though it really had no authority. BLS has a section about the placement of the altar in which it quotes 2002GIRM #299 (remember that what I now call the 2002GIRM had been released in Latin in 2000, far in advance of the release of the 2002 Missale Romanum). The bishops’ BLS gives an English translation of #299 in footnote #75:

In every church there should ordinarily be a fixed, dedicated altar, which should be freestanding to allow the ministers to walk around it easily and Mass to be celebrated facing the people, which is desirable whenever possible….

In the National Catholic Register of 7-14 April 2002, a statement was made that, according to the new GIRM, it is now preferable to celebrate Mass “facing the people.”  If the Register is making this mistake, it would appear that there was some serious damage caused from the mistranslation of #299 used by the bishops.  Let us look at #299.  The last time we examined it at length was in the third article of WDTPRS for the 2^nd Sunday of Advent in the year 2000:

Altare maius exstruatur a pariete seiunctum, ut facile circumiri et in eo celebratio versus populum peragi possit, quod expedit ubicumque possibile sit.

The English version in BLS (above) is faulty.  The translator failed to see that quod refers back to the main clause of the sentence. The bishops’ translator fell into the common trap of translating the Latin word by word, rather than reading the whole sentence. Their translator made #299 read as if there is a preference or even a requirement in the law itself to celebrate Mass facing the people. But #299 indicates nothing of the kind. That paragraph really says:

The main altar should be built separated from the wall, which is useful wherever it is possible, so that it can be easily walked around and a celebration toward the people can be carried out.  (Emphasis added)

This paragraph explains the distance of separation from the wall: at least far enough so that it can be used from either side, rather than just an inch or two of separation.  The Latin doesn’t even hint that Mass must be said versus populum.  It only provides that it can be.  And that is not an absolute, either. What makes this very troubling is that on 25 September 2000 the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments issued a clarification (Prot. No. 2036/00/L) regarding #299 in the new Latin GIRM. That clarification says:

The Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments has been asked whether the expression in n. 299 of the Institutio Generalis Missalis Romani constitutes a norm according to which the position of the priest versus absidem [facing the apse] is to be excluded.
The Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, after mature reflection and in light of liturgical precedents, responds:
Negatively, and in accordance with the following explanation.

The explanation includes different elements which must be taken into account. First, the word expedit does not constitute a strict obligation but a suggestion that refers to the construction of the altar a pariete sejunctum (detached from the wall).  It does not require, for example, that existing altars be pulled away from the wall. The phrase ubi possibile sit (where it is possible) refers to, for example, the topography of the place, the availability of space, the arti