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

Fox News’ journalist Steve Centanni and his cameraman have been RELEASED!

Let there be sung Non Nobis and Te Deum.

This is the chapel in the church of St. Augustine in Rome (literally across the street from my back door) on the day when the bones of St. Augustine were brought from their resting place in Pavia to Rome. For the first time since 387, son and mother were reunited.

Here is a closer shot of her tomb.

How did the tomb of St. Monica wind up here?  Here is an excerpt from an article I wrote for Inside the Vatican (December 2004) on the abovementioned event.  I used the alternate (and more accurate Punic) spelling of the saint’s name – "Monnica" (emphasis not in the original):

Most visitors to the Eternal City find it puzzling and wondrous that Monnica’s remains would be in Rome and even more so that Augustine’s should be in northern Italy, or that we have them at all.  How did this come to pass?  Monnica died at age 56 of a malarial fever at Ostia, Rome’s port city, not far from where modern Rome’s port, DaVinci airport, is situated.  After Augustine’s baptism in 386 by Milan’s bishop St. Ambrose (+ AD 397), Monnica and Augustine together with his brother Navigius, Adeodatus the future bishop’s son by his concubine of many years whom Monnica had forced Augustine to put aside, and friends Nebridius, Alypius and the former Imperial secret service agent (agens in rebus) Evodius were all waiting at Ostia to return home to Africa by ship.  They were stuck there for some time because the port was blockaded during a period of civil strife.  As she lay dying near Rome, Monnica told Augustine (conf. 9): “Lay this body anywhere, let not the care for it trouble you at all. This only I ask, that you will remember me at the Lord’s altar, wherever you be.”  She was buried there in Ostia.  In the 6^th century she was moved to a little church named for St. Aurea, an early martyr of the city, and there she remained until 1430 when her remains were translated by Pope Martin V to the Roman Basilica of St. Augustine built in 1420 by the famous Guillaume Card. D’Estouteville of Rouen, then Camerlengo under Pope Sixtus IV.  As fate or God’s directing have would have it, in December 1945, some children were digging a hole in the courtyard of the little church of St. Aurea next to the ruins of ancient Ostia.  They wanted to put up a basketball hoop, probably having been taught the exciting new game – so different from soccer – by American GIs.  While digging they discovered the broken marble epitaph which had marked Monnica’s ancient grave.  Scholars were able to authenticate the inscription, the text of which had been preserved in a medieval manuscript.  The epitaph had been composed during Augustine’s lifetime by no less then a former Consul of AD 408 and resident at Ostia, Anicius Auchenius Bassus, perhaps Augustine’s host during their sojourn.  It is possible that Anicius Bassus placed the epitaph there after 410 which saw the ravages of Alaric the Visigoth and the sacking of Rome and its environs.  One can almost feel behind these traces of ancient evidence Augustine’s plea to his old friend sent by letter from the port of Hippo Regius over the waves to Ostia.  Hearing of the devastation to the area, far more shocking to the ancients than the events of 11 September were for us, did Augustine, now a renowned bishop, ask his old friend to tend the grave of the mother whom he had so loved and who in her time had wept for her son’s sins and rejoiced in his conversion?

Turning again to Serge Lancel’s excellent Augustine, the best biography I know of the great Bishop of Hippo (p. 11 ff) we can get a view of Monica and her son and their relationship (my emphasis):

In the course of [The Confessions], Monica appears less as a model than as a permament point of reference, a beacon whose light, sometimes dimmed – as when he deserted and fled from his mother on his departure for Rome in 383 – marks out an as yet uncertain route. In the spring of 385, in Milan, rediscovering an Augustine who had broken with Manichaeism but did not yet adhere to the Christian faith, she would assure him of her conviction that before she departed this life she would see him a faithful Catholic. She had spared no effort to achive this goal, neither prayers nor tears nor the hard-won courage to ban her son from her house on his return from Carthage in 373. With other early Christians, she shared the gift of those visions in which divine revelation comes, for those who know how to interpret it, to throw light on a the path ahead and do away with doubt. For instance, the inspired dream she had in the depths of her despair, when Augustine was in his twentieth year. She had seen herself stading on a wooden rule, and a luminous young man approached her, joyful and smiling; when he asked her the cause of her sadness and daily tears, she replied that she was weeping for the perdition of her son; then the young man – surely Christ – told her to look more closely to discover that where she was stadning, there also stood her son. And Monica saw Augustine, standing by her side on the same rule. That is how they would be, both close to the divine, one summer evening in 387 at Ostia.

 

The last few decades of our twentieth century were more distant from Monica’s mental universe and her social environment than the fifteen preceding centuries, which leaves a great deal of room for simplification and even caricature. Where Augustine saw an exemplary Christian widow, always giving alms and going to church twice daily to pray and not to gossip, we would be tempted to see a visionary bigot, somewhat inflexible and totally lacking in what we call a sense of humour. With a nudge from Freudianism, the worried and perhaps over-attentive mother, passionately set on "travailing in the spirit" for the one she had travailed for in the flesh, has been perceived as carnally possessive and abusive by analysis for whom the Confessions sometimes seem to serve up their dubious theories on a platter. For example, this phrase of Augustine, recalling his Christian childhood which his father was still a pagan, and stating simply that Monica "did her utmost to make thee, my God, my father rather than him". We are told that the feeling of guilt, which in fact is strong in Augustine – and subsequently characteristic of medieval and modern Christianity – was the result of difficult relations between a mother and son of genius and a devout and dominating mother. The doctrine of original sin, and Augustinian creation, would emerge from it. Thus, according to this interpretation, for centuries a major feature of the moral character and religious feeling of our western world would be the outcome of neuroses engendered in Augustine’s psyche in his earliest childhood by his relationship with his mother.

Let us return to Thagaste, on the ides of November 354. Let us imagine Patricius, the too quickly forgotten father, and his wife, bending over the cradle of their newborn son. Was it at that moment that they decided on the name he was to be given? In the case of a male infant, naming was the father’s choice, but we can wager that Monica had her say in giving him the name Augustine, made commonplace for us by over a thousand years of countless bearers of this Christian name, but in those says so rare, and above all so ambitious: literally the "little Augustus" or the "little emperor". Did his parents, in the foreknowledge of a unique desitiny, bestow it on one who would make it illustrious? Bearing this diminutive, a child would grow whose posthumous glory would one day eclipse that of the masters of the world.

From Serge Lancel’s Augustine, the best biography I know of the great Bishop of Hippo (p. 8 ff):

Before devoting himself entirely to Mother Church, as he approached the age of forty, Augustine had had a concubine for about fifteen years, fo whom he had beem very fond and who had given him a son; then, at the same time as a fleeting engagement, a second short-lived liaison.  But only one woman really counted in his life, and that was his natural mother, Monica.

As we may guess from reading a few pages of Book XI of the Confessions, Patricius had taken a wife in Thagaste from a milieu close to his own.  He had married Monica, as his would describe it in a phrase borrowed from Virgil, "in the fullness of her nubility", which means that he had not married a child, a practice that was in any case more rare then in Agrica that in Rome itself.  The couple had three children, in what order we do not know: a girl, who remains anonymous to us, but who, once widowed, would later become the superior of a community of nuns, and two boys, Augustine and Navigius, whom we shall find with his brother in Italy, at Cassiciacum, then at Ostia at their dying mother’s bedside. 

...

So Monica had been born into a Christian family and was, as we would say today, a practicing believer.  The religious practices of Christians at that time, in North Africa, sometimes included aspects that would be surprising to us, such as the custom of taking offerings of food to the tombs of martyrs, for agapes that only too often degenerated into orgies; an obvious survival of the pagan festival of the Parentalia.  Of course, Monica did not indulge in those excesses.  If the baskets she brought to the cemetery contained, besides gruel and bread, a pitcher of unadulterated wine, when the time came to share libations with other faithful, she herself would take only a tiny amount, diluted with water, sipped from a goblet in front of every tomb visited.  Was this sobriety a memory of some experience in her early youth?  Augustine tells this sotry whcih he says he heard from the lady hersself.  Raised in temperance by an old serving-woman who enjoyed the complete trust of Monica’s parents, she had fallen into a bad habit.  Well-behaved girl that she was, she was sent to the cellar to fetch wine from the cask, but before using the goblet she had brought to fill the carafe she would just wet her lips with the wine, not because she liked it, says Augustine, but out of childish mischief.  But gradually she had acquired a taste for it, to the point where she was drinking entire goblets of it with great gusto.  Fortunately she had cured herself of this incipient liking for drink in a burst of pride: the maidservant who accompanied her to the cellar, having fallen out one day with her young mistresss, insultingly called he a "little wine bibber".  Stung to the quick, Monica had immediately stopped her habit.

What Does the Prayer Really Say?  21st Sunday of Ordinary Time

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2003

In that bastion of commonsense The Wall Street Journal (6 Aug 2003) I read a review by Charlotte Allen of the New York Times (called by one bishop I know “Hell’s Bible”) religion columnist (and past editor of Commonweal) Peter Steinfels’ new rather liberally oriented tome A People Adrift: the crisis in the Roman Catholic Church in America (Simon & Schuster).  Ms. Allen, while saying that Steinfels is speaking sympathetically of some issues about which most conservatives are usually quite concerned, makes some good observations regarding Mr. Steinfel’s book and his comments about “ghastly innovations” including “insipid music, architectural overhauls that have transformed parish churches into sterile auditoriums, and translations of the Latin liturgy into dumbed-down and even ungrammatical English.  (My own favorite: “the glory and honor is yours.”) “ Ms. Allen might need to make a review.  That should have been “all glory and honor is yours”, which is equally ungrammatical.  Nevertheless, her point is well taken.  

JP writes with a question: “As a reader of your articles from the first one published in The Wanderer almost 3 years ago, I was wondering if in addition to consulting Lewis & Short, do you also consult Stelten’s Dictionary of Ecclesiastical Latin to see if any new meanings/nuances maybe at work in the prayers of the new Roman Missal?  Or is there some other reference you use instead of Stelton for that purpose?  The reason I ask is that Lewis & Short covers (I think) Latin usage only up until the time of Augustine, whereas most of the prayers of the Roman Missal were written after that point (including some written relatively recently, ca. 1970).  I would think that there may be other meanings/nuances intended by the authors of the prayers that were not in use until after Augustine and I was just wondering how you take that into account when writing your articles.”  Thanks for the question.  First, L&S actually covers authors to around A.D. 600 including the Christian poet Venantius Fortunatus.  Second, Leo F. Stelton’s handy little Dictionary of Ecclesiastical Latin (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1995 – DEL) has a preface by Stelton saying that “this book is not intended to be a research dictionary”.  Rather, it is a “practical manual for seminary students once they have completed introductory courses in the Latin language” and that it might be useful also for laypeople.  So, DEL is helpful for the beginning student for a quick consultation.  As such its entries do not include citations showing the word in contexts, thus also keeping the size of the volume down.   

I often consult, as you have seen, the Latin Vulgate, both the older and the newer, as well as Greek lexical tools, such as Lampe’s great dictionary of Patristic Greek when I make a connection between a phrase in a prayer and something from the New Testament or from the Fathers.   Also, JP, the L&S is a research dictionary available in virtually every library as is Andrews, ed. Harper’s Latin Dictionary. A new Latin dictionary founded on the translation of Freund’s Latin-German lexicon. Rev., enl., and rewritten by Charlton Lewis and Charles Short (1907).  It is in one manageable, though large, volume and it is relatively cheap at $175 brand spanking new.  Other than that, I do not regularly consult other Latin dictionaries.  [NB: This is no longer the case now.  I also consult Souter and two dictionaries edited by Blaise, mentioned below and some others as well.]  I consult my memory and experience, however, from years of reading later Latin texts in various fields.  My experience is that, in the main, if you have a good grasp of Latin the one volume L&S will give you virtually everything you need.  The 40,000 word entry Oxford Latin Dictionary (P.G. Glare, ed., 1968) is very large format, quite expensive (new $295) and limited to classical texts only extending to the end of the 2nd century A.D.  Forcellini’s Totius latinitatis lexicon (1858-1887) is in 10 volumes and rare.  The many volume Thesaurus linguae latinae or TLL (1900+) is still in the works, is huge, and not easy to get to.  There are some Latin etymological dictionaries which I have looked at when I was near a library that possesses them.  Useful (and hard to get and expensive) are A. Blaise, Dictionnaire latin-français des auteurs du moyen-âge. Lexicon latinitatis medii aevi, praesertim ad res ecclesiasticas investgandas pertinens (1975) and C. du Fresne, seigneur Du Cange, Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae latinitatis. 5th. ed. by Favre, 10 vols. (1883-1887).   On the other hand L&S includes very useful etymological information, so Blaise and Du Cange are overkill.  [NB: An opinion I have revised somewhat over time.]

L&S is better suited for the rough and tumble work we do in WDTPRS each week and it is entirely available online through the good folks at Tufts University in the USA running the awesome Perseus Project with mirror sites at Chicago, Oxford and Berlin (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/).  [NB: Recently the entire Tufts project has been revised and extended.  The site, with its mirrors, is fast and amazingly useful.]

POST COMMUNIONEM
LATIN (2002 Missale Romanum):
Plenum, quaesumus, Domine,
in nobis remedium tuae miserationis operare,
ac tales nos esse perfice propitius et sic foveri,
ut tibi in omnibus placere valeamus.

In the 1962MR this was the Postcommunio of a votive Mass for the consecration of a bishop.  How it got here, I am not sure.  

Miseratio means “a pitying, pity, compassion, commiseration”.  In the Roman Canon we hear the phrase (which we reviewed just last week) “secundum multitudinem miserationum tuarum sperantibus”.   L&S tells us that a remedium is “that which heals again; a cure, remedy; a medicine” and, logically therefore, “a means of aid, assistance, or relief; a remedy.”   Curiously, a form of remedium is only twice found in the Latin Vulgate, and both times in Tobit (cf. vv. 6:7; 10:4).  I would point out that the last time we saw remedium in one of our prayers was for the Super oblata of the 4th Sunday of Lent.  In that prayer remedium appeared also with the verb perficio, as it does today.   Perficio, perfeci, perfectum is the source of the English word “perfect”, meaning “to achieve, execute, carry out, accomplish, perform, dispatch, bring to an end or conclusion, finish, complete.”  Thus it is also “to make perfect’ and also “to bring about, to cause, effect”.  It is often constructed with ut and the subjective following, as it is in our prayer.  

About our ut and subjunctive construction today.  Please notice those words tales and sic.  To make sense of all this think in these terms: we are asking God to make us “such” or rather, “the kind of person” who will, as a result, do x,y, or z.  We want to be aided, warmed and cherished (foveri is a passive infinitive) by Him in such a way (sic) that there is a consequent result.  The result follows in the ut clause.

The verb foveo signifies in its basic meaning “to warm, to keep warm”.  By extension it means “to cherish, foster any thing”.  Interestingly, when applied to physical things and, for example, diseases it can be “to foment (whether with warm or cold remedies).”  I think we have all heard tales (or maybe some of you readers have experienced yourselves) the various remedies of yesteryear.  If you had “the grip” you would be smeared with a poultice or a cataplasm of something like hot goose grease.  Then you would be wrapped up to bake under so many blankets that you felt rather like a combination of St. Lawrence and St. Margaret Clitherow.   It is interesting that foveo is used in relationship with remedium.  Concerning other physical things, foveo is used for holding a child on one’s lap, or staying warm while wintering in a military camp.  In regard to mental things, foveo is as you might suspect, “to cherish, caress, love, favor, support, assist, encourage”.   

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Lord may this eucharist increase within us
the healing power of your love.
May it guide and direct our efforts
to please you in all things.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
We entreat you, O Lord,
work in us the complete remedy of your compassion,
and graciously make us to be the sort of people, and also to be supported in such a way,
that we are able to please you in all things.

When I hear this prayer I make a couple strong connections.  My first connection is with the priest’s prayers at Holy Mass.  I mentioned above the link in the word miseratio to the Roman Canon, the only “Eucharistic Prayer” in the Latin Church for a very long time, and the one I use nearly always.  Also in the Mass prayers the priest says the word “remedium”.  After his own Holy Communion and that of the faithful (in other words seconds before he recites this Post communion prayer), as the server pours the first bit of wine into the chalice for the ablutions in order to break the substance of the last drops of the Precious Blood that may have pooled at the bottom, the priest says in the newer form of Mass as in the older: “O Lord, grant that what we have taken by mouth may be received with a pure mind and heart: and that from a temporal gift it may become for us an eternal remedy (remedium).”

I also am struck by the imagery of illness and remedy.  Christ is the great physician of our souls.  In His Sacrifice we have obtained the remission of our sins, the greatest sickness we can ever have.   By dying He destroyed our death earned by sin.  By rising He restores our life and the hope of a glorious resurrection.  In His own Person, then, we have the perfect remedy for everything that ails us, whether it be original sin or its unreconstructed effects, or our actual sins.  In the slightest fragment of a consecrated Host we have the price of every sin ever committed or to be committed.  In the slightest drop of the Precious Blood is the elixir of eternal life.  They are the full and perfect remedy (plenum remedium) by which God perfects us.  

The words foveo and remedium together in this prayer are very evocative. There come to mind the old remedies of heating and anointing.  Think of our prayer today as coming from a time when there was no central heating, before modern medicine, when a chill might mean the death knell.  Imagine that we, as weakened and sick children are being given, in Holy Communion, precisely what we need to make us whole again, to become the sort of people (tales) we ought to be.  In our Communion, God is, in a sense, anointing us yet again with a burning hot remedy.  Since the Council we speak often of the Sacraments of Initiation (Baptism, Confirmation and Eucharist) whereby we become Christians in a fuller and fuller way.   In two of the sacraments we are literally anointed on the exterior of our bodies. In the Eucharist we are perhaps being “anointed” from within.  By the hands of the priest, alter Christus, He anointed us on our breasts and our backs at our baptism with the Oil of the Catechumens saying (in the old fashioned way of things by which most of you readers were baptized), “I anoint you with the oil of salvation, in Christ Jesus our Lord, so that you may have everlasting life”.  Just after the baptism itself, God anoints us through the priest with Holy Chrism, saying “May Almighty God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who has given you a new birth by means of water and the Holy Spirit and forgiven all your sins, anoint you with the Chrism of salvation in Christ Jesus our Lord, so that you may have everlasting life.”   In Confirmation we were anointed in the forehead with Holy Chrism in the Holy Ghost as the bishop (or priest) said: “I sign you with the sign of the Cross and I confirm you with the Chrism of salvation”.  These sacraments must not be allowed to go dormant within us.  We must cherish them and keep them active.

In a good Holy Communion, God – the only effective remedy – is wrapping us up in His love, drawing us onto His lap, healing us, and keeping us warm in the winter of this world.

What Does the Prayer Really Say?  21st Sunday of Ordinary Time

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2006

One of my favorite blogs Laudator Temporis Acti provides amusing daily fare.  Recently the blogger cited Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (Ch. 2) and I had to share it with you.  It reminds me of the attitude I encounter rather often in my work:

Mr Vladimir, arranging his cravat, observed him in the glass over the mantelpiece.

“I daresay you have the social revolutionary jargon by heart well enough,” he said contemptuously. “Vox et. . . You haven’t ever studied Latin—have you?” “No,” growled Mr Verloc. “You did not expect me to know it. I belong to the million. Who knows Latin? Only a few hundred imbeciles who aren’t fit to take care of themselves.”

Oh yah?  Well, let us once again compare the Latin original of the today’s Super Oblata, called sometimes the “Prayer over the gifts”, and compare it with the lame-duck ICEL version and see what happens.  

Today’s prayer is strikingly different in style from what we have seen hitherto.  It is of new composition for the Novus Ordo edition of the Missale Romanum, though an element of it can be found in the 1962MR in the Secret of the votive Mass pro Ecclesia unitate… “for the unity of the Church”.

SUPER OBLATA (2002MR):
Qui una semel hostia, Domine,
adoptionis tibi populum acquisisti,
unitatis et pacis in Ecclesia tua
propitius nobis dona concedas.

The Latin of this prayer is not terribly challenging.  The dense Lewis & Short Dictionary says that semel is an adverb meaning “once, a single time” and also in a succession it equals primum, primo “the first time, first”.  The verb acquiro means “to add to, to get or acquire”.  Unus, a, um can mean either “one” or “a single”, “sole”.  This is not the adverbial unā, meaning “in one and the same place, at the same time, in company, together”.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
O Lord, who acquired for Yourself a people of adoption
by a single victim sacrifice offered once only,
graciously grant to us the gifts
of unity and peace in Your Church.

When you work directly with the Latin texts of our prayers for Mass, and have a knowledge of the Latin version of the Scriptures (yet another good reason for priests to say the Liturgy of the Hours and Mass in Latin), you start recognizing in the prayers references to biblical passages.  These are rarely apparent in the lame-duck ICEL versions.  Even if you can’t immediately identify the phrase at the basis of a line in a Latin prayer, you get the sense that it was biblical and so you can start searching for it.  For example, that adoptionis populum acquisisti instantly sent me running to consult Scripture because of two familiar phrases, one Pauline and the other Petrine: adoptio filiorum Dei and populus acquisitionis.  Let’s look into these.

WDTPRS has examined adoptio in the past.  You might recall that adoptio is “adoption” in the sense of “to take as one’s child.”  Paul says adoptionem filiorum Dei ... “adoption of the sons of God” in the Latin Vulgate of Jerome which translates the Greek (h)uiothesia. The noun (h)uiothesia, occurs five times in the New Testament (Rom.8:15,23; 9:4; Gal.4:5; Eph.1:5). This compound noun means “placing as a son”. Being a “son” or a “daughter” of God through the adoption won for us by Jesus Christ has enormous consequences for how we face the vicissitudes of life.  Paul wrote to the Romans (8:15): “For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of sonship. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” The Christian, integrated into Christ and His Church, can with confidence invoke the Father in time of need.  God hears our prayers not as a stranger God, but as a loving Father.  

A note is in order about Latin filii or “sons”.  Filii can be equally “children” rather than just “sons” according to the literal meaning.  Latin masculine plurals, depending on the context, can include females even though the form of the word is masculine.  In Latin, the masculine is inclusive.  So, we can say in English “adoption of children” and not just “of sons” without getting into anything too eerie.  

We can get some help to understand the phrase populus acquisitionis from 1 Peter 2:9: “But you are a chosen race (populus a[d]cquisitionis), a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (RSV).  In the Church’s liturgy we find this phrase still in the Gregorian chant Communion antiphon of Thursday in the Octave of Easter, though in the newer Vulgate we find populum in acquisitionem; it is even cited obliquely in the new 2002MR’s GIRM 5… “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (RSV).  If we look back at the Greek original for this we find laòs eis peripoíesin (the noun peripoíesis from the verb peripoiéo) which by studying similar words in Eph 1: 14, 1 Thess 5:9, and 2 Thess 2:14 gives us the sense of a people acquired or redeemed, much as someone would buy a slave to set him free.  We Christians, however, become the “possession” of God in a new way.  We are not redeemed to be slaves, but rather as sons and daughters.

The context of that passage from 1 Peter was a series of admonitions, indeed imperatives, presented to Christians for the sake of their new life and new identity.  Our phrase populus acquisitionis falls in the context of the fifth of those admonitions (1 Peter 2:1-10), namely, that we are to long for spiritual nourishment so we can mature in our Christian lives.  We grow like infants into adulthood, built up into a temple, and thence into a royal priesthood.   The image Paul uses harks to how a parent gives milk to an infant child to foster his growth.  God gives also richer solid food as we mature, that is, as we can handle it.  And we can handle it as we grow and we need it for our life.
 
In our prayer today I sense a conceptual movement.  We move from being slaves to being sons.  We start as infants and then mature into a people of priests who belong entirely to God.  Consider also the phrase unitatis et pacis and see what it brings to mind.  A quick consultation of a Biblical concordance takes us to another Pauline text, Ephesians 4:1-6:

I therefore, the prisoner in the lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace (servare unitatem spiritus in vinculo pacis).  There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.

Paul, speaking in the manner of a prisoner or a slave, uses the word vinculum to describe the “bond of peace”, the “link of a chain”.  Because we belong to the Church integrally and truly by our baptism, Paul’s description is to be extended to us.  Turning our attention back to how we participate at Mass, today’s prayer is in the context of the offertory.  At this moment we are readying what is necessary (including ourselves) for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.  

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Merciful God,
the perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ
made us your people.
In your love,
grant peace and unity to your Church.

Do we find the content of the Latin prayer in the lame-duck ICEL version?  Does it pay to know Latin?  You decide.

Let me ask you.  What would the last thirty some years have been like if we had had better translations all along?  What would our Church be like today had the mandate of the Council to maintain Latin been obeyed?  Would we have a different sense of our identity as Catholics?  Would those things have helped us better influence the society we live in?  Would we be better prepared to handle the pressures of daily life?  Would so many people, including clergy, have been acquiescent in the face of popular cultural trends and the destruction of our education system?  I think much of what we see going on today could have been averted.  We can’t know anything for sure, but I have little doubt that things would have been very different indeed.   This is because I believe that the true Actor at Mass is Christ Jesus the High Priest.  Mass is effective and nourishing.  Had things been in better shape, Catholics would be different today.  Lex orandi, lex credendi!  The way we pray has a reciprocal relationship with what we believe.  

There is no question that faithful church-going Catholics are in many places receiving nourishment and graces from the liturgy they participate in.  I am thinking about all this again, however, because of an experience I had this week.  I was called upon to preach at a Solemn Mass for the feast of the Assumption celebrated in the cathedral of Camden, New Jersey, using the 1962 Missale Romanum.  The level of intense and grateful participation at that Mass was remarkable.  The large number of well-behaved and happy children was thought provoking.  The way people dressed was exemplary.  When it was time to make responses and sing, they raised the roof.  I am also thinking of my home parish of St. Agnes in St. Paul, Minnesota where Holy Mass is celebrated often in Latin using the Novus Ordo.  In the last thirty years, some thirty men have been ordained from that one parish and many young men from St. Agnes are in the seminary.  In each case, the respective books are followed carefully, the preaching is solid, and everything is done with the sort of love that inspires care, on the part of the sacred ministers, and fervent attention on the part of the congregation.

Holy Mass is the source and summit of our Catholic lives.  It deserves the best and so do we.  If Mass must be celebrated in the vernacular, and apparently it must, then we need good translations which are accurate and beautiful.  This is especially important for critical texts in the Mass, such as consubstantialis in the Creed and pro multis in the consecration of the Precious Blood.

To grow into serious committed Catholics capable of making an impact on society, we need all that the Church desires to give us.  We adults could if necessary get by on baby food alone.  We could, if necessary, survive on milk and some nearly predigested veggies, but we would not thrive.  Would we be able to do our work well?  Could we respond with zeal and vigor to God’s will in our lives, having been fed only on such pabulum?  A new translation is in preparation.  More satisfying nourishment will come, God willing, through our beautiful prayers in a new translation, which will increase our yearning for the perfect food, containing in Itself all delight.

A SMOOTHER WDTPRS VERSION:
O Lord, who adopted for Yourself a People
by the Sacrifice offered once and for all time,
graciously grant us the gifts
of unity and of peace in Your Church.

What Does the Prayer Really Say?  21st Sunday in Ordinary Time

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2005

Last week I shared some material from Prof. Robert Louis Wilken’s article “The Church’s Way of Speaking” in the current issue of First Things (August/September 2005 – No. 155).  I want to revisit that article for some of his closing thoughts about how the Church’s language, especially her language of worship, must be true to her teachings and contrast with secular trends.  At the end of his piece Wilken writes, “For too long Christianity has relinquished its role as teacher to society.  Instead of inspiring the culture, it capitulates to the ethos of the world.  The Church must rediscover herself, learn to savor her speech, delight in telling her stories, and confidently pass on what she has received.  Only then can she draw people away from the coarse and superficial culture surrounding us into the abundance of life in Christ. … Let the Church call attention to what is peculiar to herself, not to presumed notions about what is meaningful or intelligible or relevant to contemporary society.  A robust Christian witness can only be forged by drawing on the fullness of Christ, as known through the Spirit of the Church.” (p. 31).

What Prof. Wilken is talking about fits hand in glove with the purpose of this WDTPRS series.  In our work we have seen how the Church herself, in the document Liturgiam authenticam (LA) establishing norms for the new vernacular translation of Mass, deals with matters of inculturation.  In fact LA, the fifth instruction on the proper implementation of Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium, followed organically from the fourth instruction Varietates legitimae which concerned itself precisely with inculturation.  

An important principle must be adhered to in everything having to do with inculturation which, when properly pursued, is good and desirable.  The principle is this: in the ongoing, simultaneous and dynamic exchange taking place between the Church (through her members) and the world (which must be shaped according to Christ’s mandate) what the Church has to give in the exchange must always have logical priority over what the world has to give.  That is to say, the Church forms people who in turn create and shape and form a culture and society.  Subsequent to that formation, a culture and society becomes the blossoming garden of things which are good and true and beautiful.  These good and beautiful things are then brought back to the Church who reintegrates them into herself.   So, the Church enriches all of her members who in an ongoing way continue to shape the world.  Both “directions” of this exchange are active simultaneously, but the Church’s contribution must have logical, if not chronological, priority.  The “genius” of a Christian culture such as that of Baroque Rome, once formed as a Christian culture, enriched the whole Church in countless ways.   If what “the world” has to give in the exchange is given logical priority over what only the Church has the ability to provide, then both society and the Church become serious disjointed.
   
The Church today is conscious of this logical priority.  In the abovementioned LA we read: “5. Indeed, it may be affirmed that the Roman Rite is itself a precious example and an instrument of true inculturation. For the Roman Rite is marked by a signal capacity for assimilating into itself spoken and sung texts, gestures and rites derived from the customs and the genius of diverse nations and particular Churches both Eastern and Western into a harmonious unity that transcends the boundaries of any single region.”   We should revisit LA in the next weeks to remind ourselves and the powers that be (who read this column) of what it says.  Friends, there are influential people in the Church who want to scuttle the new English translation reflecting the norms laid down by the Holy See.

COLLECT - (2002MR):
Deus, qui fidelium mentes unius efficis voluntatis,
da populis tuis id amare quod praecipis,
id desiderare quod promittis,
ut, inter mundanas varietates,
ibi nostra fixa sint corda, ubi vera sunt gaudia.

This same Collect is for the Monday of the Fifth week of Easter and also in the 1962MR on the Fourth Sunday after Easter.  In the ancient Gelasian Sacramentary you find it on the Third Sunday after the close of Easter.  All those long eeee sounds produced by the Latin letter i are marvelous. Note the nice parallels: id amare quod praecipis, id desiderare quod promittis as well as ibi…sint corda and ubi…sunt gaudia.  In the first line the genitives unius…voluntatis are elegantly split by the verb efficis.  A master made this prayer.

The pages of our opportunely situated Lewis & Short Dictionary divulge that varietas means “difference, diversity, variety.”  It is commonly used to indicate “changeableness, fickleness, inconstancy.”  I like “vicissitude.”  The adjective mundanus, a, um, “of or belonging to the world”, must be teased out in a paraphrase.  Efficio (formed from facio) means, “to make out, work out; hence, to bring to pass, to effect, execute, complete, accomplish, make, form”.   Voluntas means basically “will” but it can also mean things like “freewill, wish, choice, desire, inclination” and even “disposition towards a thing or person”.  
 
The Association For English Worship in 1985 put out an examination of the Prayers of the Roman Missal comparing two different English versions, ICEL and their own.  Here is the AEW version of the Collect: “O God, by whom alone the faithful are made one in mind and heart, grant us to love what you command and to long for what you promise, that so, amid the changes and chances of this mortal life, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found.”  In the Anglican Church’s Book of Common Prayer of 1662 they hear on the Fifth Sunday in Lent: “O almighty God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men: Grant unto thy people, that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise, that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found.”  You have to love that!  

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
O God, You who make the minds of the faithful to be of one will,
grant unto Your people to love that thing which You command,
to desire that which You promise,
so that, amidst the vicissitudes of this world,
our hearts may there be fixed where true joys are.

Let us revisit that id…quod construction. We could simply say “love that which you command,” or “love what you command”, but to me that seems vague and generic.  Of course, we must love everything God commands, but the feeling I get from that id…quod is closer to what the Anglican version expresses: “love the thing which you command… desire the thing which you promise.”  This seems more concrete.   We love and desire God’s will in the concrete situation, this concrete task.  A challenge of living as a good Christian in “the world” is to love God in the details of life, especially when those details little to our liking.  We must love him in this beggar, this annoying creep, not in beggars or creeps in general.  We must love him in this act of fasting, not in fasting in general.  This basket of laundry, this paperwork, this ICEL translation…. Hmmm…, didn’t I say it was a challenge?  God’s will must not be reduced to something abstract, as if it is merely a “heavenly” or “ideal” reality. “Thy will (voluntas) be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Father,
help us to seek the values
that will bring us lasting joy
   in this changing world.
In our desire for what you promise
make us one in mind and heart.

WDTPRS prays that the new ICEL will avoid the catch-all hyper-verb “to help.”  I cannot make myself think that “help us” unlocks for us the mystery of our total reliance on God.  God does more than “help”.  And what happened in this version to loving God’s commands?  How do “commands” become “values”?   Did no one in Rome, ICEL or the episcopal conferences see a problem in the phrase “lasting joy in this changing world”?  The Latin says that “the world” is fickle (mundanas varietates).  It cannot give us the “lasting” joy to be found only in the life to come.  This ICEL version makes me want to scream.  

More about the slippery word “values”.  We should make a distinction between values and virtues.  To my mind, values have an ever shifting subjective starting point while virtues are rooted in something objective and meaningful.  In 1995 Gertude Himmelfarb wrote in The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values: “it was not until the present century that morality became so thoroughly relativized that virtues ceased to be ‘virtues’ and became ‘values.’”  Rem acu tetigisti!   In this post-Christian, post-modern world the term “values” seems to indicate little more than our own self-projection.  I suspect this is at work in the lame-duck ICEL prayer with its “help us” and the excision of God’s commands and promises.  Can the word “values” be rescued, interpreted properly?  Not in the defunct ICEL’s wretched version.  Could “values” be used in future prayers?  Perhaps.  

The late John Paul II spoke about “values” in his speeches and writings, but in contrast to the way “values” are commonly understood today.  For example, in Evangelium vitae 71 we read (emphasis added): “it is urgently necessary, for the future of society and the development of a sound democracy, to rediscover those essential human and moral values which flow from the very truth of the human being and express and safeguard the dignity of the person: values which no individual, no majority, and no state can ever create, modify, or destroy, but must only acknowledge, respect, and promote.”  How does that wash with the stem-cell research debate and the “values” of human life and scientific advancement being discussed today?  In the 1985 letter to young people Dilecti amici 4, John Paul II taught: “Only God is the ultimate basis of all values…. in Him and Him alone all values have their first source and final completion… Without Him – without the reference to God – the whole world of created values remains as it were suspended in an absolute vacuum.”  Our Latin Collect today is a prayer for God to grant that His will be the basis of our values in concrete action, not in abstractions or mere good intentions.

Care with the word “values” must reflect the present growing awareness of the Church’s growing conflict with relativism.  Benedict XVI has already spoken eloquently and more than once about the threats we in the Church face from religious/secular relativism, the reduction of the supernatural to the natural, caving in to “the world”.  “The world” has its Prince who still dominates it until Christ the King comes again.   St. Paul wrote to the Romans: “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (12:2 – RSV).  Christ put His Apostles on guard about “the world”: “The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify of it that its works are evil” (John 7:7).  When what “the world” has to give is given preeminence over what God has to give through His Church, we have the crisis Pope Paul VI described on the ninth anniversary of his coronation (29 June 1972): “da qualche fessura sia entrato il fumo di Satana nel tempio di Dio… through some crack the smoke of Satan has entered into the temple of God”.   Today’s Collect, properly translated, is a spiritual safeguard for the vicissitudes of “the world”.

During today’s Angelus at Castel Gandolofo, the Holy Father spoke about St. Monica and St. Augustine. Pope Benedict is a deep learner about the Fathers and he is sharing wonderful insights with us now. You can hear the enthusiasm in his voice, even though he stumbles in his text once. I think he might have inserted a parenthetical.

Benedict XVI referred to Monica as an example of encouragment to parents who are suffering from watching their children stray on the wrong paths. Augustine was a long seeker after the truth, even from his youth.

Download the mp3 of his address. I don’t know how long this address will be valid. Probably one week.

VIVA IL PAPA!!