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

While I read with interest and devotion those things about Marian apparitions which receive formal approval of Holy Mother Church, I don’t spend a great deal of energy on Marian apparitions. Today, however, we observe the the Feast of Our Lady of La Salette. I am sure other bloggers will cover the history of the feast. Suffice to say that on 19 September 1846 Mary appeared to two shepherd children on a mountain in France and gave them a message for the world. Here are parts of the message of Our Lady of La Salette (my emphasis):

God is going to strike in an unprecedented manner. Woe to the inhabitants of the earth! God is going to exhaust His wrath, and no one will be able to resist so many concerted woes… Many will abandon the faith, and the number of priests and religious who will dissociate themselves from the true religion will be great… Many religious institutes will lose the faith entirely and will cause the loss of many souls. The Church will pass through a frightful crisis… The Holy Father will suffer greatly. I will be with him to the end to receive his sacrifice… For a time God will not remember France or Italy because the Gospel of Jesus Christ is no longer known... [But the] prayers, penance and tears of the just will ascend to heaven, and the entire people of God will beg for pardon and mercy and will ask My assistance and My intercession. Then Jesus Christ, by an act of His justice and His great mercy toward the just [will intervene and] then there will be peace, the reconciliation of God with men… Charity will flourish everywhere.. The Gospel will be preached everywhere, and men will make great progress in the faith, because there will be unity among the workers of Jesus Christ and men will live in the fear of God.

This sounds very much like what is going on today.

Rome will lose the faith and will become the seat of Antichrist. ... I summon the true disciples of God who lives and reigns in heaven; I summon the true imitators of Christ made man, the one true Saviour of men; I summon My children, My true devotees, those who have given themselves to Me so that I might lead them to My divine Son, those whom I carry, so to speak, in My arms, those who have lived according to My spirit; finally, I summon the Apostles of the Latter Times, the faithful disciples of Jesus Christ who have lived in scorn of the world and of themselves, in poverty and in humility, in contempt and in silence, in prayer and in mortification, in chastity and in union with God, in suffering and unknown to the world. It is time for them to arise and come forth to enlighten the earth.

I don’t know what all of this means, of course, but I find it pretty ominous.

Consider also the messages of Our Lady of Fatima. Just how are things going in Russia these days anyway?

Here is an ironic tidbit for you to think about. You might know that there are some very smart people who have said that the whole text of the so-called Third Secret has not really been released. Some think that what the Holy See released a few years ago wasn’t the whole story and we are still missing something. You might remember that some rad trads level their pointy fingers at Joseph Card. Ratzinger and the then Secretary of the CDW Tarcisio Bertone as being the real bad guys in the conspiracy to cover up the Third Secret. You will recall that in the text released by the Holy See suggested that the vision of the bishop in white referred actually to the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II on 13 May 1981. In the text the Vatican released the bishop in white "falls to the ground, as if dead, after a volley of gunfire."

Pope Benedict is now Pope and Card. Bertone is now Secretary of State.

A tip of the biretta is owed to frequent participant Henry    o{]:¬)   for the news that WDTPRS is quoted on the site of the Diocese of Knoxville, where His Excellency Bishop Joseph E. Kurtz is laboring in the Lord’s vineyard.  There is an article of 10 Sept called "Lost in translation" by Ginger Hutton which provides contrasting examples of the lame-duck 1973 ICEL version of a prayer and one of our very literal versions from WDTPRS.  The writer states about the ICEL versions now in use:

Obviously this example is an abysmal translation, but it’s not an isolated one. I studied dozens of prayers while preparing this column and found the phenomenon is all too common. Repeatedly our current translations choose words that de-emphasize God’s power, our dependence on him, and his role as active giver of grace. At the same time they overemphasize our own role and power. Reading these prayers back to back, one forms a picture of a God who is more like our personal assistant than “God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.”

This is not just bad translation. It’s a failure to faithfully transmit through the liturgy what we actually believe. This is why the coming change in translations, disruptive as it may seem in the short term, is absolutely critical to the defense of the faith.

That doesn’t need any translation.  She got it quite right. 

This issue of translations of Mass texts is very important.  Without good translations we do not hear what the Church truly desires to pray.  As a result we are all greatly impoverished.

In today’s Opinion Journal/Wall Street Journal online there is a featured article, free to read. It is worth a few minutes of your time. Here is an excerpt (my emphasis):

In Christianity, God is inseparable from reason. "In the beginning was the Word," the pope quotes from the Gospel according to John. "God acts with logos. Logos means both reason and word," he explained. "The inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of history of religions, but also from that of world history. . . . This convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe."

The question raised by the pope is whether this convergence has taken place in Islam as well. He quotes the Lebanese Catholic theologist Theodore Khoury, who said that "for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent, his will is not bound up with any of our categories." If this is true, can there be dialogue at all between Islam and the West? For the pope, the precondition for any meaningful interfaith discussions is a religion tempered by reason: "It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures," he concluded.

This is not an invitation to the usual feel-good interfaith round-tables. It is a request for dialogue with one condition—that everyone at the table reject the irrationality of religiously motivated violence. The pope isn’t condemning Islam; he is inviting it to join rather than reject the modern world. By their reaction to the pope’s speech, some Muslim leaders showed again that Islam has a problem with modernity that is going to have to be solved by a debate within Islam. The day Muslims condemn Islamic terror with the same vehemence they condemn those who criticize Islam, an attempt at dialogue—and at improving relations between the Western and Islamic worlds—can begin.

These reflections lead Benedict to a much graver indictment of Islam: "For Muslim teaching," he says, "God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality." Citing the 11th century polymath Ibn Hazm, Benedict adds that in Islam, "God is not bound even by his own word."

Let’s play that again, since the rest of the media failed to notice: [we noticed!] Pope Benedict suggests that the God of Mohammad is, or may seem to humans to be, "not even bound to truth and goodness." Who knows whether that really reflects a consensus view down the ages among Muslim theologians—Benedict makes his case about Islam by citing one scholar who cites another scholar who cites another. The more interesting question is why Benedict goes out of his way to use Islam as an example, since he also warns against similar tendencies toward insisting on God’s radical "otherness" within the Catholic tradition itself. So why can’t he simply illustrate the controversies of faith without going outside the boundaries of his own?

In fact, Benedict saves his sharpest barbs for non-Muslim targets: Protestantism, which seeks a "primordial" form of faith; liberal theology, which reduces Jesus to "the father of a humanitarian moral message"; scientific rationalism, the ethics of which are "simply inadequate" to answer the "specifically human questions about our origin and destiny"; and what might be called Catholic pluralism, a culturally adaptive notion of the faith that Benedict denounces as "false" and "coarse."

These aren’t mere provocations. There is an overarching philosophical architecture to Benedict’s critique, expressed in the notion of the "de-Hellenization of Christianity." Christianity, in his view, is shaped and defined by the great dialogue between Athens and Jerusalem, reason and revelation. When the Apostle John says "In the beginning was the Word," the "word," literally, is logos—which is reason, or argument. This, according to Benedict, expresses "the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry."

That rapprochement—a triumph of dialogue—lies at the heart of Benedict’s theology: Strip faith from reason (as scientific rationalism does), or reason from faith (as Protestant literalism does), and "it is man himself who ends up being reduced."

There is a political subtext. Precisely in the middle of his speech, the Pope describes the convergence of faith and philosophy as decisive to the character of "what can rightly be called Europe." He does not mention Europe again, nor, except obliquely, Islam. But near the end of his speech he warns that the "exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason" may be seen by other cultures "as an attack on their most profound convictions." "Reason which is deaf to the divine," he adds, "is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures."  [Remember that Benedict resisted the suggestion that Turkey be admitted to the EU.]

A Europe that cannot understand its own religion, except as a form of subjective irrationalism, cannot possibly engage another. A Christianity that voluntarily recuses itself from reason cannot sustain a belief in the goodness of its convictions, to say nothing of its truth. A West that abandons a critical dialogue between faith and rational inquiry ceases to be the West. It becomes, in a peculiar way, guilty of the same errors Benedict accuses Islam of making. This is the Pope’s teaching, and it requires no apology. Notice that he offers none.