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

In the interesting Italian newssite L’Occidentale there is a piece by Pietro de Marco about why Pope Benedict XVI would want to derestrict the older form of Mass.

It is as if this fellow had been reading my articles.  Actually, the similiarity between his ideas and mine are probably due to the fact that we are working from the same sources, which are certainly, knowledge of the older liturgy and the writings of Papa Ratzinger.

Here is a brief summary of the reasons de Marco thinks Pope Benedict would want to derestrict the older Mass.  They are fleshed out with my own observations.  I have other reasons beyond de Marco’s, but here are de Marco’s with my own additions.

a) An uncommon language gives an impression of the rite’s antiquity.  In turn this supports a perception of continuity with the past. 

b) Prayer "turned toward the Lord", because of the operating principle lex orandi lex credendi will stimulate relfection about what is sacred and redirect us to the first condition of Mass, namely, that it be a sacrificium.  It is not the behavior of the congregation that counts.  The High Priest is the one who is in action.  This reattachment to the sense of mysterium will work against the pragmatic and activist liturgical attitude prevalent today.  Mass is mystery and sacrifice, not spectaculum.

c) The Blessed Sacrament is at the center.  Recovering this sense of presence will aid a dialogue with the "God with us", which has long been a point of reflection for Joseph Ratzinger in years past, and today.

Again, these are de Marco’s reasons supplimented with my own thought. 

I have a couple other reasons which I am working to formulate for an upcoming article.

I having been getting feedback about my comments (here and here) about H.E., Bishop Traumant, "The Chair", and his inimical attitude toward the Holy See’s translation norms in Liturgiam authenticam. 

Since His Excellency thinks "John and Mary Catholic" are not smart enough to understand the real content of the Latin prayers in accurate translation, he believes the prayers should be reduced to everyday speech, the lowest denominator, and I do mean "common".  I referred to this in another entry as "mashed carrots and goop. 

Reacting to this JS writes via e-mail:

Ahhhhh!   The gerberization (as in Gerber’s baby food) of the literature of the Church.  Well at least the consumer can be fairly certain that the pablum for infants that is available at the local grocer is wholesome.  The Erie bishop must suffer from the delusion that the intellects, the souls, and the vocabularies of his flock must be in a state of perpetual infantilism, or worse.

Once upon a time in a WDTPRS article, I wrote: 

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.

What is at stake here?

Let’s consider what you will be hearing in church at the end of Mass on the, say, the Vigil of the Solemnity of St. John the Baptist, which is coming up soon.

POST COMMUNIONEM (ad Missam in Vigilia):
Sacris dapibus satiatos,
beati Ioannis Baptistae nos, Domine,
praeclara comitetur oratio,
et, quem Agnum nostra ablaturum crimina nuntiavit,
ipsum Filium tuum poscat nobis fore placatum.
   
This is an interesting and tricky prayer.  It is addressed to God the Father, but the subject is the Baptist’s words, his “prayer” in John 1:29,36: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” A daps is “a solemn feast for religious purposes, a sacrificial feast (before beginning to till the ground; the Greek proêrosia, made in honor of some divinity, in memory of departed friends)”.  That odd looking ablaturum (esse) is the future active “participle” from aufero, abstuli, ablatum, auferre, “to take or bear off or away, to carry off, withdraw, remove”.  The fore is a shortened form of futurum esse.

The fact that the Baptist’s speech is the grammatical subject of the action of the prayer points to the interior meaning.  The real actor or subject is the Lamb of God.  As St. Augustine put it, John is the Voice, the vox, but Christ is the Word, the verbum.  This conceptual paring is present in the Post Communion.

The Baptist is so in harmony with the Lamb that the ecstatic declaration which bursts forth from him at the sight of Jesus reveals John’s inward disposition.   John’s whole being is directed to Jesus. His outward words and deeds aim at Him.  By asking the Father that John’s prayer accompany us we use a spiritually poetic expression to beg the Baptist’s intercession that we may attain the salvation Jesus won with His Blood.  The prayer also underscores how our words and deeds both must and do reveal who we are inside.

LITERAL VERSION:
O Lord, may the excellent prayer of blessed John the Baptist
accompany us, filled to satiety with the sacred sacrificial meal,
and may it urge that Your Son Himself,
whom it declared was the Lamb about to take away our offenses,
will be appeased in our regard.

Keep in mind in follows that I am not making this up:

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Father,
may the prayers of John the Baptist
lead us to the Lamb of God.
May this eucharist bring us the mercy of Christ.

YEEECHH!

In another WDTPRS article I ended with this:

We need what our prayers really say. They are the bones of our daily lives. Our Mass should give us thick red steak and cabernet not pureed carrot and formula for baby teeth. I want meat not goop. I want you to thrive through our Mass not just survive. Mass is succulent, not ordinary. The content of our prayers will reach through to us when we have accurate translations of the Latin. Then with the help of preachers we can crack them open with adult teeth, chew their marrow.

H.E. "The Chair" objects to accurate translations convey the content of the Latin.  He wants the translations to be simple, immediately understandable by everyone in every pew.  However, this is what Liturgiam authenticam says (my emphases):

25. So that the content of the original texts may be evident and comprehensible even to the faithful who lack any special intellectual formation, the translations should be characterized by a kind of language which is easily understandable, yet which at the same time preserves these texts’ dignity, beauty, and doctrinal precision. By means of words of praise and adoration that foster reverence and gratitude in the face of God’s majesty, his power, his mercy and his transcendent nature, the translations will respond to the hunger and thirst for the living God that is experienced by the people of our own time, while contributing also to the dignity and beauty of the liturgical celebration itself.

At the same time LA says:

28. The Sacred Liturgy engages not only man’s intellect, but the whole person, who is the “subject” of full and conscious participation in the liturgical celebration. Translators should therefore allow the signs and images of the texts, as well as the ritual actions, to speak for themselves; they should not attempt to render too explicit that which is implicit in the original texts. For the same reason, the addition of explanatory texts not contained in the editio typica is to be prudently avoided. Consideration should also be given to including in the vernacular editions at least some texts in the Latin language, especially those from the priceless treasury of Gregorian chant, which the Church recognizes as proper to the Roman Liturgy, and which, all other things being equal, is to be given pride of place in liturgical celebrations.  Such chant, indeed, has a great power to lift the human spirit to heavenly realities. 

29. It is the task of the homily and of catechesis to set forth the meaning of the liturgical texts,...

Friends, the answer to His Excellency’s objection, which in justice corresponds to LA 25, must lie in LA 28 and 29. 

Preaching and catechesis are the answer to Bp. Trautman’s concerns, not another disastrous dumbing-down of our liturgical prayer.

This is a really interesting story in the WaPo about President bush and one of WDTPRS’s favorite cardinals, H.E. Joseph Card. Zen Ze-Kiun.   Biretta tip to Argent   o{]:¬)

A Chinese Cardinal Meets the Real Bush

By Robert D. Novak
Thursday, June 21, 2007; A23

On May 31, President Bush met for 35 minutes in the private living quarters of the White House with Cardinal Joseph Zen, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Hong Kong, in an event that was not announced and did not appear on his official schedule. Their meeting did not please the State Department, elements of the Catholic hierarchy and certainly not the Chinese government. But it signifies what George W. Bush is really about.

In Hong Kong, Zen enjoys more freedom to speak out than do his fellow bishops in China proper, and he has become known as the spiritual voice of China’s beleaguered democracy movement. Since Hong Kong was handed over to Beijing by the British government in 1997, he has increasingly called for both religious freedom and democracy in China. Consequently, the China desk at the State Department in Washington and the U.S. Embassy in Beijing contended that, for the sake of Sino-American relations, it would be a bad idea for the president to invite the cardinal. So did some of Zen’s fellow cardinals.  [Like…. who?  Which cardinals?   See below…]

So, why did the president invite him? The fact that no news of the session leaked out for two weeks indicates that this was no political stunt to revive Bush’s anemic poll ratings. The president got divided counsel from his advisers regarding the impact the meeting would have on China’s rulers. As he nears the end of a troubled presidency, Bush as a man of faith places the plight of the religious in unfree countries at the top of his agenda.

Pope Benedict’s decision last year to place the red hat of a cardinal on Joseph Zen Ze-kiun at age 74 was not popular among advocates of a negotiated settlement between the Vatican and the Chinese government. For the past decade, Zen has been an increasingly vigorous and even strident advocate of democracy for China.

The suggestion that Zen conclude his three-week visit to 14 North American cities with a meeting in the White House came from presidential speechwriter Bill McGurn. One of the most conservative White House aides, McGurn had become acquainted with and impressed by Zen during his time as editorial page editor of the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review.

McGurn’s advice did not please the State Department, which contacted the politically well-connected Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, [That figures.  The picture is much clearer now.] the former archbishop of Washington. According to Hong Kong sources, McCarrick advised that it might be better if the U.S. government worked through the regular Vatican diplomatic corps.

Clark T. Randt Jr., the U.S. ambassador in Beijing, also weighed in against a Bush-Zen meeting. Randt is an old China hand who has spent 30 years in Asia as a lawyer-businessman and is fluent in Mandarin. He is referred to as "Ambassador Squish" by pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong. Randt is also a good friend of the president, dating to their days at Yale.  [Maybe they were in the same…. organization?]

But more important to Bush than advice from a college chum is what he believes, as the difficult days of what has been an unpopular presidency dwindle. He met in Washington last year with dissident "House Christians" from China. Speaking in Prague, a week after his talk with Zen, Bush affirmed his position on the side of religious dissidents everywhere: "Freedom is the design of our Maker, and the longing of every soul."

In a city abounding in leaks, I first learned on June 13 about the cardinal’s visit to the White House via a circuitous route, from an American Catholic layman. That same day, Raymond Arroyo of the Eternal Word Television Network, acclaimed reporter of Catholic news, made public that the meeting took place.

Bush asked Zen whether he was the "bishop of all China." [The President might not know much about Catholics but he sure does like and respect them.]  Replying that his diocese was just Hong Kong, Zen told Bush of the plight of Catholics in China, including five imprisoned bishops. The cardinal is reported by sources close to him to have left the White House energized and inspired. George W. Bush is at a low point among his fellow citizens, but he is still a major figure for Catholics in China who look to him as a clarion of freedom.

His Excellency the Bishop of Erie, Most Reverend Donald W. Trautman is an enemy of the Holy See’s translation norms.  He is energetic in recruiting people to reject the Holy See’s norms.  His basic problem with the norms is that the Holy See requires accurate translations.  Since people not smart enough to understand good translations, he wants the translations to conform to the way people walk in daily life so that the prayers won’t be toooo harrrrd.

For a long time I have strongly disagreed with His Excellency.  However, today, scanning the new online number of the lefty National Catholic Reporter, I am wondering if perhaps I haven’t been too hard on Bp. Trautman?  Maybe accurate translations and things like… facts, really are toooo harrrrd for the people he is hangin’ with, you know… like, his peeps.  Consider the following.

Erasing women from history

A ninth-century church mosaic of a female with the word episcopa over her head. A woman bishop? Truth is in the eye of the beholder. If evidence for “herstory”—female authority in the church—is there looking back at us from the mosaics, frescoes, burial inscriptions and ancient texts, the truth of it has seldom registered with our male-run church. History’s winners have chosen to ignore it.

An advocate for women’s ordination (Subcription only)

Finding ‘Herstory’ (Subcription only)

Therefore, given the quality of the abovementioned, maybe His Excellency has a point.  I am driven to ask…

{democracy:13}

 

PS: For more information about the Theodora episcopa dopiness check this out.