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

From a 2005 article  for The Wanderer, where my columns appear weekly, now in the ninth year of the series.

What Does the Prayer Really Say?  34th and Last Sunday in Ordinary Time – Christ The King

We come now to the final WDTPRS on the Collects of the Sunday Masses.  This is the last Sunday of the liturgical year.  Each year Holy Church presents to us the history of salvation, from Creation to the Lord’s Coming (the First and also the Final).   In a sense, today’s Solemnity is an anticipation of the season of Advent, which also focuses on the different ways in which the Lord comes to us.  At this time of year (November) we are also considering the Four Last Things: death, judgment, heaven and hell.   We are praying for the Poor Souls in Purgatory in a special way this month.  The Solemnity of Christ the King (which in the older Roman calendar was celebrated on the last Sunday of October) brings sharply to our attention the fact that the Lord is coming precisely as King and Judge not merely as friend or savior or role-model.  In the great Dies Irae prayed at Requiem Masses for so long (and still today), Christ is identified as “King of Fearful Majesty” and “Just Judge”.  Consider today’s feast in light of what we read in 2 Peter 3: 10-12: “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and the works that are upon it will be burned up. Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of persons ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be kindled and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire!”  Christ Jesus will judge us all, dear friends, and submit all things to the Father (cf. 1 Cor 15:28).  Having excluded some from His presence, our King, Christ Jesus, will reign in majestic glory with the many who accepted His gifts and thereby merited eternal bliss.

COLLECT - (2002MR):
Omnipotens sempiterne Deus,
qui in dilecto Filio tuo, universorum Rege,
omnia instaurare voluisti,
concede propitius,
ut tota creatura, a servitute liberata,
tuae maiestati deserviat ac te sine fine collaudet.

While this Collect is of new composition for the Novus Ordo, it is similar to what was in the 1962 Missale Romanum for this feast with variations in the second part: Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, qui dilecto Filio tuo universorum Rege, omnia instaurare voluisti: concede propitius; ut cunctae familiae gentium, peccati vulnere disgregatae, eius suavissimo subdantur imperio… “so that all the families of peoples, torn apart by the wound of sin, may be subject to His most gentle rule.”

Universus is an adjective and universorum a neuter plural, “all things.”  Since we have another “all things” in omnia I will make universorum into “the whole universe.”  Our Latin ears perk up when we hear compound verbs (verbs with an attached preposition like sub or de or cvm).  In our own copy of A Latin Dictionary. Founded on Andrews’ edition of Freund’s Latin dictionary. revised, enlarged, and in great part rewritten by. Charlton T. Lewis, Ph.D. and. Charles Short, LL.D. – (aka Lewis & Short or even L&S) we find that de-servio expands the meaning of servio to mean “serve zealously, be devoted to, subject to.”  Col-laudo, more emphatic than simple laudo, means “to praise or commend very much, extol highly.”  You veterans of WDTPRS know how maiestas is synonymous with gloria which in early Latin writers such as Hilary of Poitiers, Ambrose and in early liturgical texts, the equivalent of biblical Greek doxa and Hebrew kabod.   This “glory” and “majesty” is God’s own transforming power, a sharing of His life, that transforms us into what He is in an everlasting “deification”.

Instauro is a wonderful word which deserves more attention: “to renew, repeat, celebrate anew; to repair, restore; to erect, make”.  It is synonymous with renovo.  Etymologically nstauro is related to Greek stauros.  Turning to a different L&S, the immensely valuable Liddell & Scott Greek Dictionary, we find that stauros is “an upright pale or stake.”   Stauros is the word used in the Greek New Testament for the Cross of Jesus.  Also the word immediately makes us think not only of the motto on the coat-of-arms of Pope St. Pius X, but also the origin of that motto Ephesians 1:10: “For he has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” (Eph 1:9-10 RSV).  There have been, by the way, some changes in the Latin texts of this passage.  The older Vulgate says “instaurare omnia in Christo” while the New Vulgate says “recapitulare omnia in Christo”.  

Let’s pause a moment to review what the New or “Neo” Vulgate is.  The New Vulgate is a modern and excellent reworking of the venerable Vulgate which for the most part compiled St. Jerome (+420) translations from Greek and Hebrew.  This was the standard version of the bible in use for many years.  However, with the advent of modern tools of research and scholarship it was determined that the Vulgate could benefit from some review and revision.  The New Vulgate was in preparation for many decades and was promulgated in an editio typica prior by John Paul II on 25 April 1979 by means of the Apostolic Constitution Scripturarum thesaurus.  It was then reissued in an official version in 1986.  What has all this to do with translations of texts for Holy Mass?   The document of the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments (CDWDS) requires in the norms found in its document Liturgiam authenticam (LA) that translators must now refer to the Neo-Vulgate.  Some people, including His Excellency Donald W. Trautman the Erie bishop in Pennsylvania and present head of the U.S. Bishops’ Committee for Liturgy, think LA is a bad document because (as he claims) the New Vulgate is a flawed translation and translators of the liturgy should rather refer to texts in Latin and Greek.   However, what LA really says it that the New Vulgate must be used when determining which verses of Scripture are to be translated for the liturgy by the fact that chapter and verse markings differ among ancient manuscripts.   A single clear reference was needed.   

Back to our prayer.  Recapitulare is related to Latin caput (“head”) and was deemed by the scholars behind the New Vulgate as a better translation of the Greek anakephalaioô, “to sum up the argument.”  This harks to the headship of Christ over the Body of the Church and expresses that He is the Final Statement, the Conclusion of All Things.  At any rate, in 1925 and in the 1960’s when the older version of Vulgate was in use, the Collect had instaurare and not recapitulare.  

Why all this ink about recapitulare?  The phrase, “renew/reinstate all things in Christ” points to the Kingship of Jesus.  In everything that Jesus said or did in His earthly life, He was actively drawing all things and peoples to Himself.  In the time to come, when His Majesty the King returns in gloria and maiestas this act of drawing-to-Himself (cf. John 12:32) will culminate in the exaltation of all creation in a perfect unending paean of praise.  In the meantime, by virtue of baptism and our integration into Christus Venturus (Christ About-To-Come), we all share in His three-fold office of priest, prophet, and also king.  We have the duty to proclaim His Kingship by all that we say and do.  We are to offer all our good works back to Him for the sake of His glory and the expectation of His Coming.  This glorious restoration (instaurare) is possible only through the Lord’s Cross (Greek stauros).  The Cross is found subtly in the midst of this Collect, where it is revealed as the pivot point of all creation (creatura).

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
Almighty eternal God,
who desired to renew all things
in Your beloved Son, the King of the universe,
graciously grant
that the whole of creation, having been freed from servitude,
may zealously serve Your majesty and praise You greatly without end.

The first objective of our participation in the Church’s sacred rites is to praise God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and give God glory.  Liturgical and Biblical Latin is rich with words and phrases which exalt and express praise of God.  In fact, the concepts of “glory” and “majesty” are nearly interchangeable in this light.  We, on the one hand, render up honor and glory to God in a way external to God.  On the other hand, glory and majesty are also divine attributes which we in no way give Him, which He has – or rather is – in Himself by His nature.  When we come into His presence, even in the contact we have with Him through the Church’s sacred mysteries, His divine attribute of splendor or glory or majesty, whatever you will, has the power to transform us.  His majestic glory changes us.  So, it is right to translate these lofty sounding attributions for God when we raise our voices in the Church’s official cult.

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Almighty and merciful God,
you break the power of evil and make all things new
in your Son Jesus Christ, the King of the universe.
May all in heaven and earth
acclaim your glory
and never cease to praise you.

As we come to the end of another year’s work in this fruitful WDTPRS project, some comments and reminders are in order.   In the introductory article of this series I stated that it was not my intention to offer alternative translations to be used instead of those provided by ICEL with the approval of proper authority (no matter how bad the lame-duck ICEL versions might be).  I set out to provide you with “literal translations” in order to give even non-readers of Latin a glimpse into the original structure of the prayers, their elegance, and also the world-view inhering in them.  At times my versions adhere “slavishly” to the Latin originals but, since I am not trying to give you a liturgically appropriate text, that’s fine by me.  Sometimes my versions extend and paraphrase difficult words or passages, but I usually provide explanations of my choices, good or bad as they may be.  I am sure that my WDTPRS versions are flawed in many ways.   I know these articles are sometimes hard for the average reader.  When they are, I beg your patience.  The tradeoff is that WDTPRS is now being cited in some university level classes and quite a few people working in the Holy See’s Curia have told my they follow them with attention.  

Moreover, WDTPRS aims to stimulate and support the evolution of good, sound, accurate and beautiful translations in the future.  In the past I asked you to write to those in charge of making the new translations.  Many of you have and I have reason to believe that your letters touched the hearts of more than one official.  In addition, I have always invited and welcomed your feedback via letters and e-mail.  You honor me with your time and observations.  Over the past five years, I have also urged, cajoled and pled with you to pray for our bishops and give them positive support.  The work of the bishop is extremely difficult.  We may sometimes be struck with amazement at some of their actions (or inactions), but we must offer them prayer-filled support while we express courteously our legitimate observations.  Lastly, the most important goal of this series is to inspire in you a greater love of the rich content in our Church’s beautiful sacred liturgy both in Latin and in English.  If these articles help you listen more closely when attending Sunday or weekday Mass and think about what the prayers really say, then our efforts have been worthwhile.

What Does the Prayer Really Say?  5^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in February 2005 

A Correction: In last week’s column, a zealous copy editor changed the Latin title of the Sacramentarium Veronense (correct) to Veronese (incorrect), probably on the model of the English version of the title, Veronese Sacramentary.   This happens occasionally.

Feedback from readers: Commentary arrives from FJK via e-mail (edited): “Your words are devastating: We have to be realistic about the situation we face in the Church. Like it or not, the Novus Ordo is NOT going away. Neither is the vulgar vernacular. ...We must improve the state of the Church all around and foster improvements gradually. – Write kind letters to the men in the pointed hats, and pray. – But who can live so long, as already I am looking toward age 90?! … Why must we be forced on Sundays to bear such agony as the novel theology and banal translations? … Why have the bishops been seeking to destroy our liturgy and our Church? ... Thank you for all that I can read from you. ... Please continue to give us glimmers of hope and courage.”  I’ll try, FJK, for as long as I am allowed.  JR writes, via e-mail: “I carelessly tossed out The Wanderer from a few weeks ago when you had a story on the front page about using Latin in the liturgy or the study of Latin.  Is it possible for you to email me that column?  I look forward to your wonderful column each week and find it very inspirational.”  “Carelessly”?  I’ll say!  But never fear, JR.  There were enough requests for the column that it has been put on the website of The Wanderer:  (http://thewandererpress.com/a12-30-2004.htm).

Those of you who are internet savvy might use the search engine Google.  The fabled “Diogenes” of the internet site Catholic World News and the magazine Catholic World Report made an interesting observation online which I share with you here (edited): “You all know how Google Roulette works. You go to Google’s translation engine …, and type any English sentence into the text box (let’s use, ‘Beam me up, Scotty’). Then you select, say, English-to-French from the options menu and hit TRANSLATE. This gives you rayonnez-moi vers le haut de scotty. You copy this and paste rayonnez moi vers le haut de scotty back into the text box, and select French-to-English this time. You get back ‘Radiate me to the top of Scotty.’ I think that’s how ICEL got started.”  Thanks, Diogenes, for the chortle.

When we translate prayers, we must hold in gentle tension the obligation to translate the Latin pure and simple and, on the other hand, to find out what the contexts and sources were along with the actual meaning of the words in those contexts.  I am of the opinion that the Latin must be respected.  While we are obliged to consult the source texts the prayers are based on, we ought not go too far afield.  In these WDTPRS articles we can play around a bit, taking cues from dictionaries and Scriptures, the Fathers of the Church, Church documents, literature and even current events if we want.  But those who must translate the prayers for a new liturgical version must stick closely to the Latin translating what the prayers really say.  His Eminence Joseph Card. Ratzinger argues this also in his book in God Is Near Us: The Eucharist, The Heart of Life (Ignatius Press, 2003, cf. pp. 37-8, n. 10).  The language of the Latin Church’s liturgy is Latin, not some other language (i.e., Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek).  The Latin must be respected.  If the Church wants to say something other than what the Latin text says, she will change the Latin.  

COLLECT - LATIN TEXT (2002MR):
Familiam tuam, quaesumus, Domine, continua pietate custodi,
ut, quae in sola spe gratiae caelestis innititur,
tua semper protectione muniatur.

This Collect was in the pre-Conciliar 1962MR, the so-called “Tridentine” Missal, for the 5th Sunday after Epiphany.  Let us see the Google… er um… ICEL version we will hear on Sunday in our parish churches and then immediately our slavishly literal WDTPRS version.

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Father,
watch over your family
and keep us safe in your care,
for all our hope is in you.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
Guard your family, we beseech you, O Lord, with continual mercy,
so that that (family) which is propping itself up upon the sole hope of heavenly grace
may always be defended by your protection.

Custodio means “to watch, protect, keep, defend, guard.”  It is common in military language.  Innitor, a deponent verb, means “to lean or rest upon, to support one’s self by any thing.”   Innitor also has military overtones. The thorough and replete Lewis & Short Dictionary provides examples from Caesar and Livy describing soldiers leaning on their spears and shields (e.g., scutis innixi ... “leaning upon their shields” cf. Caesar, De bello Gallico 2.27).   Munio is a similarly military term for walling up something up, putting in a state of defense, fortifying so as to guard.  Are you sensing a theme?  We need a closer look.

Pietas, which gives us the English word “piety”, we have seen before in the last few years but it bears review.  L&S says pietas is “dutiful conduct toward the gods, one’s parents, relatives, benefactors, country, etc., sense of duty.”  It furthermore describes pietas in Jerome’s Vulgate in both Old and New Testament as “conscientiousness, scrupulousness regarding love and duty toward God.”  The heart of pietas is “duty.”  Pietas is also one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit (cf. CCC 733-36; Isaiah 11:2), by which we are duly affectionate and grateful toward our parents, relatives and country, as well as to all men living insofar as they belong to God or are godly, and especially to the saints.  In loose or common parlance, “piety” indicates fulfilling the duties of religion.  Sometimes “pious” is used in a negative way, as when people take aim at external displays of religious dutifulness as opposed to what they is “genuine” practice (cf. Luke 18:9-14).  However, when we speak of the pietas of God, we are generally referring to His mercy toward us.

When we truly grasp the words in today’s prayer we find rich imagery of contrasting images.  On the one hand we see a family and on the other a group of dutiful soldiers leaning on their shields or spears, these being for us “the sole hope of heavenly grace”!  In fact, we Catholics are both a family, children of a common Father, and a Church Militant, the Body of Christ which is a corps (French for “body” from Latin corpus) marching in this vale of tears towards our heavenly fatherland.  Many of us were confirmed by bishops as “soldiers of Christ” and given a blow on the cheek as a reminder of what suffering we might face as Christians: not the first time we have suffered at the hands of bishops, perhaps, and maybe not the last.   

By our baptism we are integrated in Christ’s Mystical Body, indeed His Person, the Church. We are given the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit.  Through the sacramental graces that flow from baptism and confirmation, nourished by the Eucharist and healed and strengthened with the other sacraments, we are capable of facing the challenges of daily life and face down the attacks of hell.  We ought rather desire to die like soldiers rather than sin in the manner of those who have no gratitude toward God or sense of duty toward Him.  In today’s prayer we beg the protection and provisions Christ our King and commander can give us soldiers while on the march.  We need a proper attitude of obedience toward God, our ultimate superior, dutifulness our earthly parents, our heavenly home and our earthly country, our heavenly brothers and sisters the saints and our earthly siblings and relatives, our heavenly patrons and worldly benefactors, and so forth.  

This is also what it means to belong to a family: there is both a profound interconnection between the members but also an inequality – children are no less members of the family than parents, but they are dependent they are not the equals of their parents. Our prayer gives us an image that runs very much contrary to the prevailing values of the last few decades, a period in which the military has been denigrated and the family as a coherent recognizable unit has been systematically broken down.  The Latin prayers often reflect the Church’s profound awareness of our lack of equality with God.  The prayers are radically hierarchical, just as God’s design reveals hierarchy and order.  Compare this with prevailing societal norms.  Nowadays individual soldiers might be praised but the military is still being looked at by the intelligentsia with suspicion.  Rights of individual people are validated, but the family as a unit is under severe attack.   

In both the military and in a family (and the Church) there must be order.  Yet, children today can take their parents to court for disciplining them.  In some places parents are forbidden their rights to protect children who can obtain contraception or even abortions through schools without parental notification.  Discipline is dissolving.  And yet that very discipline is precisely the protection needed by troops on the march, children in growing up, the flocks of the Church from their pastors, from their commanders so they can attain their goal.   Parents, officers and shepherds must fulfill their own roles with pietas also, religious and sacred duty.  Holy Mother Church has maintained this Collect for centuries now in this exact period of the year (5thSunday after Pentecost and 5th Sunday of Ordinary Time).  She holds these petitions up to God because the concern constituent elements of who we are.  The Church is not afraid to combine images of family and soldiering, the symbiotic exchange of duty, obedience and protection.

Please keep something in mind: the prayer suggests to me a meaning which is founded on the possible military nuances of the vocabulary.  It is also possible to emphasize the familial dimension and say, “Watch over your family, …with continual religious dutifulness,…” invoking more something like the image of a father or mother checking into the bedrooms of their children while they sleep, listening in the night for sounds of distress or need.  Perhaps putting the military element in relief helps us to claim both sets of images.  These choices are not easy friends.  Every time you make a choice in translating, you are going to lose something.  Therefore, pray daily for our bishops and those in charge of translating the Latin texts.  It is not an easy job.   They must make truly difficult decisions, knowing full well that with every choice something important will be lost for someone.  However, lest we be smug about the “olden days”, this applied equally to translations in pre-Conciliar hand missals used now by those attending Holy Mass celebrated according to the older books.  Something is always lost in translation.

What Does the Prayer Really Say?  3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2005

ER writes via e-mail (Latin cleaned up): “I am not sure whether I heard it correctly. When watching the Papal Mass at the Vatican for Christmas, on TV, I was jolted when I thought I heard the Pontiff recite ‘pro OMNIBUS’ in the consecration.”    No, ER, you did not hear him say in Latin “pro omnibus” (literally “for all”, the equivalent of “pro universis” which the Catechism of the Council of Trent of 1566 explains would be improper (Part II, ch. 4).   He said “pro multis”.  The Holy Father, poor man, is rather hard to understand in any language right now.  Nevertheless, this is another example of why it is so vital that we have an accurate English translation of pro multis.  We must move away from the execrable and misleading “for all”.  Perhaps this is the single most important of the theologically controversial points in any new draft translation in English.  You readers can help to secure one by writing kind letters to those involved.  I provide addresses on the WDTPRS website or you can write to The Wanderer to obtain them.  

Via e-mail GJ takes me to task for my comments about the quality of an ancient Collect not previously in the Missale Romanum but is now in the Novus Ordo (edited): “You will spend your life helping us get something that (is) sub par though better than what we have now.”  Well, GJ, that sounds like a step in the right direction.  The problem with some Catholics who are attached strongly to the older, venerable way of celebrating Mass is that they think the Novus Ordo should or could be abandoned and the older Mass restored across the board overnight.  GJ stays on the attack: “But the real thing is in a whole different category and a good Catholic will go to the true Mass whether it is "allowed" or not.  Why don’t you compare the Olde Mass to the new and tell us what you think about that?  Would that make you somehow disloyal to VII and this pope?”  You are making my point for me: some people think the Missale Romanum of 1962 and its predecessors back to Trent are the be all and end all of prayer without regard for what the prayers (and rubrics) of the post-Conciliar missals really say!  They consider only the banal ICEL translations they have heard and the liturgical abuses they have seen.  I do enjoy the “olde” spelling of old, GJ, but perhaps thou art not aware that I have spent a good share of my priesthood promoting the celebration of Ye Olde Mass and I have suffered seriously as a result.  I have often compared the olde with the new, usually pointing out how much was have lost to our great detriment.  I was not ordained a priest for the sake of a book: I was ordained for people.  Thus, I have to consider the well-being of everyone in the Church and not just the people I agree with the most.  Patience is needed as well as incremental gains.  

Friends, I know quite well that many readers of The Wanderer don’t like the Novus Ordo.  Some, probably, have been tempted to stop reading because it is hard core enough.  But we have to be realistic about the situation we face in the Church.  Like it or not, the Novus Ordo is not going away.  Neither is the vernacular.  Dear traditional Catholics, I share many legitimate aspirations with you.  The promotion of sound and beautiful translations is of benefit to everyone in the Church, even to the most dedicated adherent of the “Traditional Latin Mass”, because we are all in this together.   We must improve the state of the Church all around and foster improvements gradually.  So avoid this siege mentality.  The traditional Catholics ought to be the first to write kind letters of encouragement to those who are preparing the new translations!  Consider it this way: if once people start getting more of the “real thing” (as GJ puts it), perhaps they will then want even more and become far more interested in traditional expressions.  I have seen this pattern again and again with individuals.  Let’s see if it works with the whole English speaking Church.  Why do you think the liberal progressivists are trying to sidetrack the present draft of the translation being prepared?  I am grateful, GJ, that you read WDTPRS with attention and I hope you will continue.  Give some gift subscriptions of The Wanderer and see if you can get others to take me to task too.  Have at!  

Speaking of those trying to axe a better translation, I will decline to share some of the e-mail feedback you have sent about the election of His Excellency Donald W. Trautman, the Erie Bishop in Pennsylvania to the chairmanship of the USCCB’s liturgy committee (BCL).  I am trying to maintain a positive tone in this WDTPRS series.  The BCL will be involved in the review of the draft translation of the Missal now in preparation.  With the Vox Clara committee on the watch and the CDWDS standing firm on the norms they issued in the document Liturgiam authenticam the most the BCL can do is slow the process.  This is not nothing, of course.  There is an adage in the Church: “cunctando regitur mundus … the world is ruled by delaying.”  Oddly, while doing an internet search on my own articles to find when I had quoted that adage in the past, I discovered that WDTPRS is cited in a June 25, 2004 entry in fun blog-site called The Inn At The End Of The World (http://thesixbells.blogspot.com/) run by some liturgically long-suffering soul in Los Angeles who obviously is an aficionado of bagpipes.  I have often been associated with bags of hot air, but this is a new one.  The blogger wisely and perspicaciously called WDTPRS “indispensable”, which rouses in me the hope that he gave some gift subscriptions to The Wanderer to friends.   And now, ad ramos!

COLLECT - LATIN TEXT (2002MR):
Omnipotens sempiterne Deus,
dirige actus nostros in beneplacito tuo,
ut in nomine dilecti Filii tui
mereamur bonis operibus abundare.

GJ will be glad that this was in the 1962MR as the Collect for the Sunday in the Octave of Christmas. In the functionally superior Lewis & Short Latin Dictionary we learn that beneplacitum means “good pleasure, gracious purpose”.  The preposition in using the ablative case indicates a condition, situation or relation rather than a reference to space where or time when something was occurring.  In the Vulgate beneplacitum translates the original Greek eudokia in, e.g., Eph 1:9; 1 Cor 10:5.  Other phrases are used for eudokia too (e.g., bona voluntas in Luke 2:14, the famous “peace on earth to men of good will” or “peace on earth good will toward men”).  Paul wrote eudokia at the beginning of 2 Thessalonians (1:11-12), rendered as voluntas bonitatis in the Vulgate:

...oramus semper pro vobis ut dignetur vos vocatione sua Deus et impleat omnem voluntatem bonitatis et opus fidei in virtute ut clarificetur nomen Domini nostri Iesu Christi in vobis et vos in illo secundum gratiam Dei nostri et Domini Iesu Christi… we always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his call, and may fulfill every good resolve (omnem voluntatem bonitatis) and work of faith by his power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ (RSV).

We can find connections between 2 Thessalonians and our Collect at several points: mereamur in the Collect with dignetur in Paul (both having to do with meriting or being worth of), beneplacitum with voluntas bonitatis, bona opera with opus fidei (good works flowing from lived faith), nomen Filii with nomen Domini Iesu Christi.   Taken in the sense of “gracious purpose” we can make a connection to Paul’s vocatio too, our “calling” or the purpose for which God placed us on this earth with a part of His plan to fulfill.

Abundo means, “to overflow with any thing, to have an abundance or superabundance of, to abound in.”  If we go back to the idea of the preposition in and the ablative indicating place or location in space, (in beneplacito tuo) we have an image of our good works originating in God and, coming from Him, overflowing out from us.  Some Protestants are under the false impression that Catholics think we can “earn” our way to heaven by our own good works, as if our good works had their own merit apart from God. Catholics believe, however, that true good works always have their origin in God, but the works are truly our works as well since we cooperate with God in performing them.  Therefore, having their origin and purpose in God, they merit the reward of God’s promises.  Whenever we find a reference to works in these liturgical prayers, do not forget the Catholic understanding of good works.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
Almighty eternal God,
direct our actions in your gracious purpose,
so that in the name of Thy beloved Son,
we may merit to abound with good works.

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
All-powerful and ever-living God,
direct your love that is within us,
that our efforts in the name of your Son
may bring mankind to unity and peace.

The lame-duck ICEL version’s “All-powerful and ever-living God” for omnipotens sempiterne Deus is not so bad.  Quite bad, on the other hand, is their “direct your love that is within us”.  The Latin clearly connects God’s own purpose for us and the actions that flow from that purpose.  In the ICEL version we have a vague term “love”, rather than the indication of God’s eternal plan.  Perhaps this is a bit picky, but when I hear “we may merit to abound with good works”, I think we are abounding because of God’s action within us through the good works He makes meritorious.  They overflow from us because of His generosity.  In the ICEL version God’s “love” is in us, but this leads to “our efforts”.  Yes, this can be reconciled with a Catholic theology of works, but it just doesn’t sound right.  Also, I don’t think that “efforts” to “bring mankind to unity and peace” means the same as us “meriting” by God’s grace to “abound with good works”.     Please understand: I don’t object to praying for unity and peace, but I think we ought to pray the prayer as the Church gave it to us, what the prayer really says.  When we feed the hungry and console those who mourn, visit the shut-in and imprisoned and pray for the dead, sure we are building “unity and peace”, but that phrase is so vague as to mean very little to someone in the pew.  The Latin does not say “conatus nostri genus humanum ad unitatem et pacem inducant”.  Is it possible that the guitar strumming and all those kumbayas of the 1960’s affected the ICEL translators choice of words?  I suppose we could all stand outside the headquarters of the USCCB and sing, “All we are saying, is give Latin a chance!” while swaying back and forth holding our lighters in the air.

What Does the Prayer Really Say?  2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2005

I am glad to have received a note via snail-mail from Fr. VY, OFM who has corrected an error I made about the pre-Conciliar liturgical calendar.  I had said that in the 1962MR 1 January was the Feast of the Circumcision when, as Fr. VY points out, by 1962 it was simply Sunday in the Octave Christmas.   While 1 January had been still the Feast of the Circumcision in 1959 I gratefully stand corrected about the 1962MR.   I received an undated letter from Fr. BF, OSB who included some a copy of an article in The Tablet (22 May 2004) called “The Draft Order of the Mass”.  Apparently he shared his thoughts about the draft with Fr. Bruce Harbert, the Executive Secretary of ICEL but didn’t hear back from him at the time of his writing.  I note that The Tablet’s article says of the new draft that some people may be “alarmed” at the “hieratic, archaic nature of God’s relationship with humanity implicit in some of the prayers”.  I respond saying, “Goodie!” and “It’s not implicit in the Latin so why should it be in the English?  Let’s just make it all explicit for the sake of accuracy and honesty.”  I want to acknowledge also kind written notes from CC of IL and EL of AZ and others.  Your feedback is valuable.

We have into the Sundays “Ordinary Time” (once called the Season of Epiphany) during which we wear the green vestments that some say symbolize of hope.  Even though these Sundays are not part of a sacral cycle such as Advent/Christmas with a focus on specific mysteries of Our Lord’s life and saving work, each Sunday is always an echo of Easter.  Pre-Conciliar liturgical books called the Sundays after Epiphany and the Sundays after Pentecost the tempus per annum… “the time through the year” and this terminology has remained in the Novus Ordo.   We are entering the liturgical span stretching from the adoration of kings and shepherds at the feet of the infant King to the end of the year and the solemn feast of Christ the King, the King of fearful majesty who will come as judge and will separate the goats from the sheep and usher in the unending reign of peace.

COLLECT - LATIN TEXT (2002MR):
Omnipotens sempiterne Deus,
qui caelestia simul et terrena moderaris,
supplicationibus populi tui clementer exaudi,
et pacem tuam nostris concede temporibus.

This prayer was the Collect for the Second Sunday after Epiphany in the 1962MR.    We should look at some words before getting at what the prayer really says.  The unrivaled Lewis & Short Dictionary says that simul et connects two or more co-ordinate terms or facts and represents them as simultaneous and is the equivalent of simul etiam meaning “and at the same time, and also”.  The deponent verb moderor means “to manage, regulate, rule, guide, govern, direct”.  The word moderator is what we use in Latin for people like the state governor or the president of the United States: governing officials.  A gubernator was the steersman or pilot of a sailing ship.  

When we pray in Latin we often ask God to pay attention in some way, usually by “hearing” us.  Exaudio signifies “listen to” in the sense of “harken, perceive clearly.”  The imperative exaudi is more urgent than a simple audi (the imperative from audio, not the car).   I like “harken.”  Different words are used for this in Latin and though they mean subtly different things, they are all pretty much the same thing.  A good example is the beginning of one of the Litanies in Latin: Christe audi nos… Christe exaudi nos... which is often translated as “Christ hear us… Christ graciously hear us.”  

Clementer is an adverb from clemens, means among other things, “mild in respect to the faults and failures of others, i.e. forbearing, indulgent, compassionate, merciful.”  We have seen this many times in the last four years.  In the religious language of the ancient Romans a supplicatio was a public prayer or supplication, a solemn religious ceremony in consequence of certain public events, good or ill.  So, what we have here is a phrase something like, “in an indulgent manner graciously pay close attention to the humble petitions of your people, bent down in prayer.”  Tempus means many things but primarily, “time in general, or a season of time; the state of the times, position, state, condition; circumstances.”  It can also be “the appointed time, the right season, an opportunity (Greek kairos)”.   In the plural tempora gives us the word for the “temples” of the sides of your head.  The word “temporal” ultimately derives from tempus and it often indicates worldly or earthly things, material things, as opposed to sacred, eternal or spiritual.   

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
Almighty eternal God,
who at the same time does govern things heavenly and earthly,
mercifully harken to the supplications of Your people,
and grant Your peace in our temporal affairs.

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Father of heaven and earth,
hear our prayers, and show us the way
to peace in the world.

In the past we discovered in the course of this WDTPRS series that the ICEL versions of the prayers for the festal seasons of Advent/Christmas and Lent/Easter were marginally better than those of Ordinary Time.  Now that we are in Ordinary Time again you will see a change in the quality of the “translations”.  They must have had a different committee work on the prayers of Ordinary Time.  First take note that the ICEL prayer is shorter than the Latin version, which set off flares and rings claxons.  Normally when you render a Latin text in English, the English will be considerably longer than the Latin.  This is a superficial but solid clue that not all is well.

To my mind the ICEL prayer is sterile, not just terse.  We can all agree that God is the “Father of heaven and earth”, but the Latin addresses “Almighty eternal God.”  “Father of heaven and earth” makes God smaller than He is, it seems to me, and is not what the Latin prayer really says.  “Hear our prayers”, indicates little of our humble posture before God which the Latin clearly proposes with “mercifully give ear to the supplications of your people”.  I suppose this is what The Tablet article mentioned above was referring to, namely, the “hieratic, archaic nature of God’s relationship with humanity implicit in some of the prayers”.  In the Latin, we are cast down, bent in prayer, asking the almighty God, indulgently to spare us a little attention.  I am perfectly content to grovel with penitentially confident joy before God even if the translators of the lame-duck ICEL version were not.   From what I have seen of the draft of the Ordinary we will be pleased in the future when a new translations finally comes forth.

The old ICEL version of the first Collect we see in Ordinary Time isn’t terribly successful when compared to the Latin, is it?  The bishops’ conferences, the Vox Clara Committee, the restructured, restaffed ICEL and the Holy See have their work cut out for them.  If the draft of the Ordinary of Mass is well under way, where are we with the Proper (i.e., the prayers which change according to the day).  Translating prayers is a daunting task and thus these people need our prayerful support and, may I say it, incessant positive urging and input.  I have provided addresses for the major figures involved on the internet (http://www.wdtprs.com/blog) or you can write e-mail to me for or snail-mail to The Wanderer.  Never forget when reading this column to say a prayer for our bishops and ask the Holy Spirit to guide them in their challenging mandate.  Also, be kind and respectful when writing.  Bishops are peculiar creatures to be sure, but they are still human beings.  They have more than enough to do in their busy days to deal with all the negative things which besiege them without getting some snippy letter from a disgruntled critic.  You can make your points and observations without being rude or demanding.  Look at it this way: if you want a cardinal or bishop or priest to read your thoughts and take them to heart, be nice, otherwise your note will probably wind up in the garbage can.

Getting back to our Collect we are begging God as omnipotent disposer of all things for peace in our temporal affairs now, not just later in heaven.  And we want not just any peace man can cobble together, but rather the peace which comes from Him.  During Holy Mass (before the entirely optional “sign of peace”) the priest repeats Christ’s words in John 14:27: “Pacem relinquo vobis, pacem meam do vobis... Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”  Catholic Christians are confident.  Christ said He was going to give it to us.  

There is a great difference between the peace the world can offer and the peace that God offers.  This world of temporal goods (and ills) is passing and fragile, always susceptible to loss.  The goods of heaven are lasting, enduring, solid and dependable.   We must never fall into the sin of putting any created thing or person in the place which only eternal God may properly have.  No infinite and passing thing can provide lasting joy or eternal peace.  Any created thing can be lost through theft, wear and time.  The vicissitudes of this passing world roar over us like an inexorable wave and can sweep away any material thing to which we have clung, perhaps even in idolatry.  Our wealth, our family, our health, our appearance and our reputation can be taken in the blink of an eye.  God alone endures.

God knew each one of us outside of time, before the creation of both the visible and invisible universe.  He called us into existence at a precise moment in His eternal plan.  We have something to do in God’s plan.  He gives us work to fulfill and the talents and graces to fulfill it.  We must cooperate with Him, making His plan for us our own so that He can then make us strong enough to carry it out.  God knows our needs and in turn we confidently come to Him in prayer asking humbly in our trials during this earthly journey for peace only He can give, the peace which alone can make sense of what we experience in life.  Our sins lost this peace for us but it has been restored through the merits of Christ’s Sacrifice which we renewal and remember with each Holy Mass.  We ask God to bless us in this new year of salvation.  We beseech Him to give aid to all who suffer.  With bended knee and foreheads to the ground, bodies and wills both bent in supplication, we beg His patient indulgence and His peace.

Here are links to my articles on Epiphany which I posted last year.

COLLECT (1)

SUPER OBLATA (1)

POST COMMUNION (1)

Here are some other pieces of the puzzle:

What Does the Prayer Really Say? Epiphany and Mary, Mother of God

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2005

Epiphany is from the Greek word for a divine “manifestation” or “revelation”. The Church’s liturgy for the feast, especially in its antiphons for Vespers, reflect the tradition that Epiphany was thought to be the day not only when the Magi came to adore Christ, but also the same day years later when Jesus changed water into wine at Cana, and also when He was baptized by St. John at the Jordan.

Images of these three mysteries has been maintained in the 2002 edition of the Missale Romanum in the artwork on the facing page for the texts, artwork as I have said in the past that is every bit as good as that which Mommy might proudly display on the refrigerator fixed on with magnets of plastic fruit.

The “art” for the Missale is based on the mosaics of a new chapel of the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace built during the Jubilee. In any event, in each of these three mysteries Jesus is revealed to be more than a mere man. He is man and God. The are many “epiphanies” of God in the Scripture, for example, the burning bush seen by Moses, the Transfiguration, and the abovementioned. The history of the modern feast of Epiphany is ancient and complicated history. In the East Epiphany was an extremely important feast far more important than the relative latecomer Christmas. In the West, the Nativity developed first and the celebration of Epiphany came later. In many places in the world, Epiphany, and not Christmas, is the day to exchange gifts, in imitation of the Magi. Epiphany truly really falls on the 6th of January, the twelfth day after Christmas (as in “On the Twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…” – which some think comes from Ireland during the time when Catholicism was illegal). Twelfth Night as in Shakespeare’s play, refers to Epiphany. In the post-Conciliar calendar, it can be transferred to Sunday and perhaps this is good: the ancient and mysterious feast now gets more attention than it did when it was observed strictly on January 6th. Today’s “Opening Prayer” for Mass, or more properly Collect, was in the 1962MR and in other ancient sacramentaries. Enjoy the sound of the Latin by reading it aloud, with the fine rhythmic clausula at the end (celsitúdinis perducámur).

COLLECT - LATIN TEXT (2002MR):
Deus, qui hodierna die Unigenitum tuum stella duce revelasti,
concede propitius,
ut qui iam te ex fide cognovimus,
usque ad contemplandam speciem tuae celsitudinis perducamur.

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Father,
you revealed you Son to the nations
by the guidance of a star.
Lead us to your glory in heaven
by the light of faith.

Well that is what ICEL gave us. But is that what the prayer really says? I suspect not. We are justifiably suspicious when the translation is shorter than the Latin original (which just doesn’t happen, friends). In case you are trying to figure out the ending of revelasti it is a syncopated (shortened) form of revelavisti. Stella duce is an ablative absolute (duce is from dux). Don’t fall into the trap of translating an ablative absolute beginning with “with” (e.g., “with a star as leader”). “With” gives an impression of accompaniment rather than the existing circumstance at the time of the action of the main verb. The adjective hodiernus, a, um, is “of this day, today’s”, so hodierna dies literally is “today’s day”, stronger than a simple “today”. Perhaps we could say, “this day of day’s” or “this of all days”. To my Latin ear this emphasizes the weight of the feast of Epiphany with its three events that are traditionally associated with it. Celsitudo, in your revelatory Lewis & Short Dictionary, indicates in older Latin a loftiness of carriage while in later Latin it points to majesty, as in the title “Highness”.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
O God, who today revealed your Only-begotten, a star having been the guide,
graciously grant,
that we, who have already come to know you from faith,
may be led all the way unto the contemplation of the beauty of your majesty.

There is depth in the phrase usque ad contemplandam speciem. The noun species (three syllables) is too broad in meaning for this narrow space. Species often means “beauty” in prayers, but it is also a technical philosophical term about the way the human intellect apprehends things. Species, (frequently also called forma, another word for “beauty, splendor”) points at a relationship between the thing known and our knowing power. It allows us to perceive objects directly and without a bridge or intermediary. A famous philosophical adage says, “Quidquid recipitur per modum recipientis recipitur.... Whatever is received, is received in the mode of the one doing the receiving” (cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, STh I, q. xii, a. 4). Species has a transforming effect on the mind of the one perceiving a thing. The object being considered acts upon our power of knowing, and this knowing power acts simultaneously on the object known. So, our knowing power’s “active and passive” dimensions come together in the process and the object of consideration is known directly, without intermediaries. This is what we are praying for, hoping for, living our earthly lives for: we want to see God face to face, directly and immediately. In this life, we know God indirectly, by faith, our intellect being aided by authority of revelation and by grace. This is St. Paul’s “dark glass” (1 Cor 13:12) through which we peer toward Him in longing. In the next life we will not need faith because we will have direct knowledge. In this phrase usque ad contemplandam speciem (a gerundive construction indicating purpose) we are praying to be brought “all the way to the beauty” of God “which is to be contemplated”. This vision of His beauty will increase our knowledge of Him and therefore our love for all eternity. This is what we were made for: His glory and splendor. They will transform us, making us more and more like what God is by our contemplation of them for ever and ever. The Fathers of the Church, such as Hilary of Poitiers (+367), spoke of the glory of God as a transforming power which divinizes us by conforming us more and more to His image. In our prayer, there is a move from faith to knowledge in the Beatific Vision. Christ is the visible image of the invisible God, He is the Beauty and Truth of the Father. Christ could be seen as the species of this prayer. In heaven, God’s Truth and Beauty are indistinguishable and we will see them directly and be thus transformed during all eternity.

This prayer has meaning for our earthly lives: we need beauty now as well. The influence of post-modernism, particularly in education, has made it harder and harder for people to grasp the existence of objective truth. Ugly images flood our vision, hideous noises our ears. This numbs us to beauty and therefore apprehensions of truths. In a post-modern view everything relative, we cannot really know things with certainty nor can we communicate them, and nothing is admitted as unchanging or eternal. The discord and restlessness this provokes in life has nothing to do with God. But it has nothing to do with man either, at least in the way he was made and what he is intended for. Dante in the Paradiso of the Divine Comedy invents a new word, “transhumanize”, to describe what happens to us through the Beatific Vision. In our direct contact with God we are simultaneously made more and more like God and also more and more what we are supposed to be, God’s images. In being “transhumanized” in this world and the next, His grace perfects our nature, not destroys it. In this life, holiness and the life of virtues is what does this. Think of the document of the Holy Father, concerning moral theology, called Veritatis splendor… The Splendor of the Truth.

If eternal beauty transforms man, “divinize” him, then in this life beauty (Truth’s echo) can change him as well. So will ugliness. The current dissolution of formal education in fundamentals and tools of learning has rendered many people incapable of following easily a linear argument to a conclusion that they will accept because it must perforce be true: “It is true for you, maybe,” they often respond. Could the proper use of and fostering of beauty in our churches help us reach people in a way that the systematic approach and arguments may not be able to effect at this time? Once people have seen God’s truth shining through beauty (of music, motion, language, environment) they can be reached in other ways. The Church has given two things as a common inheritance for all mankind: art and saints. In art, God’s truth and beauty are reflected in inanimate creation. In the lives of saints, God’s truth and beauty shines forth in living creatures, His images. In both, we find the beauty which points to the truth. The beauty of the truth and the truth of beauty can affect every dimension of our lives now, in anticipation of heaven.

 

Our true Catholic faith and our splendid liturgy show forth the truth and beauty of God in a way that urges us to find the most accurate and beautiful words, actions, music we can possibly summon from human genius, labor and love. What we say and do in church ought to be a foretaste of heaven and the Beatific Vision. The Church must once again reclaim her role as the greatest patron of the arts in human history. Beauty in liturgy can be a manifestation of the divine, a revelation, an “epiphany”. In a new translation of the Missal, our bishops will have the chance to give us a precious gift: a new glimpse of God through beauty and truth in words. When we go to Mass we are like shoeless Moses’ meeting God in the burning bush which is not consumed. We are like the Magi whose penetrating sight is fixed upon the infant Jesus, in whose perfect image something of the invisible Father is revealed.

What Does the Prayer Really Say? Holy Family – Sunday in the Octave of Christmas

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2004

A liturgical “octave” is an eight day period following and including the feast. In a way, the Church suspends time so that we can “rest” within the mystery we have celebrated while contemplating it from different angles. Perhaps you have gone to a museum and seen a magnificent statue, such as Michelangelo’s David in Florence. Glancing at it for a moment is not enough; you want to spend some time. Looking at it from one direction is inadequate; you walk around it to see it from various points of view. Considering our human weakness, a single day per year does not suffice to gather in the different dimensions of the mystery of a great feast. An octave, however, allows us to reflect on a feast in different ways. For example, Pius Parsh, a prominent figure of the Liturgical Movement during the 20th c., wrote in The Church’s Year of Grace that the feasts of Sts. Stephen, John the Evangelist, and the Holy Innocents permit us to approach Christ, the new born King, first as martyrs, then as virgins, then as virgin-martyrs. Theologically speaking, an octave anticipates the eternal bliss of heaven in which we will consider God in His glory. Think of it this way. God created the world in six days and on the seventh, the Sabbath, He rested. This cycle of seven repeats itself while the world endures. The eighth day is therefore beyond the cycle of seven. It symbolizes an eternal state, the perfect unending Sabbath of heaven. As a Church, during the octave – perceived as a single continuous day – we imitate the hosts of heaven in their abiding contemplation. Advent prepared us for the coming of the Lamb, both at Bethlehem and the end of time. Christmas too marks both comings. After Christmas we gather around the manger of Bethlehem and contemplate Jesus who is also the Lamb of the book of Revelation. We are like the Magi who adore Him, but we are also like the heavenly multitude of 144,000 who “follow the Lamb wherever he goes” (Rev 14:4). In both ways we remain in the Lord’s presence.

On 1 January we celebrate the solemn feast of Mary, Mother of God, once called in the traditional Roman calendar (and still so by those using the MR1962) the Feast of the Circumcision, when Christ shed His Blood for us for the first time. Thus, at Christmas the wooden Crib already points to the wooden Cross, and beyond to the goal of heaven made possible now for the children of a common Father. Mary stood at the foot of both. Consequently, it is fitting to celebrate her with great solemnity in the Christmas octave. By her participation in the salvific shedding of her Son’s Blood Mary gives us an important example of sacrificial love.

The place God Incarnate chose to begin manifesting this sacrificial love, which reached its culmination on the Cross, was the family home. Together with Mary and His earthly father Joseph, Christ began to reveal something of the unity of love within the most perfect of communions, the Holy Trinity. It is fitting to celebrate the Holy Family within the Octave of Christmas when we contemplate the coming of the Lord in imitation of that final, perfect communion with God to be enjoyed only by the blessed in heaven. The family is a paradigm of all other human relationships. The Holy Family teaches us, who are still in this world but moving inexorably toward our judgment and final goal, how to live – together – in this present state of “already, but not yet”.

COLLECT - LATIN TEXT (2002MR):
Deus, qui praeclara nobis sanctae Familiae
dignatus es exempla praebere,
concede propitius,
ut domesticis virtutibus caritatisque vinculis illam sectantes,
in laetitia domus tuae praemiis fruamur aeternis.

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Father, help us to live as the holy family,
united in respect and love.
Bring us to the joy and peace of your eternal home.

According to the fine Lewis & Short Dictionary the noun exemplum means, “a sample for imitation, instruction, proof, a pattern, model, original, example….” For the Fathers, exemplum could mean many things. including man as God’s image, Christ as a Teacher, and the content of prophecy. In Greek and Roman rhetoric and philosophy, which so deeply influenced the Fathers, exemplum could have auctoritas, “authority”, which means among other things the moral persuasive force of an argument. When we hear this prayer with Patristic ears, exemplum is not merely an “example” to be followed: it indicates a past event as a reason for hope and an incitement to the spiritual life that leads to being raised up after the perfect exemplum, the Risen Christ. The deponent verb sector (you know the word “sect”) is, “to follow continuously or eagerly… to strive after.” The playwright Publius Terentius Afer (Terence + 158 BC) uses it for followers of a philosopher (Eunuchus 2.2.31). These disciples would take their name from their philosophical master just as we ‘Christians have ours. In the ancient Church there was a gossamer thin distinction between religion and philosophy. In a sense, Christ, the teacher offering His disciples perfect exempla is the verus philosophus for He Himself is Wisdom and Truth, and our faith is vera philosophia. That illam (singular) goes back, necessarily to familia (singular feminine, not the neuter plural exempla). Exemplum is also laden with import in the writings of the Fathers of the Church. Praeclarus, a, um, the adjective paired with exempla, signifies basically, “very bright, very clear” and then by extension, “very beautiful (physically or morally), magnificent, honorable, splendid, noble, remarkable, distinguished, excellent, famous, celebrated.” Praeclara …exempla is so packed with information that it is really impossible to render it into English completely without a long excursus, like, “authoritative models for imitation very beautiful in instructive clarity”. Also, the combination of praebere exempla is very common in the writings of the Fathers often for “offering examples for imitation” of virtues or good works. This prayer is laden with philosophical vocabulary revolving around instruction of and conformity of life to wisdom through virtues. This prayer is a new composition for the Novus Ordo based somewhat on the Collect for the Feast of the Holy Family in the 1962MR. Whoever wrote this knew more than his prayers, I can tell you.

The term domestica virtus, is used by ancient authors of philosophical works (e.g., Cicero (+43 BC) and Seneca (+AD 65)) and thereafter by the doctor of the Church St. Ambrose of Milan (+397) in his own works on virginity and on virtues and duties.

This word pairing brings to mind the Second Vatican Council’s description of the family as the “domestic Church”, reprised in the Catechism of the Catholic Church 1656 citing Lumen gentium 11:

In our own time, in a world often alien and even hostile to faith, believing families are of primary importance as centers of living radiant faith. For this reason the Second Vatican Council, using an ancient expression, calls the family the domestic Church (Ecclesia domestica). It is in the bosom of the family that parents are “by word and example…the first heralds of the faith with regard to their children. They should encourage them in the vocation which is proper to each child, fostering with special care any religious vocation.”

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
O God, who deigned to provide us
with the very beautiful models of the Holy Family,
grant propitiously
that we who are eagerly imitating them in domestic virtues and the bonds of charity,
may enjoy eternal rewards in the joy of Your house.

We are asking God implicitly to enable us through grace, building in us the supernatural virtues of faith, hope and especially charity, to imitate the clear examples (praeclara exempla) of Jesus, Mary and Joseph in the communion of their earthly household. We are to build communion among ourselves, on their authoritative model, which in turn exemplifies the communion of the Church and of the Persons of the Trinity. Thereafter, our examples, our own families, serve as the building block of a society oriented to God, the “city of God”, not the “city of man”. The reward for doing this faithfully is participation in the heavenly household of God the Father in the new family of the Church triumphant.

What the Holy Family offers us is a real exemplum, authoritative model, of freedom. This is not the false freedom of self-interested satisfaction of appetites, or the freedom to “choose” divorced from consideration of objective truths. This is freedom within, not from the bonds of charity. The more we are implicated or “bound up” in the love of God, giving Him our freedom, the freer we truly are. Vinculum literally means “that with which any thing is bound”, a “fetter”, like a chain. Here it describes effect of real charity, vincula caritatis, the kind of sacrificial love based on obedience to God’s will that the Holy Family had for one another and Christ showed forth perfectly while fixed and bound to the Cross. The “bonds of charity” require sacrifices and the abandoning, or better, transformation of selfish desires. The bonds of the family, and any authentic relationship based on something other than mutual use of each other, seem to modern eyes often to restrict personal freedom. But this is not the case. God’s love and God-like love, charity, makes us freer than we could ever hope to be without it.

The bonds of love and virtues of the Holy Family are foreshadows of the harmony of heaven which we are eagerly striving after. The family, nourished in the faith and sacraments of the Church, is an image of the Holy Family, itself an image of the communion of persons of the Church in heaven and of the Persons of the Trinity. Today’s Collect points to the importance of the “domestic Church.” The family is the first “church” children know. Parents are the first examples of God children experience. Your children first learn who God is by experiencing you. Can anyone wonder why the forces of hell are bending relentless attacks upon the family and the virtues which must be practiced in the home? Through the media, especially cinema, TV, and the internet, there pour into our homes a constant assault on virtue. And it is precisely virtue (not diversity, not tolerance, not inclusivity, not politically correct sensitivity, not freedom of choice unfettered from charity) that makes possible a family and therefore a society. This prayer is a contradiction of worldly ways and an affirmation of the God’s true image in us.

What Does the Prayer Really Say? The 4th Sunday of Advent

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2004

On 4 December, the anniversary of the Vatican Council’s Apostolic Constitution on the Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium, I attended a “day of study” held by the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments (CDWDS) on the newest, 2004 edition of the Martyrologium Romanum (Roman Martyrology – MartRom). This is an official liturgical book which will eventually need translation into English. I wrote about the 2002 typical edition of the MartRom when it came forth. It took decades to get the new MartRom in shape especially because of the reform of the process of beatification/canonization and the immense increase in the number of declarations between the pontificates of Pius XII and John Paul II. Long study went into this volume. Errors from the Mediaeval period which were incorporated into the 1586 and 1589 editions prepared by the Renaissance historian Cesare Card. Baronio (+1607 – to whom Gregory XIII had entrusted its revision after his reform of the Julian calendar in 1582) were subsequently recopied. The 2002 MartRom also had some errors and gaps despite its improvements. It was determined, properly, to issue an editio typica altera. The new MartRom underscores the universal call to holiness, God’s call to all people but, “in the first place, the Christian faithful” (in primis christifideles – Praenont. 1). The MartRom reveals that it is possible to live the life of grace amid the variable circumstances of this life, even – and especially – when they are challenging to the point of one’s own death. At the conference I had the chance to chat with the Prefect of the CDWDS, His Eminence Francis Card. Arinze, who is always very kind. He told me that he reads WDTPRS though he can’t get to it every week. The poor man has very little time and, as he said, “it is extensive”. Respondeo dicendum, “You’re telling me, Eminenza!”

Today’s Collect is the Post-communion of the Feast of the Annunciation (25 March) in the 1962MR. Four years ago, when last we saw the Collects, I gave you the traditional version most of you know if you recite the Angelus (which has an indulgence). This time we also get the WDTPRS version since we want to know what the prayer really says. This is also the prayer said traditionally after the Alma Redemptoris Mater, sung following Compline during Advent.

COLLECT - LATIN TEXT (2002MR):
Gratiam tuam, quaesumus Domine,
mentibus nostris infunde,
ut qui, Angelo nuntiante,
Christi Filii tui incarnationem cognovimus,
per passionem eius et crucem
ad resurrectionis gloriam perducamur.

The last part, per passionem eius et crucem ad resurrectionis gloriam perducamur has a wonderful flow to it with its alliteration and snappy cadence (glóriam perducámur), followed as it is by the rhythmically gear changing conclusion, Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum…. Collects are often little masterpieces. They deserve great care in rendering them into a liturgically smooth, yet accurate version. In WDTPRS we are purposely being rather “slavish” in translating so you can see the raw text. Imagine how hard it is to work up good liturgical versions.

We never have to brush dust from our frequently exploited Lewis & Short Latin Dictionary. Therein we find that cognosco is, generally, “to become thoroughly acquainted with (by the senses or mentally), to learn by inquiring…”, but in the perfect tenses (cognovimus) it is “to know” in all periods of Latin. The verb infundo basically is “to pour in, upon, or into” but in the construction (which we see today – infundere alicui aliquid) “to pour out for, to administer to, present to, lay before”. Simply, it can mean, “communicate, impart”. The verb perduco “to lead or bring through”, is “guide a person or thing to a certain goal, to a certain period”. Interestingly, both infundo and perduco can have the overtone of to anoint, or smear with something.

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Lord,
fill our hearts with your love,
and as you revealed to us by an angel
the coming of your Son as man,
so lead us through his suffering and death
to the glory of his resurrection
for he lives and reigns…

A TRADITIONAL VERSION:
Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts, that we, to whom the incarnation of Christ, Thy Son, was made known by the message of an angel, may by His Passion and Cross be brought to the glory of His resurrection, (through the same Christ our Lord).

Some people think that “Thee” and “Thou” are formal. Au contraire! These are familiar forms of pronouns for the second person singular used by a superior to an underling or between equals or friends. The “you” form (derived from “ye”) is the more formal! In traditional prayers (Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by Thy name…) we address God with a familiar, intimate form not so common today unless you are Amish or Quaker. You will raise an eyebrow or two at the bowling alley if you shift to “thou”: “Since it’s the tenth frame and thou hadst a strike, thrice canst thou bowl. Take up thy ball and bowl, already, ‘cause I gotta go home.” Well… that last phrase shows some ICEL influence, but I think you get my drift. In the Sacramentary (which should have been called the Roman Missal) now in use ICEL improperly provided “Alternative Prayers” having nothing to do with Latin edition which has no alternative opening prayers. If we must have alternative prayers, how about one version having a modern (but accurate) sound and an alternate with “Thee”s and “Thou”s? Here is my defense for this. Providing a more archaic, stylized prayer would cut across differences between, say, the English of Africa, Australia, and Asia. They say Americans and British are two peoples separated by a common language. But not when we read Shakespeare or we say the traditional Our Father! I can back this up from a Vatican document, too. The CDWDS document for the norms of translation, Liturgiam authenticam, says that the language of liturgy should be distinct from daily speech:

27. Even if expressions should be avoided which hinder comprehension because of their excessively unusual or awkward nature, the liturgical texts should be considered as the voice of the Church at prayer, rather than of only particular congregations or individuals; thus, they should be free of an overly servile adherence to prevailing modes of expression. If indeed, in the liturgical texts, words or expressions are sometimes employed which differ somewhat from usual and everyday speech, it is often enough by virtue of this very fact that the texts become truly memorable and capable of expressing heavenly realities. Indeed, it will be seen that the observance of the principles set forth in this Instruction will contribute to the gradual development, in each vernacular, of a sacred style that will come to be recognized as proper to liturgical language. Thus it may happen that a certain manner of speech which has come to be considered somewhat obsolete in daily usage may continue to be maintained in the liturgical context.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
We beg You, O Lord,
pour Your grace into our minds and hearts,
so that we who came to know the incarnation of Christ Your Son
in the moment the Angel was heralding the news,
may be guided through His Passion and Cross
to the glory of the resurrection.

Carefully note that Angelo nuntiante is an ablative absolute, hard to render in English without using a paraphrase. The participle nuntiante is in the present tense, or better, in a tense “contemporary” with the time of the verb cognovimus having a past tense. Thus, in the very moment the Angel was heralding the good news, we (collectively in the shepherds) knew about how God the Son Eternal took our whole human nature perfectly into an indestructible bond with His divinity. Good Advent shepherds, they rushed to the Coming of the Lord, to see the Word made flesh lying in the wooden manger. “Seeing is believing”, they say, but believing makes us want to see! “Crede ut intellegas! Believe that you may understand!” is a common theme for St. Augustine (e.g., s. 43,4.7; 118,1; Io. eu. tr. 29,6). Today many people automatically oppose faith against reason, authority versus intellect, as if they were mutually exclusive. In fact, faith and authority are indispensible for a deeper rational, intellectual apprehension of anything. In all the deeper questions of human existence, we need the illumination from grace, we must believe and receive. Faith is the foundation of our hope which leads to love and communion with God, as Augustine might say (trin. 8,6). The Angel heralded with authority. The shepherds believed. They rushed to Bethlehem. They saw the Infant. They understood the message. Then they worshipped the Word made flesh Who opened for them a new life.

How often do we hear about something or learn a new thing and then rush to know more, to have personal experience, to see? This is a paradigm for our life of faith. There is an interlocking cycle of hearing a proclamation (such as the Gospel at Mass, a homily, or a teaching of the Church) or observing the living testimony of a holy person’s life, and by this experience coming to know and then love the content of that proclamation or living testimony. The content is the Man God Jesus Christ. By knowing Him we come all the better to love Him and in loving Him we desire better to know Him. An act of faith, acceptance of the authority of the content of what we receive, opens unto previously unknown territory, a vast depth otherwise closed to us. For the non-believer, on the other hand, a miracle is simply something inexplicable having nothing of the supernatural. For a non-believer being nice or hard working can never ascend to true virtue or holiness. For him, the content of the Faith itself (both Jesus as well as what we learn and assent to) appears to be pleasant or interesting, but in the end remains naïve or foolish.

As we rush into Advent’s final days, that first candle we lit on our wreaths is now quite depleted. From 17 December to Christmas Eve solemn days envelop us and the haunting “O Antiphons” of vespers one after another cloak us in our longing: “O come! O come!.. to teach us… redeem us… deliver us… ransom us… free us… enlighten us… save us… save us….” We are deeply wrapped within our penitential holyday cheer because our celebration of the Lord in His First Coming is near to hand, but we do not forget that His Second Coming will bring our final judgment.

Since we are so close now to the great feast of Our Lord’s birth, I extend my warmest greetings and prayerful best wishes to you and yours for a very Merry Christmas.

What Does the Prayer Really Say? 3rd Sunday of Advent “Gaudete” – Station: St. Peter in the Vatican

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2004

This article was an oddity in the series, since there were techincal difficulties in transmitting it to the publisher.  So, here is just the part referring to the 3rd Sunday of Advent.

Now for the 3rd Sunday of Advent, also nicknamed Gaudete.... the plural imperative of gaudeo, “Rejoice!”.  Today, there is a relaxation of the penitential aspect of Advent.  In the first week of Advent we begged God for the grace of the proper approach and will for our preparation.  In the second week, we ask God for help and protection in facing the obstacles the world raises against us.  This Sunday we have a glimpse of the joy that is coming in our rose colored (rosacea) vestments, some use of the organ, flowers.  Christmas is near at hand.  

COLLECT – LATIN TEXT (2002MR)
Deus, qui conspicis populum tuum
nativitatis dominicae festivitatem fideliter exspectare,
praesta, quaesumus,
ut valeamus ad tantae salutis gaudia pervenire,
et ea votis sollemnibus alacri laetitia celebrare.

The infinitives in our Collect (expectare… pervenire… celebrare) give it a grand sound and also sum up what we are doing in Advent.  L&S informs us that conspicio means, “to look at attentively, to get sight of, to descry, perceive, observe.” Alacer is, “lively, brisk, quick, eager, active; glad, happy, cheerful” and it is put in an unlikely combination with laetitia, “joy, especially unrestrained joyfulness”.  At the same time we also have votis sollemnibus. Votum signifies first of all, “a solemn promise made to some deity” (we have all made baptismal vows!) and also “wish, desire, longing, prayer”.  There is a powerful sentiment of longing in this prayer, God’s as well as ours.  Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that expecto is from ex- + pecto (pecto, “to comb”). You won’t find exspecto “look forward to”, in your L&S, but the etymological dictionary of Latin by Ernout and Meillet says it is from ex- + *specio, spexi, spectum or ex- +  spicio.  Therefore, it is a cousin of conspicio:  God “watches” over us and we “look” back at… er um… forward to Him.  This word play is quite clever, really.    

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
O God, who attentively does watch Your people
look forward faithfully to the feast of the Lord’s birth,
grant, we entreat,
that we may be able to attain the to joys of so great a salvation
and celebrate them with eager jubilation in solemn festive rites.

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Lord God,
may we, your people,
who look forward to the birthday of Christ
experience the joy of salvation
and celebrate that feast with love and thanksgiving.

This offertory embodies a word pair describing the attitude of Advent: joyful penance… penitential joy.   With the last two week’s of “rushing” in our prayers and doing good works, we have now the added image of eager and unrestrained joy,  an almost childlike dash towards a long-desired thing.  Have earthly fathers watched this scene all of a Christmas morning?  Even so should we be in our eager joy to perform good works under the gaze of a Father who watches us, a Father with a plan.   This lame duck ICEL version captures little of the impact of the Latin prayer, that is, God the Father is patiently watching his people as we go about the Advent business of doing penance and just works in joyful anticipation Christ’s coming.  But perhaps you will be good enough to respond with an eager and joyfully penitential “Amen” when you hear it pronounced even as you long for a better translation in the future.

What Does the Prayer Really Say?  The 2nd Sunday of Advent

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2004

When we approach difficult questions or topics, we must be humble before them, admitting the truth when made plain and ignorance when plainly we don’t have a clue.  I have told you all more than once how baffled I was by something both readers and I received from the hand of the Executive Secretary of ICEL, Fr. Bruce Harbert.  In responding to your (and my) kind letters about the thorny pro multis controversy (“for all” in the sacramental form for the consecration of the Precious Blood) Fr. Harbert systematically penned a puzzling claim without offering support or references, that is: the Holy Father reserves to himself personally the approval vernacular translations of the sacramental forms.  This claim struck me as unlikely and I was not alone – in a copy of a response a WDTPRS reader shared with me I saw that His Eminence George Card. Pell, chairman of Vox Clara, was similarly surprised.  With the help of others I have gotten to the bottom of Fr. Harbert’s contention, which sounded like a dodge.

What Fr. Harbert wrote is true. I verified it.  Of course, he might have saved us some trouble and provided in his letters a reference to reduce our original level of wonder and confusion.  In the Holy See’s official instrument of promulgation, Acta Apostolicae Sedis for 28 February 1974 (AAS 66 (1974) 98-99) we find a circular letter dated 25 October 1973 over the signature of then Secretary of State Jean Card. Villot, countersigned by Archbp. Annibale Bugnini, about this very matter (my translation from the Latin):  “The Supreme Pontiff reserves to himself the power of approving directly all translations into vernacular languages of the formulas of sacraments.”  1973 was the year our present ICEL version was approved.  There was a dust-up going on about whether the vernacular sacramental forms (i.e., “for all”) were heretical.  The circular letter stated a translation (conversio) of sacramental forms was to be prepared (apparabitur – apparo: “prepare, make ready”) by the (then) Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship after consultation with the episcopal conferences; a translation must accurately reflect proper doctrine and be in harmony with the Latin text as much as possible.  Nota bene: the Congregation (at present the CDWDS), not the conferences, not ICEL, furnishes the translation of the sacramental form to the Pope for approval.  I therefore renew my plea to you, good readers, to write with cordial fervor to those in charge of these matters, if you need addresses and don’t have back issues of WDTPRS wherein they were provided, contact either The Wanderer or yours truly.  

Why is this important?  During the fall meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, His Excellency Most Rev. Donald W. Trautman, Bishop of Erie, was re-elected chairman of the Bishops’ Committee on Liturgy (BCL – a non-authoritative body).  The BCL must soon review ICEL’s latest draft translation which the Vox Clara Committee recently reviewed in Rome.  Bp. Trautman has been consistently and sharply critical of the Holy See’s norms for translation issued in the CDWDS’s Liturgiam authenticam (LA).  This is rather dramatic, so keep reading.  Enter from upstage: a regular WDTPRSer, JB via e-mail from Washington, D.C., where he attended a “Tridentine” Mass last Sunday.  “Ding” goes the sanctuary bell.  Enter stage right: the priest celebrant in biretta and maniple, Fr. Bruce Harbert, the aforementioned Executive Secretary of ICEL.  I ask you: can you wrap your mind around the image of a member of ICEL’s politburo of yore, say 10 years ago, celebrating a Tridentine Mass?    I say “Kudos, Father.”  No, “for all” during that Mass, I can tell you.  Anyway, JB recounts that, in a conversation with Fr. Harbert after Mass, Father assured him that Bp. Trautman is a scholarly fellow who will not have a negative impact on the translation.  Having confirmed what Fr. Harbert has asserted before, shall we give him the benefit of the doubt in this matter as well?    Quoth Ronald Reagan, “Trust, but verify.”

In 2003 a group decidedly not friendly to the Holy See’s norms, the Federation of Diocesan Liturgical Directors (I’ve mentioned them before) presented Bp. Trautman with their Frederick R. McManus Award.  His Excellency spoke inter alia about the then forthcoming CDWDS document Redemptionis Sacramentum desired by the Pope against liturgical abuses.  His Excellency’s anaphoric remarks in 2003 may reveal something of his approach to documents from the Holy See (slightly edited):  

A recent draft of a forthcoming Vatican instruction included several problematic elements – elements which were neither pastorally sensitive nor liturgically correct.  While we are thankfully reassured that more competent and more sensible judgments have prevailed, we need to ask how could such proposals be drafted and approved for submission in the first place?  When such Roman liturgical drafts call us to return to a liturgical mentality prior to Vatican II, we need to say to one another: Keep up your courage.  When liturgical expertise is not respected, … When fundamental principles of liturgical renewal are reversed, we must say to one another: Keep up your courage….

There is more of the same.  Folks, do you see what is going on?  I say keep up your courage, pick up your pens and ratchet up your efforts.   The coming months are decisive!

Lest any “traditional” Catholics think today’s Collect is less valuable because it isn’t old enough, or wasn’t in the 1570 Missale Romanum, it is from the Gelasian Sacramentary, compiled around 750 in Paris from material in use much earlier.

COLLECT - LATIN TEXT (2002MR):
Omnipotens et misericors Deus,
in tui occursum Filii festinantes
nulla opera terreni actus impediant,
sed sapientiae caelestis eruditio
nos faciat eius esse consortes.

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
God of power and mercy,
open our hearts in welcome.
Remove the things that hinder us
 from receiving Christ with joy,
so that we may share his wisdom
and become one with him
when he comes in glory,…

What does the Latin prayer really say?  We now consult that sure stock of Latin lemmas the Lewis & Short Dictionary for actus which means, “an act or action” but also, “the moving or driving of an object, impulse.”  Impedio (built from the word pes, pedis, “foot”) is “to snare or tangle the feet”.   Sapientia means “wisdom”.  In Christian contexts, especially of the Early Church, Wisdom is simply loaded with different overtones from theology and philosophy (philosophia, “love of wisdom”).   The Bible has a group of writings called “Wisdom literature” which were, according to the Fathers of the Church, filled with foreshadowings of Christ who is identified with Wisdom.     The phrase faciat eius esse consortes calls to mind both the Collect prayer in Mass for Christmas Day and also the priest’s prayer when preparing the chalice at the offertory.  A consors is someone with (con) whom you share your lot (sors).   This is at the heart of today’s Collect prayer.  Remember: Deus, “God”, is declined irregularly and in solemn discourse the nominative is used as the vocative form (e.g. cf. Livy 1, 24, 7).  Do not, like ICEL did, fall into the trap of thinking that Deus is the subject of the verbs.  The subjects are plural opera and singular eruditio.  

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
Almighty and merciful God,
let no works of worldly impulse impede
those hurrying to the meeting of Your Son,
but rather let the learning of heavenly wisdom
make us to be His partakers.

Last week we were rushing to meet the Lord who is coming and meriting our reward through good works, meritorious for heaven because they are made so in Christ.  In Advent, as the Baptist warns us, we are to make smooth the path for the coming of the Lord.  This week we are again rushing, but, perhaps we are wiser this week after the first rush of excitement: now are now also wary of obstacles on that path which could impede us, snare our feet.  These would be our merely human, simply worldly, works.  These “works of worldly impulse” are not meritorious since they are not performed in Christ.  There is a sharp contrast between heavenly Wisdom which liberates and worldly “wisdom” which entangles.  The Apostle St. Paul contrasts the wisdom of this world with the Wisdom of God (cf. 1 Cor 1:20;  3:19; 2 Cor 3:19). In Romans 12:2 Paul says, “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.”  This is not just a Pauline concept.  Compare our Collect today also with 2 Peter 1:3-4 (RSV): “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge (cognitio: cf. eruditio) of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers of the divine nature (efficiamini divinae consortes).”   

St. Augustine of Hippo (+430) beat up some Donatist heretics and dismantled their argument that all clerics ordained by a sinful bishop would be automatically stained in the same guilt. He used imagery like that of our prayer today (Ad Donatistas post collationem in CSEL 53:19.25, p. 123 my translation): “The sludge (lutum) their feet are stuck in is so thick and dense that, trying in vain to tear themselves out of it, they get their hands and head stuck in it too, and lingering in that sticky mess they get more tightly enveloped.”  The Donatist argument was based in worldly, not heavenly, wisdom.  

Sticky lutum is a metaphor of worldly life.  Neglecting God, who speaks in the Church and our conscience, we weak sinners can convince ourselves of anything, over time: down becomes up, back is made front, black turns into white, and wrong is really right.  We justify what we know, or knew, to be sinful.  Once this becomes a habit, it is a vice in more than one sense of that word.  Occasionally our consciences will struggle against the grip of self-deception, but quite often the proverbial “Struggle”, Novocain for the conscience, supplies permission: “I really ‘struggled’ with this, … before I did it!”  If we go off the true path into the murky twisted woods, thoroughly mired in sticky error we will not escape the Enemy, the roaring lion seeking whom he might devour (1 Peter 5:8).  Nor will we elude Christ the Judge, who will come through dark woods by straight paths.  Advent reminds us to prepare for the coming of both the Enemy lion and the Lion of Judah who will open the seals and read forth the Book of Life (Rev 5:5).

What Does the Prayer Really Say?  The 1st Sunday of Advent

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2004

This is the first offering of the fifth year of WDTPRS.  We begin anew.  In this series we have been examining the original Latin prayers of Holy Mass in the typical edition of the Missale Romanum promulgated by Pope Paul VI, in force since the 1st Sunday of Advent (30 November 1969). This is the so-called “Novus Ordo” or 1970 Roman Missal (the 1970MR).  After the Second Vatican Council, the Holy See entrusted the work of translating liturgical texts to the conferences of bishops.  In the English speaking world the conferences founded the International Committee on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) to do the work, later to be revised by the conferences and then submitted back to Holy See for approval.   The translations used since 1973, have long been recognized as inadequate in too many ways to enumerate with ease.   Years ago, driven by frustration and longing many participants of the internet forum I moderate begged me for accurate translations of Sunday prayers.  They wanted to know what the prayers really said.   Eventually, I was invited by The Wanderer to write this weekly column. We wanted to promote better translations for the common good of the people of God.  

This series has a two-fold objective.  First, we must all promote greater interest in and understanding of the content of the prayers the Church gives us for Holy Mass.  I want you to know what the prayers really say because, through them, we come to know and love the content of the prayers.  The content of our Catholic Faith is not just words to recite or memorize, but rather a divine Person, Jesus Christ, with whom we can have a reciprocal relationship of love shaping every dimension of our lives.  Secondly, WDTPRS has been urging, prompting, cajoling, pleading with you readers to write respectful, prayerful letters of support to those in charge of preparing the new English translations.   I have given you addresses.  I have done everything but put the pen on your hand and lick the stamp.  In turn, many of you have sent me copies of responses you received in return.  Your letters have made a difference, friends, make no mistake.  Moreover, you often send me your feedback and comments which I happy read and include in these articles.  You are a vital part of this WDTPRS project.  

In the first year of the series, we examined the “Opening Prayers” (collects) of the Mass, in the second the “Prayers over the gifts” (Super oblata), in the third the Post-communion prayers and during the fourth year we went through the four major Eucharistic Prayers.   This year WDTPRS takes a step both forward and backward.  Your feedback revealed that many of you appreciated the meticulous examination of the Eucharistic Prayers (part of the unchanging “Common” of the Mass), but you enjoyed far more looking at the prayers that change each Sunday (part of the changing “Proper”).  In response to you, we are returning to an examination of the changing Sunday prayers.  Many of you are interested in the detailed look at Latin vocabulary, while many are baffled or bored by it and just skip over those paragraphs.  Therefore, we will still review Latin, but not quite so much.  And remember: WDTPRS has never claimed to offer versions that are suitable for use in the Church’s liturgical action of Holy Mass: this is not our goal.  At times I will try to smooth them out a little, but mostly I will stick closely, even slavishly, to the Latin structure and to the original vocabulary.   Latin doesn’t always go into English very easily.  The people preparing translations truly need our prayerful and positive support along with constant reminders of our hopes and confidence.  Write letters.  Also, get subscriptions for people, as gifts, and share the project with others.  Do you love them?  Do you want them to have better translations and know what the prayers say?

What is the status quaestionis, the “state of the question”, these days? Since WDTPRS began the Holy See blasted ICEL for its draft translation of the 2nd Latin edition of the Missale Romanum and then issued a 3rd edition of the same (the 2002MR). A new set of norms for translation were promulgated by the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments (CDWDS) in a document called Liturgiam authenticam.  ICEL was gutted by the CDWDS and rebuilt.  The Vox Clara Committee was formed by the CDWDS as a powerful liaison and watchdog for ICEL.  ICEL prepared a new draft of the common prayers of Mass under the ongoing scrutiny and revision of Vox Clara.  A document with legislative force concerning liturgical abuses, Redemptionis Sacramentum, came forth at the order of the Holy Father in his encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia.  A special Year of the Eucharistic is in course now.   These are good things.  Nevertheless, I have warned you that, while there good advances, there are many and powerful enemies who fight with might and main to turn progress back, return to the older, cliché way of understanding translations.  If they can, they will block the production of a translation according to the norms laid down in Liturgiam authenticam.  They are not asleep.

An example of this came during the latest fall meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).  His Eminence Francis Card. George of Chicago ended his term as the head of the Bishops’ Committee for Liturgy (BCL).  But a surprise nomination came from the floor when Bp. John Kinney of St. Cloud – the last bishop appointed during the less than inspiring term of Belgian Archbishop Jean Jadot as the Papal Delegate to the USA (1973-80) nominated Bp. Donald Trautman of Erie, who was then elected by a large margin.  Bp. Trautman had this post once during the 1990’s: his track record is not what we might prefer.  In the USCCB he is the foremost campaigner for inclusive language among other, less than felicitous oddities.  He made strong declarations against the Holy See’s Liturgiam authenticam.  Bp. Trautman’s BLC will soon review the ICEL’s draft translation and vetted last week in Rome by the Vox Clara Committee.  There are strong indications that the decisions taken by Vox Clara last week would be very pleasing to WDTPRS readers.  However, we are forced to the conclusion that the selection of Bp. Trautman for the BCL is a declaration of war on the Holy See in the matter of translations.  But let us move to happier things, indeed, something of great joy: the prayers of Holy Mass and what they really say.  This year we are going to make a fresh examination of the Collects or “Opening Prayers” of Sunday Masses.

COLLECT - LATIN TEXT (2002MR):
Da, quaesumus, omnipotens Deus,
hanc tuis fidelibus voluntatem,
ut, Christo tuo venienti iustis operibus occurrentes,
eius dextrae sociati, regnum mereantur possidere caeleste.  Per Dominum….

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
All-powerful God,
increase our strength of will for doing good
that Christ may find an eager welcome at his coming
and call us to his side in the kingdom of heaven.

Would these articles be complete without reference to the prestigious Lewis & Short Dictionary?   L&S says that voluntas is basically, “will, freewill, wish, choice, desire, inclination”, but in our collect it has also the nuance of a “disposition” toward a thing or person.  Occurro is, “to run up to, run to meet” and the deponent verb mereor, “to deserve, merit, to be entitled to, be worthy of a thing”.   The usually active socio, “to join or unite together, to associate; to do or hold in common, to share a thing with another”, has a “middle” impact in this passive construction with the dative.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
Almighty God, we beseech You, grant
to Your faithful this disposition of will,
that those rushing with just works to meet Your Christ, now coming,
united at His right hand may merit to possess the heavenly kingdom.

This is the first prayer of the liturgical year. We are readying ourselves for Christ who comes!  This Sunday is back to back with the Solemnity of Christ the King, honoring the future Second Coming at the end of the world, while it prepares us for celebrating His First Coming at Christmas. Advent is all about how the Lord comes… in every way.  He comes in actual graces.  He comes when the priest says, “Hoc est enim corpus meum....This is my Body.”  He comes in Holy Communion and in the person of the needy.  “Make straight the paths!”, the liturgy of Advent cries out with the words of Isaiah and John the Baptist.  We are rushing forward (occurrentes) and smoothing the path for the feet of our King.  This requires work, just works, just by their origin, Christ Himself. When even in this life we are united to the right hand of Christ (dextrae sociati) our works are truly ours but also truly His and we merit heaven.   The image of the “right hand”, the Biblical place of honor, points to the eternal glory of God and the inauguration of the Messianic kingdom… regnum…celeste to which we look forward even as we look back to His First Coming (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church 663-4).

This is a new prayer for the Novus Ordo but based on ancient prayer from the so-called “Gelasian Sacramentary”. Many “Traditional” Catholics will claim that the prayers of the Novus Ordo are not sufficiently “Catholic”.  No prayer you will ever hear is more Catholic than this collect!  A Protestant or fundamentalist Christian could not say this prayer with its “just works”, its “meriting”, its “disposition”.  What does “disposition of will” (voluntas) mean for us fallen humans?  Protestants think our nature is wholly corrupt and so our disposition must be entirely evil.  But we know man is wounded by the Fall, not wholly corrupted.  Protestants believe anything good in us must be imposed from outside through the “alien merits” of Christ.  Is the voluntas we are begging in the prayer going to be our will or someone else’s will covering us over?  The prayer doesn’t say if the voluntas is God’s or ours.  But this is a Catholic prayer.  Once we are baptized and live in the state of grace, we are New Creations and God the Holy Trinity is at work in us.  Our cooperation with God’s gift of faith through good works saves us, not “faith alone” or a mere “covering over”.  A proper interior “disposition of will” is made possible and given by God but after that it is really ours.  Our works do not by themselves merit anything, but once we are transformed and renewed by sanctifying grace, “united at His right hand” already in this life, our work on earth merits the increase of grace and the reward of heaven because they are His while they are ours.  Thomas de Vio Card. Caietanus (Cajetan +1534) explained to Martin Luther (+1546) that, when we say that we “merit”, we are saying that Christ merits in us (cf. De fide et operibus, 12).  St. Augustine of Hippo (+430) preached that, “When God crowns our merits (merita), He crowns nothing other than His own gifts (munera)” (ep. 194, 5, 19). We merit salvation on the foundation of habitual, sanctifying grace, through the virtuous works which we perform.  His will becomes our sole desire.

How rich is this prayer!  This is how we begin our year, suffused with the language of deep humility: “Grant, we beseech You….”  We beg God to bless this WDTPRS project and cause it, by His will and our cooperation, to bear fruits for His glory and merit for us the gifts He comes to give.

What Does the Prayer Really Say?  34th and Last Sunday in Ordinary Time – Christ The King

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2005

We come now to the final WDTPRS on the Collects of the Sunday Masses.  This is the last Sunday of the liturgical year.  Each year Holy Church presents to us the history of salvation, from Creation to the Lord’s Coming (the First and also the Final).   In a sense, today’s Solemnity is an anticipation of the season of Advent, which also focuses on the different ways in which the Lord comes to us.  At this time of year (November) we are also considering the Four Last Things: death, judgment, heaven and hell.   We are praying for the Poor Souls in Purgatory in a special way this month.  The Solemnity of Christ the King (which in the older Roman calendar was celebrated on the last Sunday of October) brings sharply to our attention the fact that the Lord is coming precisely as King and Judge not merely as friend or savior or role-model.  In the great Dies Irae prayed at Requiem Masses for so long (and still today), Christ is identified as “King of Fearful Majesty” and “Just Judge”.  Consider today’s feast in light of what we read in 2 Peter 3: 10-12: “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and the works that are upon it will be burned up. Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of persons ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be kindled and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire!”  Christ Jesus will judge us all, dear friends, and submit all things to the Father (cf. 1 Cor 15:28).  Having excluded some from His presence, our King, Christ Jesus, will reign in majestic glory with the many who accepted His gifts and thereby merited eternal bliss.

COLLECT - (2002MR):
Omnipotens sempiterne Deus,
qui in dilecto Filio tuo, universorum Rege,
omnia instaurare voluisti,
concede propitius,
ut tota creatura, a servitute liberata,
tuae maiestati deserviat ac te sine fine collaudet.

While this Collect is of new composition for the Novus Ordo, it is similar to what was in the 1962 Missale Romanum for this feast with variations in the second part: Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, qui dilecto Filio tuo universorum Rege, omnia instaurare voluisti: concede propitius; ut cunctae familiae gentium, peccati vulnere disgregatae, eius suavissimo subdantur imperio... “so that all the families of peoples, torn apart by the wound of sin, may be subject to His most gentle rule.”

Universus is an adjective and universorum a neuter plural, “all things.”  Since we have another “all things” in omnia I will make universorum into “the whole universe.”  Our Latin ears perk up when we hear compound verbs (verbs with an attached preposition like sub or de or cvm).  In our own copy of A Latin Dictionary. Founded on Andrews’ edition of Freund’s Latin dictionary. revised, enlarged, and in great part rewritten by. Charlton T. Lewis, Ph.D. and. Charles Short, LL.D. – (aka Lewis & Short or even L&S) we find that deservio expands the meaning of servio to mean “serve zealously, be devoted to, subject to.”  Collaudo, more emphatic than simple laudo, means “to praise or commend very much, extol highly.”  You veterans of WDTPRS know how maiestas is synonymous with gloria which in early Latin writers such as Hilary of Poitiers, Ambrose and in early liturgical texts, the equivalent of biblical Greek doxa and Hebrew kabod.   This “glory” and “majesty” is God’s own transforming power, a sharing of His life, that transforms us into what He is in an everlasting “deification”.

Instauro is a wonderful word which deserves more attention: “to renew, repeat, celebrate anew; to repair, restore; to erect, make”.  It is synonymous with renovo.  Etymologically instauro is related to Greek stauros.  Turning to a different L&S, the immensely valuable Liddell & Scott Greek Dictionary, we find that stauros is “an upright pale or stake.”   Stauros is the word used in the Greek New Testament for the Cross of Jesus.  Also the word immediately makes us think not only of the motto on the coat-of-arms of Pope St. Pius X, but also the origin of that motto Ephesians 1:10: “For he has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” (Eph 1:9-10 RSV).  There have been, by the way, some changes in the Latin texts of this passage.  The older Vulgate says “instaurare omnia in Christo” while the New Vulgate says “recapitulare omnia in Christo”.  

Let’s pause a moment to review what the New or “Neo” Vulgate is.  The New Vulgate is a modern and excellent reworking of the venerable Vulgate which for the most part compiled St. Jerome (+420) translations from Greek and Hebrew.  This was the standard version of the bible in use for many years.  However, with the advent of modern tools of research and scholarship it was determined that the Vulgate could benefit from some review and revision.  The New Vulgate was in preparation for many decades and was promulgated in an editio typica prior by John Paul II on 25 April 1979 by means of the Apostolic Constitution Scripturarum thesaurus.  It was then reissued in an official version in 1986.  What has all this to do with translations of texts for Holy Mass?   The document of the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments (CDWDS) requires in the norms found in its document Liturgiam authenticam (LA) that translators must now refer to the Neo-Vulgate.  Some people, including His Excellency Donald W. Trautman the Erie bishop in Pennsylvania and present head of the U.S. Bishops’ Committee for Liturgy, think LA is a bad document because (as he claims) the New Vulgate is a flawed translation and translators of the liturgy should rather refer to texts in Latin and Greek.   However, what LA really says it that the New Vulgate must be used when determining which verses of Scripture are to be translated for the liturgy by the fact that chapter and verse markings differ among ancient manuscripts.   A single clear reference was needed.   
Back to our prayer.  Recapitulare is related to Latin caput (“head”) and was deemed by the scholars behind the New Vulgate as a better translation of the Greek anakephalaioô, “to sum up the argument.”  This harks to the headship of Christ over the Body of the Church and expresses that He is the Final Statement, the Conclusion of All Things.  At any rate, in 1925 and in the 1960’s when the older version of Vulgate was in use, the Collect had instaurare and not recapitulare.  

Why all this ink about recapitulare?  The phrase, “renew/reinstate all things in Christ” points to the Kingship of Jesus.  In everything that Jesus said or did in His earthly life, He was actively drawing all things and peoples to Himself.  In the time to come, when His Majesty the King returns in gloria and maiestas this act of drawing-to-Himself (cf. John 12:32) will culminate in the exaltation of all creation in a perfect unending paean of praise.  In the meantime, by virtue of baptism and our integration into Christus Venturus (Christ About-To-Come), we all share in His three-fold office of priest, prophet, and also king.  We have the duty to proclaim His Kingship by all that we say and do.  We are to offer all our good works back to Him for the sake of His glory and the expectation of His Coming.  This glorious restoration (instaurare) is possible only through the Lord’s Cross (Greek stauros).  The Cross is found subtly in the midst of this Collect, where it is revealed as the pivot point of all creation (creatura).

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
Almighty eternal God,
who desired to renew all things
in Your beloved Son, the King of the universe,
graciously grant
that the whole of creation, having been freed from servitude,
may zealously serve Your majesty and praise You greatly without end.

The first objective of our participation in the Church’s sacred rites is to praise God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and give God glory.  Liturgical and Biblical Latin is rich with words and phrases which exalt and express praise of God.  In fact, the concepts of “glory” and “majesty” are nearly interchangeable in this light.  We, on the one hand, render up honor and glory to God in a way external to God.  On the other hand, glory and majesty are also divine attributes which we in no way give Him, which He has – or rather is – in Himself by His nature.  When we come into His presence, even in the contact we have with Him through the Church’s sacred mysteries, His divine attribute of splendor or glory or majesty, whatever you will, has the power to transform us.  His majestic glory changes us.  So, it is right to translate these lofty sounding attributions for God when we raise our voices in the Church’s official cult.

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Almighty and merciful God,
you break the power of evil and make all things new
in your Son Jesus Christ, the King of the universe.
May all in heaven and earth
acclaim your glory
and never cease to praise you.

As we come to the end of another year’s work in this fruitful WDTPRS project, some comments and reminders are in order.   In the introductory article of this series I stated that it was not my intention to offer alternative translations to be used instead of those provided by ICEL with the approval of proper authority (no matter how bad the lame-duck ICEL versions might be).  I set out to provide you with “literal translations” in order to give even non-readers of Latin a glimpse into the original structure of the prayers, their elegance, and also the world-view inhering in them.  At times my versions adhere “slavishly” to the Latin originals but, since I am not trying to give you a liturgically appropriate text, that’s fine by me.  Sometimes my versions extend and paraphrase difficult words or passages, but I usually provide explanations of my choices, good or bad as they may be.  I am sure that my WDTPRS versions are flawed in many ways.   I know these articles are sometimes hard for the average reader.  When they are, I beg your patience.  The tradeoff is that WDTPRS is now being cited in some university level classes and quite a few people working in the Holy See’s Curia have told my they follow them with attention.  

Moreover, WDTPRS aims to stimulate and support the evolution of good, sound, accurate and beautiful translations in the future.  In the past I asked you to write to those in charge of making the new translations.  Many of you have and I have reason to believe that your letters touched the hearts of more than one official.  In addition, I have always invited and welcomed your feedback via letters and e-mail.  You honor me with your time and observations.  Over the past five years, I have also urged, cajoled and pled with you to pray for our bishops and give them positive support.  The work of the bishop is extremely difficult.  We may sometimes be struck with amazement at some of their actions (or inactions), but we must offer them prayer-filled support while we express courteously our legitimate observations.  Lastly, the most important goal of this series is to inspire in you a greater love of the rich content in our Church’s beautiful sacred liturgy both in Latin and in English.  If these articles help you listen more closely when attending Sunday or weekday Mass and think about what the prayers really say, then our efforts have been worthwhile.

What Does the Prayer Really Say? 33^rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2005

WDTPRS wishes His Eminence Francis Card. Arinze, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and titular Cardinal Bishop of (my) Suburbicarian Diocese of Velletri-Segni, a warm and prayerful “Ad multos felicissimos annos” on the occasion of his 40^th anniversary of episcopal consecration.

You have heard there is a new draft translation of the Ordinary of Mass from ICEL. WDTPRS has this text and we have been looking at bits and pieces, comparing them to both the earlier draft translation and the WDTPRS versions we have provided over the years. In the Roman Canon (First Eucharistic Prayer) for the sections called the Hanc igitur and the Quam oblationem the new draft translation reads: “Therefore, Lord, we pray: graciously accept this offering from us, your servants, and from your whole family: order our days in your peace, and command that we be delivered from eternal damnation and counted among the flock of those you have chosen. We pray, O God: be pleased to bless, recognize, and approve this offering in every way: make it spiritual and acceptable, that it become for us the Body and Blood of your most beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.” The older draft translation gave us: “Therefore, Lord, we pray: graciously accept this offering from us, your servants, and from your whole family; order our days in your peace, and command that we be delivered from eternal damnation and counted among the flock of those you have chosen. We pray, O God, deign to make this offering in every way blessed, consecrated, approved, spiritual, and acceptable, that it may become for us the Body and Blood of your most beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.” Here are the WDTPRS versions. Remember, it was not our objective to make a smooth, liturgically useful translation: “We beseech You therefore, O Lord, that having been appeased you might accept this offering of our humble familial service: and that you might give order to our days in Your peace, and also that you might bid that we be snatched away from eternal condemnation and be numbered in the flock of your elect. Which sacrificial offering, O God, may you deign in every way to make blessed, accepted, ratified, spiritually dedicated, and acceptable: so that it may be made for us the Body and Blood of your most beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.”

I think the older draft was better than the new draft. The newer draft has lost something of the grace of the earlier attempt, perhaps because the translators abandoned their effort to communicate the structure of the Latin prayers. For example, where the Latin says “Quam oblationem tu, Deus, in omnibus, quaesumus, benedictam, adscriptam, ratam, rationabilem, acceptabilemque facere digneris…” in which the digneris (“deign”) is preceded by an infinitive (facere) and a series of accusatives, the new version simplifies the syntax to a series of infinitives. In the older version we have a more Latin sounding “deign to make this offering in every way blessed, consecrated, approved, spiritual and acceptable,...” to “be pleased to bless, recognize, and approve this offering in every way” make it spiritual and acceptable,…”. I think the newer version is not an improvement over the older draft and it represents a dumbing down of the text. Is the newer draft better than the lame-duck ICEL version now in use? Without question it is. I think, however, that ICEL could give us something better than this new draft. Sometimes the Latin syntax comes into English only with real effort and difficulty. An English version which adheres to the Latin will sometimes challenge a modern listener to think a bit and listen carefully. The Latin turns of phrase might actually have a greater impact and be more memorable than a version sticking more closely to modern, every-day speech. I don’t think a liturgically useful version needs to slavishly adhere to the Latin syntax, but at the same time there are moments when the Latin structure provides us with gems which make the content of the prayer sparkle and shine with interest and provocative meanings.

COLLECT - (2002MR):
Da nobis, quaesumus, Domine Deus noster,
in tua semper devotione gaudere,
quia perpetua est et plena felicitas,
si bonorum omnium iugiter serviamus auctori.

It is possible that tua could be a neuter plural rather than an ablative linking with devotione. It is possible, but I doubt it. Surely it goes with devotione. Words like iugiter and servio are by now old friends, so we can leave them aside. In other WDTPRS articles I have mentioned “false friends”, that is, words very similar to English cognates but having quite different, even surprising meanings in Latin. Your Lewis & Short Dictionary reveals that in classical usage devotio can mean “fealty, allegiance, devotedness; piety, devotion, zeal.” Devotio also means “a cursing, curse, imprecation, execration, a magical formula, incantation, spell.” It is not too difficult to decide which direction to go in the context of our prayer today! You may find a more extensive examination of devotio in the WDTPRS column for the 4^th Sunday of Lent. Briefly, devotio can be seen as “a devotion to duty”. Our “devotion” must lead the soul to keep the commandments of God and the duties of one’s state before all else. If we are truly devout in respect to God and devoted to fulfilling the duties of our state, as our state in life truly is here and now, then God will give us every actual grace we need to fulfill our vocations. We are, in effect, fulfilling our proper role in His great plan and thus He is sure to help us.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
Grant to us, we beseech You, O Lord our God,
always to rejoice in Your devotion,
for happiness is perpetual and full,
if we serve constantly the author of all good things.

I mentioned above how changing the syntax can lose for us something of the impact of the original Latin prayer. Today’s Collect, which is also in the very ancient Veronese Sacramentary as a prayer during July, has a clause beginning with si... “if”. This introduces a conditional statement: we will get Y if we do X. Consider this in light of the the religious attitudes of many today who presume that heaven’s rewards are ours automatically without our having to do anything more than just feel good about ourselves or, in some non-Catholic groups, make a “once for all” affirmation of Jesus as “personal Lord” and so forth.

Note the words perpetua and felicitas in our Collect. When and if you hear the Roman Canon (First Eucharistic Prayer), you will recognize the names of two ancient martyrs, Sts. Felicity and Perpetua. It is hard to imagine that these two words are in this Collect by mere coincidence. As a matter of fact, in the eighth century Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis or Sacramentary of Gellone today’s prayer appears for martyr. Trivia moment: the cloister of the Benedictine Abbey the Sacramentary came from, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert of the Gellone valley in France, was disassembled during the terror of the French Revolution and rebuilt in “The Cloisters” in New York City. But I digress. Who are Saints Felicity and Perpetua?

After a lull in the official persecutions of Christians, in A.D. 250 the Emperor Decius determined that Christians were the enemies of the Roman Empire. At that time in the Empire there was widespread corruption and decadence in the aristocracy, the Persians were menacing the Eastern borders and Germanic barbarians were pressing on the North. The economy was a disaster. From the pagan point of view, something had upset both the proper order of society and the relationship of the state with the gods, the pax deorum. A new religion was taking hold in great numbers. Decius issued a decree: under pain of death everyone was to sacrifice to the Roman gods and obtain a certificate that they had done so. The aim was to cut down the leaders of the troublemaking Christian sect. The result, however, was a strengthening of the Church through the blood of martyrs (from the Greek word for “witness”). A new cult of martyrs developed and many were thereby attracted to Christianity.

The whole of the third century was marked by persecutions of Christians, though they were sporadic and often localized. But we know they took place whenever social conditions degenerated enough to warrant a scapegoat. We have documents from that period attesting to the persecution of Christians including the prison diary of a young woman named Perpetua, martyred around 202 in Carthage, North Africa. She was still a catechumen (not yet baptized), but who nevertheless identified herself as Christian. She handed over her still nursing baby and insisted on being put into the arena during a civic festival. After many tried to dissuade her, she got her wish. With great heroism she faced the animals and gladiators. After many torments a young gladiator was sent to finish her off, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Finally, Perpetua grabbed his hand and pointed his sword at her own throat. The heroism of Perpetua inspired many people who also began to give strong witness to their faith and were subsequently imprisoned. This is also the fate of a pregnant slave girl name Felicity (Felicitas). Felicity had her baby just before the imprisoned Christians were in their turn all sent to the arena. The acta (trial records and transcripts) and ancient diaries indicate the sort of amazing love these Christian martyrs had for each other in prison. There is a very powerful scene related when Perpetua and Felicity arrange each other’s clothing so as to preserve their modesty even while they were being tortured. They bade each other farewell with the kiss of peace. The kiss of Perpetua and Felicity should remind us today to be dignified and to uphold the solemnity of the moment in Holy Mass if and when the optional sign of peace is invited.

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Father of all that is good,
keep us faithful in serving you,
for to serve you is our lasting joy.

Pardon me but…. ARRRGGG! What were they thinking? For years we have seen, again and again, that many of the lame-duck ICEL prayers bear little or no resemblance to the Latin originals. The Holy See says it is determined to remedy this situation. The Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments (CDWDS) issued the document Liturgiam authenticam (LA) establishing norms for liturgical translations. LA was a source of great hope for the Catholic faithful in the pew and at the altar alike. Will the members of the Vox Clara Committee and the officials of the CDWDS allow themselves to be intimidated into dumbing down the translations in preparation, draft after draft after draft, slowly chipping away at beauty and accuracy, allowing the erosion of time to blunt the good initiative that was begun now several years ago?

Keep in mind, folks, what we are trying to accomplish in this series, now about to begin another year of service. The liturgical language of formal prayers, which we are examining each week, is meant to be experienced in a living, breathing, sacred action called Holy Mass, not just through smudgy ink on newsprint. The content of these prayers must enter into our hearts through our eyes and ears to become part of who we are. We need our prayers! Please, give us good translations!! Why is this taking so long!? Folks, please pray that our shepherds, especially men like His Eminence Francis Card. Arinze, His Eminence George Card. Pell of the Vox Clara Committee and Fr. Bruce Harbert, Executive Secretary of ICEL, will make every effort to move positively and with determination to implement LA with an enthusiastic response to what it intends. They must resist the pressure to gut the texts of their elegance and content for the sake of the lowest common English denominator. Let our hearts and minds be drawn upward, even if we are challenged, and not forced downward into the shapeless goop of daily prattle where nothing sparks our minds or fills our hearts with hope.

Next week: the final WDTPRS on the Collects of our Sunday Masses.

What Does the Prayer Really Say?  32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2005

In the English version of the official message put out by the Synod of Bishops which met in Rome (October 2-23) to discuss the Eucharist, we read: "7. On the eve of his passion, ‘Jesus took the bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to the disciples, saying, "Take, eat, this is my body." Then he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them saying, "Drink of it all of you; for this is my blood, the blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins"’ (Mt 26:25-28).‘"Do this in memory of me"’ (Lk 22:19; 1 Cor 11:24-25)." So, the Synod of Bishops got pro multis right. Of course, they were quoting The Gospel of Matthew.

COLLECT - (2002MR):
Omnipotens et misericors Deus,
universa nobis adversantia propitiatus exclude,
ut, mente et corpore partier expediti,
quae tua sunt liberis mentibus exsequamur.
 
ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
God of power and mercy,
protect us from all harm.
Give us freedom of spirit
and health in mind and body
to do your work on earth.

When you open your Lewis & Short Dictionary you will find that adversantia is from adverso® “to stand opposite to one, to be against, i.e. to resist or oppose (in his opinions, feelings, intentions, etc.); while resistere and obsistere denote resistance through external action.”   It is constructed with the dative, which explains the nobis.   Adversantia is the neuter plural form of the active participle.  I think the distinction between “internal” and “external” is quite useful in understanding the prayer.  Pariter, an adverb meaning “equally, in like manner” and “at the same time” connects mens and corpus (think of the adage mens sana in corpore sano... “a healthy mind in a healthy body”).  We encounter many difficulties and challenges in life.  There is resistance and adversity, indeed, an adversary.  We are opposed from without, but the greatest challenges and dangers come from within.  We must constantly cope with the unreconstructed effects of original sin together with the diabolical workings of the enemy of the soul, who stirs up passions, memories, and implants wicked thoughts and images.   Very wisely the Church would pray at Compline every night (but now only on Tuesdays) the passage: “Be sober and vigilant: for your adversary (adversarius) the devil is going around like a roaring lion seeking whom he might devour: whom you must resist (resistite), strong in the faith.  But you, O Lord, have mercy on us.”  God truly is a God of mercy, to protect us so from such a dire foe” (1 Peter 5: 8-9).”  Excludo literally means, “to shut out, exclude; to cut off, remove, separate from any thing.”  Therefore it also means, “to drive out, thrust out, hinder, prevent.”  We are praying to God to keep away from us all things that actively hinder and oppose us and, if we stick closely to the distinction made between adverso®, resisto, and obsisto, particularly interior dangers.

How will that come about?  God must be appeased.  He must be favorable towards us.  In the Collect we find the word propitiatus, a perfect passive participle from propitio, “to render favorable, to appease, propitiate.”  (NB: Even though in the dictionary the lemma form of verbs is in the first person singular, the definitions are presented as infinitives.)  Propitiatus is “having been appeased.”  Many forms of propitio appear in our liturgical prayers.  Its use reflects our recognition that as a race and as individuals we have sinned in His sight and offended Him.  Our offense required a Redeemer capable of appeasing the Father.  We offend God as a society or as groups only on the basis of the personal sins of individuals.  We must seek to make amends, but our efforts would be in vain without the merits of Christ’s sacrifice mediated through the Church.

The word expediti, also a perfect passive participle from expedio meaning,“to extricate, disengage, let loose, set free, liberate any thing entangled, involved.”  By extension expedio signifies many other things including, when applied to persons, to be without baggage.  Thus, the noun expeditus, i, m., is “a soldier lightly burdened, a swiftly marching soldier.”  You might have heard of a “St. Expeditus” (feast day 19 April) a patron saint of procrastinators and, oddly enough, computer programmers… for reasons which are perfectly clear.  Expeditus is appropriately depicted as a Roman solider holding aloft a Cross.  The are some amusing suppositions about the origins this “saint’s” cult, but I am sure you now praying to Expeditus that I will stop this digression and swiftly march to my point.  Expediti can also refer to how we have been freed from the chains of sin which would have doomed us to eternal hell.  Going on, exsequor is “to follow, go after, pursue” as well as “to follow up, prosecute, carry out; to perform, execute, accomplish, fulfill” and also “to go through with in speaking, to relate, describe, say, tell.”   Finally, that quae tua sunt is hard.  Literally, it means “things which are yours”.  There isn’t room here to get into why but it refers to things God wills or commands.  Think of it this way, Jesus told His Mother and Joseph, “I must be about my Father’s business” (cf. Luke 2:49).

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
Almighty and merciful God,
having been appeased, keep away from us all things opposing us,
so that, having been unencumbered in mind and body equally,
we may with free minds accomplish the things which you will.

This Collect appears also in the Catechism of the Catholic Church 1742 in the section on “Human Freedom in the Economy of Salvation”:  “Almighty and merciful God, in your goodness take away from us all that is harmful, so that, made ready both in mind and body, we may freely accomplish your will.”

Too rarely these days are our young people instructed about Holy Mother Church distinguished as Militant, Suffering, and Triumphant.  We who are still in this earthly vale belong to the Church Militant.  Having put on our baptismal character we become soldier pilgrims journeying toward the triumph of heaven.  As good Christians who love both our God and our neighbor, along our road we help other members of the Church who are suffering (in Purgatory, the Church Suffering).  When we ourselves are in need, we turn for aid to members of the Church who have obtained what we long for – the bliss of heaven.  They are still members of the Church and they love us and wish us well as intercessors with God.  

Our Collect this week provides us with military language consonant with this three-fold understanding of the Church.  In this prayer we are like lightly burdened foot soldiers (expediti) who are on an urgent mission.  All around us there are enemies around us, lying in wait. There are obstacles without and within (adversantia).   Before going into battle soldiers will often shed some of their heavier gear so that they can move more freely, taking only what will be of immediate need when the clash begins.  They need to be free to expedite (expediti) their orders and accomplish their mission (quae tua sunt).  By their training, grueling, repetitious and extensive, their bodies are strengthened and hardened.  Because of the habits they developed through the sometimes tedious drills they endured, when danger is near their minds are to an extent freed up (liberis mentibus).  They are prepared for the challenges of the mission.  Though they may be afraid, they can act with confidence when their commanders act with sure and true competence.  This is the ideal for the soldier.  But it must be the ideal for every Christian too.  Virtues are habits developed over time by repetition and discipline.  Our Church’s pastors are our officers who will lead us through adversities towards our objective of heaven.   We must diligently learn and then review the content of our Faith, especially in the fundamentals, and with discipline and dedication frequent the sacraments.  This rule of life should after a measure of time become so much a part of us that it is nearly automatic.  It will carry us through even the worst things we might have to face.

Some years ago I had an experience which confirmed for me the value of the old-fashioned methods of catechism: long and hard practice, memorization, and repetition.  I was called to a hospital to assist in a patient’s difficult death.  I gave the man Last Rites and talked with the family as they struggled with the reality of the end of the earthly life of a loved one.  A daughter of the dying man had been estranged from her faith and her family for a long time.  She was beyond her life’s middle years, which clearly had been pretty rough.  She was bitter and cursed life, fate and God for the cruelty of such an end as her father was experiencing.  She shouted at me, “Why did God make us if this is all there is?”  I responded asking, “Why did God make you?”  She became very still and stared at me.  Then she said, “God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next.”  I continued, “What must we do to save our souls?”  On cue she responded with something that she hadn’t perhaps thought of for decades, “To save our souls, we must worship God by faith, hope, and charity. We must believe in Him, hope in Him, and love Him with all our heart.”  “Did your father do that?”, I asked.  “Oh, yes…. oh yes.”  She had obviously been taught very well as a child.   One can imagine that she was at times forced to study and to learn, to repeat over and over what at the time seemed boring and pointless.  She had been drilled at school by the Sisters, whom these days we see mocked and abused in the media by ungrateful cads who benefited from their dedication.  More importantly, she had parents who fulfilled their obligations to see that she learned her faith.  I imagine they had to work hard to make her work hard.  Her father had done his duty to give her what she needed when the battle was joined.  Whatever they all did worked.  In the moment of truth, by the grace of God and the help of her guardian angel, the gift her dying father had given her years before was rediscovered and put to its proper use.  

Can we relate this to the purpose of this series of articles?   Together with helping you to love the Church’s prayers and understand them better, we also want to urge and encourage a sound, accurate and beautiful English translation of Holy Mass and our other liturgies.  The norms for that translation were issued by the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments in a document called Liturgiam authenticam.  In that document we read:
 
48. The texts for the principal celebrations occurring throughout the liturgical year should be offered to the faithful in a translation that is easily committed to memory, so as to render them usable in private prayers as well.

Many people today criticize the old method of education by memorization and repetition.  They say that children just wind up mouthing things they do not understand.  On the other hand, while they might not understand it at the moment, one day they will be ready for it and they will have it because it had been given them.  Countless soldier and sailors, for example, griped (and gripe) about their training.  Many Marines entertain homicidal thoughts about their drill instructor.  But when that Anchor, Globe and Eagle is finally pinned on, not a few Marines return to their DI and shake his hand and thank him for what he gave them.  In later service, when the time comes for that single skill or tool or piece of knowledge to be used in its critical time, it is there.  It gleams with purpose.  Polished and tended, it is tried and true.  We of the Church Militant are pilgrim soldiers and, if we are going to reach our goal of heaven, we need training, sacrifice, and leadership.

What Does the Prayer Really Say?  31st Sunday in Ordinary Time

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2005

On 13 October 2005 during the Synod of Bishop on the Eucharist Bishop Ian Murray of Argyll and the Isles gave an “in scriptis” discourse which touched on the issue of translations writing/saying: “Liturgy is a key instrument of evangelization and must be celebrated in a language which draws the faithful into the heart of the mystery of faith. Texts should transcend the vagaries of linguistic fads. Local languages present particular difficulties, as in my own diocese with Scots Gaelic. In situations like this, local conferences of bishops should be given the authority to produce and approve such liturgical texts. Migrants from European countries require the services of chaplains of their own language who will accompany them.”  There are different ways to parse this.  First, one could argue that Latin “draws the faithful into the heart of the mystery of faith”.  Did it not do so for many centuries even when it was not the spoken language?  However, clearly His Excellency was speaking of vernacular translations.  He seems to have been arguing for a classical approach to English that cuts across regional variations.  Let’s consider that Shakespeare or the classic English of the King James Bible remain the same whether you are in the Isles of Scotland, Australia, South Africa or North America.  Perhaps in this sense, if you are dead set again Latin, you could establish the style of Early Modern English as a benchmark.  

COLLECT - (2002MR):
Omnipotens et misericors Deus, de cuius munere venit,
ut tibi a fidelibus tuis digne et laudabiliter serviatur,
tribue, quaesumus, nobis,
ut ad promissiones tuas sine offensione curramus.
 
ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
God of power and mercy,
only with your help
can we offer you fitting service and praise.
May we live the faith we profess
and trust your promise of eternal life.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
Almighty and merciful God, from whose gift it comes
that You be served by the faithful worthily and laudably,
grant us, we beseech You,
that we may run toward Your promises without stumbling.

We have a loaded word in our Collect today: munus.   Munus means essentially “a service, office, post, employment, function, duty.” Some synonyms are: officium, ministerium, honos.  A Greek equivalent of munus is “leitourgia” whence comes our word “liturgy”, originally standing in the ancient Greek world for a needed civic work or service that one performs because he ought to for the sake of society. 

In the New Testament this old word was applied to a new Christian context for concepts like taking up collections for the poor (i.e., what man does for man) and religious services (man’s worship of God).   To make this more complicated, munus also means “a present, gift.”  When it means “gift” it seems often to be in the ablative case, as in the construction mittere alicui aliquid munere... “to send something to someone as/for a gift”.  I say munus is a loaded word because in theological writing we speak among other things of the three-fold office or tria munera which Christ passed to His Church, the Apostles and their successors: to teach, to govern, to sanctify.

When the Lord gives us a command, and He does (e.g., love one another as I have loved you, pick up your Cross and follow me, be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect, do this in memory of me, etc.), we can sum them up in the two-fold commandment of love of God and of neighbor.  All followers of Jesus have been given a two-fold munus to fulfill which reflects the three-fold munera Christ gave to the Church’s ordained priesthood.  I invite you to try an experiment.  See what happens to your perception of the Collect if you make munus mean “office” rather than “gift.”  When four years ago I wrote about this Collect the first time, I chose “office” over “gift”.  We might be able to say “ministerial gift” so as to get at both sides of the content of munus.  While looking at it, can you keep both concepts simultaneously in mind?  

Our dog-eared editions of the Lewis & Short Dictionary provide insight into offensio, closely related to the verb offendo.  This verb has many meanings though some are not obvious.  Primarily it stands for “to hit, thrust, strike or dash against something.”  Therefore it is also, “to suffer damage, receive and injury” and “blunder, make a mistake, commit an offense.” From our knowledge of the English cognates, offendo also can mean, “be offensive, shock, mortify, vex.”   However, it can also simply mean, “to hit upon, light upon a person or thing, i. e. to come upon, meet with, find.”  Many years ago in Rome during my intensive studies of Latin I used to write postcards in Latin to my home parish.  During the summers the pastor was teaching some informal Latin courses to seminarians who were not receiving this essential training from their seminary (as is required in the 1983 Code of Canon Law).  I caused some surprise and not a little of anxiety once when I wrote : Cardinalem Ratzinger offendi... “I had by chance met Card. Ratzinger”, and greeted him from the aforementioned pastor whom the Cardinal knew.  When they read, “Cardinalem Ratzinger offendi” and that I greeted him in the name of the pastor, well… at first they thought I had done something else.  So, never forget that our Latin words have layer of meanings and sometimes the English cognates lead us into a false or deficient understanding of what is actually being said.  To the incautious, what I wrote sounded alarming when in fact it meant something else entirely.  But I digress… back to offensio.  The first meaning of offensio is “a striking against anything; a tripping, stumbling.”  By extension it can also mean the thing that causes one to trip or stumble, a “stumbling block.”  As a result, offensio indicates also an offense, either given to someone or received from someone.   In the Latin Vulgate offensio can be a thing which causes one to sin.

Some grammatical constructions we find in Latin force us to scramble after a comfortable English paraphrase.  This verb serviatur signals one of those hard constructions. First, servio is one those verbs constructed with an “object” in the dative case (tibi) rather than the accusative. L&S tells us that servio is virtually never used as a passive.  So, we can rule out saying something like munus … serviatur … that the gift may be served.  What we have instead is periphrastic (Greek peri- “around” and phrastic – “saying”) or “roundabout” way speaking, using the third person and the point of reference in the dative.  

This Collect gives me the image of a person hurrying to fulfill a duty or command given by his master or superior.  He is rushing, running.   He might even be carrying a heavy burden.   While dashing forward, I see him trying to be careful under his burden lest he stumble, fall, or spill what he is carrying and thus lose or ruin it.  This could be a description of how we live our Christian vocations sometimes.  Each one of us was made in God’s image.  We were given something to do here.  When we discern God’s will and do our best to live well according to our state in life, we experience heavy burdens.  We have the opportunity to participate in carrying the Cross of Jesus.  

The Lord Himself told us through the Gospels that if we want to be with Him, we must participate in His Cross.  We must pick up our Crosses and follow Him each day.  During His fearful Passion, our Lord literally carried His (and our) Cross.  Without a doubt He was hard pressed to stay on His feet under such a burden.  Envision the soldiers, probably the Temple guards, prodding Him while the Roman soldiers cleared the way.  They were forcing Him to go faster in order to beat sundown deadline and the Jewish holy days that followed.  The road He walked would have been uneven and rough, with edges and corners to catch weary feet.  He stumbled.  He fell even though He surely was being as careful as possible.  We stumble and fall too, though not like the sinless Lord.  We stumble in our sins mostly by choice.   In our Collect, we pray that we can hurry, even run, rather than drag along toward the reward of heaven.  We beg God (quaesumus) that we do so without mishap.   We desire neither to give offense God by what we do (offensio) but we also ask that the road be made free of stumbling blocks (offensio) for our feet as we run.  He understands the tough road we travel.  When we stumble in sin, we give offense to God.  Here is an echo of our petition in the Lord’s own Prayer: lead us not into temptation.  We must never forget that there is a tempter out there who desires us to fall and give offense to the Lord.  He will place obstacles before our feet.  That one we do not want to meet with (offendo) even by chance.

What Does the Prayer Really Say? 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2005

I received a wonderful message via e-mail from JB of NE. He asked good questions about how in the past I translated votum. Here are some of his other interesting comments (edited): “I am a convert of some 30 years standing from Episcopalianism, and I am now a ‘Traditionalist’ Catholic attending the indult Latin Mass parish (FSSP). I have subscribed to The Wanderer for 15 years, though I almost quit a few years ago when the paper went through a phase of vicious traditionalist-bashing. Your column, always fair to ‘Traddies,’ is the main reason I stay with The Wanderer, and reading it is my weekly delight. I do not share your hopes for eventual good translations of the new Mass, but I admire greatly your guts, and indeed your plucky optimism in the face of the antics of such figures as Bishop Trautman of Erie. … Though I am old and weary, and a pessimist about the whole state of the Church, I am sustained by people like you, who never cease to fight the good fight. Your inspiring and courageous column may not suit the taste of all, but it is surely ‘pro multis’, emphatically including myself!” Thanks, JB, your comments made my day. I hope to get to your concerns about votum in the not too distant future.

This is still the Year of the Eucharist proclaimed by the late Pope. Also, the Synod of Bishops is meeting in Rome right now to discuss matters related to the Eucharist, which is “source and summit”. During the Synod meeting, bishops and other delegates from around the world give brief speeches, meet in small groups to discuss certain themes, and do a lot of mixing. As the synod progresses a message is prepared for the Holy Father’s consideration. In the past John Paul II wrote post-synodal documents dealing with synod’s theme. Pope Benedict will probably follow this pattern.

Although at the time of this writing there have only been a few days of speeches, some themes are emerging as common concerns on the part of the attending bishops. We will look at these in the next weeks. For now, however, the issue of the effect of Communion in the hand has been raised and it is worth looking at what was said. His Excellency Jan PaweÅ‚ Lenga, M.I.C., Archbishop of Karaganda (Kazakhstan) gave us of the materialistic West something to ponder (my translation): “Among the liturgical innovations that have grown up in the West, there emerge two in particular which obscure in a certain sense the visible dimension of the Eucharist in regard to its centrality and sacred nature; these are: the removal of the tabernacle from the center and the distribution of Communion in the hand. When you remove the Eucharistic Lord, ‘the sacrificed and living Lamb”, from the central position and when in the distribution of Communion in the hand there is undeniably increased the danger of losing particles, of profanations, and of a virtual reduction of the Eucharistic bread to the level of ordinary bread, you create unfavorable conditions for a growth in the depth of faith and in devotion. Communion in the hand is becoming common, and is even more and more becoming dominant as the easiest way to go, almost as a kind of fad. … I therefore want humbly to make the following concrete proposals: that the Holy See might establish a universal norm according to which the official manner of receiving Communion would be on the tongue and kneeling. Communion in the hand would be reserved to clerics. May diocesan bishops where Communion in the hand has been introduced, work with pastoral prudence gradually to lead back the faithful back to the official rite of Communion, valid for all the local Churches.”

Since JB of NE (above) brought up Bishop Donald W. Trautman, the Erie Bishop of Pennsylvania (head of the USCCB’s Liturgy Committee and alternate bishop named to the Synod on the Eucharist) in the left-leaning Jesuit weekly America (3 October) criticized the Synod’s working document or Instrumentum laboris (find it on the website of the Holy See) much in the same snarky way he criticized the norms for liturgical translation in Liturgiam authenticam (LA) the 2001 document of Congregation for Divine Worship (CDW). Bishop Trautman thinks the Instrumentum pays too much attention “looking in the rearview mirror” and too little attention to the “pivotal problem of the lack of priests”. His Excellency’s main prop for his criticism of the document and his views of today’s challenges seems to be that people have an “absolute right” to the Eucharist. Based on that “absolute right” I guess we have to agree that any obscure old-fashioned view of priesthood and liturgical practice posing an obstacle to that “absolute right” ought to be set aside. By the end of this op-ed piece you have the sense that only by throwing off the past and greater subsidiarity with all manner of forward-imagining and blue-skying will we able to meet our challenges. Personally, I think that being in the state of mortal sin, lacking reason or will, adhering to heterodox doctrine or being excommunicated diminishes one’s “absolute right” to partake of Holy Communion in the Catholic Church, but I hope to be corrected on this point.

Bishop Trautman’s op-ed aims at so many things at once that it is hard to know just what he thinks the Instrumentum ought to have been. I do, nevertheless, agree completely with His Excellency when he says we already have now all the theological and disciplinary documents we need. He says that we should “enforce”, yes… “enforce” the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, “the authoritative document on the correct celebration of the Eucharist”. I couldn’t agree more, Your Excellency! As far as his “rearview mirror” is concerned, I humbly offer a comment: at one parish I know of in St. Paul, Minnesota, the Church of St. Agnes where the tabernacle is at the center of the church, people kneel and receive Communion on the tongue, Mass is often celebrated in Latin and always ad orientem, only boys and young in cassock with surplice men serve, and the rubrics of Mass are obeyed. I think His Excellency would consider this all very “rearview mirror” stuff. Despite this retrograde approach, St. Agnes’ parish has been producing on average a new priest ordained every year for nearly thirty years. So, if you want more priests…. The old ways work and are good ideas for the future too. Why is this all so hard?

COLLECT - (2002MR):
Omnipotens sempiterne Deus,
fac nos tibi semper et devotam gerere voluntatem,
et maiestati tuae sincero corde servire.

Those of you who are able to enjoy approved celebrations of Mass also according to the 1962 typical edition of the Missale Romanum will recognize that this is the Collect for Sunday in the Octave of the Ascension.

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Almighty and ever-living God,
our source of power and inspiration,
give us strength and joy
in serving you as followers of Christ.

In your trusty Lewis & Short Dictionary you will learn that the complex verb gero means many things though basically it is “to bear, wear, carry, have”. However, in the supplement to the great L&S, Souter’s A Glossary of Later Latin, we find that after the 3rd century A.D. it is “to celebrate a festival, etc.”. This is confirmed in Blaise’s work on liturgical Latin vocabulary; we again find that gero is “celebrate”. The L&S says that in a construction with a dative pronoun (such as tibi) and morem (from mos as in the infamous exclamation O tempora! o mores!) it can mean “perform someone’s will.” It might be today’s tibi…gerere substitutes devotam voluntatem for morem. A close examination of L&S shows also that servio (“serve”) is one of those verbs constructed with an “object” in the dative case rather than accusative. This is the reason for the dative case of maiestas in our prayer.

Do you remember that maiestas is often synonymous with gloria? Early Latin writers such as Hilary of Poitiers, Ambrose and in early liturgical texts, use this concept for far more than simple fame or celebrity or splendor of appearance. A liturgical Latin gloria can be the equivalent of biblical Greek doxa and Hebrew kabod. Latins also translated doxa with the words like maiestas and claritas. This “glory” and “majesty” is a power of God that transforms us into what He is. It is a sharing with us of His own glory. Our contact with Him through the sacraments begins a transformation which will continue in the Beatific Vision. When God wished to speak with Moses His Presence would descend on the tent/tabernacle in a cloud of glory (Heb. shekina). Moses’ face would shine radiantly from his encounters with God and had to be covered with a veil. The shekina remains with us architecturally in our churches even now… in some places at least. More than the burning presence lamp, a baldachin or a veil covering the tabernacle is the true sign of the Real Presence. When we enter the holy precincts of the church, our encounter must transform us. We must thus be well prepared to meet the Lord there. Good translations or good use of Latin with excellent hand missals would be of great aid in that preparation. It would also help to have the tabernacle front and center, and kneel at Communion rails, but I digress. And I will be punished for it, you can be sure.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
Almighty eternal God,
cause us always both to bear towards you a devout faith,
and serve your majesty with a sincere heart.

Today’s Collect brings to my mind a beautiful fresco by Piero della Francesca in a little town near Arezzo, Italy called Monterchi. The unique fresco is called “La Madonna del Parto”. This important work shows Mary great with Child, a subject rare in Renaissance painting. One meaning of the Latin verb gero is precisely “to be pregnant” as in gerere uterum or partum. In the fresco, on both sides twin angels in Renaissance dress delicately lift tent-like draperies to reveal La Madonna standing with eyes meditatively cast down, one hand placed for support on her hip, as women are wont to do in later weeks, and the other hand upon her unborn Child. The fresco, this incredible depicting of Life, ironically originally in a cemetery chapel, evokes a baldacchino and the veil of the tabernacle. It calls to mind the tent in the wilderness where the Ark with the tablets and its golden angelic cherubim were preserved, where Moses spoke to God and his face shown with God’s splendor. Mary also is Ark of the Real Presence, the Tabernacle in which Christ reposed. She, like the tent of the Ark, was overshadowed. Our Collect this Sunday can remind us to look to Mary, the Mother of God and Mother of the Church, our Mother. She is the perfect example of service coming from bearing a devout faith. In the faithful way she lived her life Mary gives us a model of preparation for service.

Finally, I want to remind you all that these articles aim at stirring greater interest in what the Church’s prayers really say. Here is another invitation to pray for bishops who have the task of overseeing the development of accurate and beautiful vernacular translations. LA was issued over four years ago. Have the whining wails about LA drowned out the cheers? There a real war going on over the implementation of of LA. It is naive to think the nay-sayers will implement the document … or enforce other existing norms. I think that we who long for serious changes are being held at bay through the usual tactics of delay and earnest declarations that everything “is being studied.” Dear friends, ask the guardian angels of these our shepherds to open their hearts to us their people. Promise them … promise our prayerful support for their positive response to their duty. Don’t let them think we have forgotten anythign. Remind them now. Let’s start writing letters again, positive, supportive, respectful letters:

His Eminence
Francis Card. Arinze
Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship
and Discipline of the Sacraments
Palazzo delle Congregazioni
00120 Vatican City

What Does the Prayer Really Say?  27th Sunday in Ordinary Time

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2005

Pope Benedict XVI, in his address on 19 September 2005 to newly consecrated bishops from around the world, made observations about the manner of celebration of Holy Mass and the effect celebration has on the life of the Church. The new bishops were attending an annually conducted “workshop” about their new mandate in the Church. Quoth the Pope: “The way Mass is celebrated by the bishop nourishes the faith and devotion of his priests and of the faithful.  Every bishop, as the ‘principal dispenser of the mysteries of God’, is in his diocese the one answerable (il responsabile) for the Eucharist: he has, therefore, the task of being on guard (vigilare) over the worthy and decorous (degna e decorosa) celebration of the Eucharist and of promoting Eucharistic worship” (my translation from the Italian original).  In Italian, il responsabile is “the one in charge” and, as a result, the one to be held accountable for what happens on his watch.

COLLECT - (2002MR):
Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, qui abundantia pietatis tuae
et merita supplicum excedis et vota,
effunde super nos misericordiam tuam,
ut dimittas quae conscientia metuit,
et adicias quod oratio non praesumit.

With a minor variation this week’s Collect was in the ancient Gelasian Sacramentary and was thence in all the editions of the Missale Romanum.

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Father,
your love for us
surpasses all our hopes and desires.
Forgive our failings,
keep us in your peace
and lead us in the way of salvation.

As usual some quick glances at vocabulary will help us understand what the prayer really says.  The Lewis & Short Dictionary, oozing with information, says votum means “a solemn promise made to some deity; a vow.”  It is therefore also the thing promised or vowed.  In a more general sense it is a “wish, desire, longing, prayer.”  

Supplex is an adjective, used also as a substantive, meaning “humbly begging or entreating; humble, submissive, beseeching, suppliant, supplicant.”  This and other derivative forms are commonly used in our Latin prayers; for example, now and again we see the adverbial form suppliciter.  In the past I said that supplex is formed from the verb plico, “to fold”, but I was probably wrong about that.  Though L&S says: “sup-plico, bending the knees, kneeling down”, the article on supplex in the etymological dictionary of Latin of Alfred Ernout and Antoine Meillet presents the probability that supplex comes from plecto, xi, ctum, “to plait, braid, interweave”, and offers also the possibility that it is from placo, “to reconcile; to quiet, soothe, calm, assuage, appease, pacify”.   The former describes the physical attitude of the suppliant while the latter describes his moral attitude.  In any event, the more probable source plecto and its fundamental meaning of bending and braiding gives us much the same impact as plico and its folding connotations.  L&S also says that plico and plecto are synonyms.  Thus, the imagery I have invoked in the past of the supplicant being bent over or folded in respect to his knees (i.e., kneeling or bent low toward the floor) works well.  Also, in the ancient world it was usual for the supplicant to wrap his arms around (plecto) the knees of the one from whom he was begging his petition.  

This is hard, I know, but let’s stay with supplex for a moment.   It is important.  In many places celebrations of Holy Mass have been stripped of humility.  Instead of abasing ourselves humbly before the Real Presence of Almighty God, we celebrate ourselves in remembrance our non-judgmental buddy Jesus.  The concept behind supplex was systematically expunged from translations of prayers, contemporary music in parishes, and (in churches now lacking kneelers) architecture.  One of the most “Catholic” of prayers, nearly eliminated after Vatican II, underscores an important dimension of healthy spirituality.  In the once familiar Dies Irae, the haunting sequence of the Requiem Mass by the Franciscan friar Thomas of Celano (+ c.1270), sung amidst the inky vestments symbolizing our death to sin and the things of this world, we contemplate our inevitable judgment by the Rex tremendae maiestatis... the King of fearful majesty, iustus Iudex… our just Judge.  In two of the verses we prayed: “Once the accursed have been confounded / delivered up to the stinging flames, / call me with the blessed. // Knees bent and leaning over (supplex et acclinis), / My heart worn down like ash, I pray: / Have a care for my end.”

The use of supplex in our Catholic prayers conveys an attitude of contrition for our sins which then shapes other more joyful and confident prayers.  This lowly attitude keeps in close view the reality of our sins, God’s promises of forgiveness, the ordinary means of their cleansing and thus the joyful comfort we have when we surrender to this merciful plan.  God takes our sins away, but only when we beg Him to.  We retain the memory of actual sins, but not their stain.  When we reduce ourselves to the ashes of humility and confess our sins we know those sins are not merely covered over; they are washed away clean.  Before modern times soaps were made partly from ashes.   Today, the use of the Dies Irae is not forbidden in Masses.  The Church’s documentation on the use of sacred music establishes that suitable (i.e., truly sacred and truly artistic) pieces can be substituted into the Mass for the proper purpose and occasion.   Nothing is more suitable for Catholic piety than the use of the Dies Irae.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
Almighty and everlasting God, who in the abundance of Your goodness
surpass both the merits and the prayerful vows of suppliants,
pour forth Your mercy upon us,
so that You set aside those things which our conscience fears,
and apply what our prayer dares not.
 
In the vocabulary of the Collect we have a pair of contrasts: God must remove from us the sins meriting perdition’s eternal agony while at the same time He must add to us the grace opening to us the glories of heaven.  You will recognize dimitto from the Lord’s Prayer.  Its basic meaning is, “to send different ways, set apart or forth.”   Therefore, it comes also to mean, “let go, discharge, dismiss, release.”  Another logical step makes dimitto into “renounce, give up, abandon, forego, forsake.”  Juxtaposed with dimitto is adicio (ad[j]icio), signifying “to throw or cast a thing to, to put or place at or near.”  Thus it is, “add to, apply to, increase.”  There is an interesting use of this by St. Jerome, translating Hebrew when putting together what we call the Vulgate: used as a Hebraism it is “to add to do, to do further” as in Isaiah 7:10 (RSV), “adiecit Dominus loqui... again the LORD spoke” or, in another translation, “the Lord furthermore spake”.

Some Collects we have encountered seem to refer to the Lord’s Prayer.  Perhaps this one does as well.  First, we have the word oratio.  In Latin the Lord’s Prayer is oratio dominica where dominica is an adjective, “lordly; of or pertaining to the Lord.”  In our Collect the “prayer”, oratio, is grammatically the subject of that last verb adicio.  After the Eucharistic Prayer the priest introduces the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer saying “audemus dicere.... we dare to say….”  On our own we could never presume or dare to raise any petitions to the Father if the Son had not already enjoined them on us, given us permission, nay command, and made us members of His own mystical Person as coheirs.   A noble and even courtly style of speech our prayer helps us avoid being presumptuous.  The banal, humility-stripped style of the lame-duck ICEL versions… well….

In our Collect today we have a tricky translation choice.  In dimitto we have a verb meaning basically “to send away; separate” and thus logically “to forgive” and in ad(j)icio a verb meaning “place a thing near; add as an increase, apply”.  It is hard to get the impact of this “spatial imagery” into English without circumlocutions.  We want to have sins and their lethal effects separated far away from us.  We want God’s favors and promises to stick to us and grow in abundance.

Our Collect gives us a model for an attitude of prayer.  We see the figure of one who is supplex, bowed down, folded in two, with bended knee.  This suppliant is frightened by the just reward the Judge will apply to him because of the sins he remembers he committed and which bother his conscience.  This lowly beggar prays and prays, entwining his arms about the knees of his Lord.  He petitions the Almighty Father, merciful and good, to allay his fears by totally removing the damning sins and then supply him with whatever he dares not ask or does not even know he ought to beg for (non praesumit).  At the same time, while he has the humility of the kneeling suppliant he also has the boldness of sonship.  He also dares that which is beyond his ability because God the Father Himself made him His son through a mysterious adoption.  He is emboldened to ask many things of the Father with faith and confidence (cf. Mark 11:24 and 9:23).  As Luke recounts (cf. ch. 11 and 18), Jesus gave us three parables about the persistent, even audacious, prayer of petition.  When we pray with the right attitude, particularly when in the sacred liturgy together before the altar of sacrifice with the assembly gathered by our mediator the priest, Christ makes up for what we are incapable of accomplishing.  St. Augustine (+430) describes this saying that Jesus “prays for us as our priest, prays in us as our Head, and is prayed to by us as our God.  Therefore, let us acknowledge our voice in Him and His in us” (en Ps 85, 1).

I find that last line of the Collect very consoling: adicias quod oratio non praesumit...add that which prayer does not dare… or rather … anticipate.  Praesumo also means “foresee” or do something “in advance”.  With our limited powers of discernment we cannot see or pray about every contingency we must face in life, but God knows them all.  He can mitigate our fears, both about the sins we remember as well as the things we worry over and can only guess at.  

Holy Mass is all about what Christ does for us.  The Church’s liturgy is a sacred action in which God is the principal actor.  By our baptism we participate actively in His sacred action even by our reception of what He gives.  He is the Head, we the Body.  He takes our voices and makes them His own.  Our actions become His.  For this reason, we must not usurp the liturgy into our own hands and change it around to suit our wants or force it to reflect our transient desires or circumstances.  With Christ’s own authority the Church gives us the Mass and she alone provides the proper options or variations.  We should bend to her will and make use of what we are given so that our earthly voices ring authentically with the celestial, and ecclesial, voice of the Risen Christ.  

We suppliants beg our Holy Father Pope Benedict and all those to whom he grants authority to oversee the preparation of new English translations to give us good and accurate versions of the words by which we are informed and transformed by Christ in the liturgy, in which He makes our words and actions His own and raises them on our behalf to the Father.

What Does the Prayer Really Say?  26th Sunday in Ordinary Time

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2005

In his latest and always informative “The Word From Rome” (9 September 2005) Mr. John L. Allen, Jr., the ubiquitous and fair-minded Rome correspondent for the left-leaning National Catholic Reporter, relates how he queried Walter Card. Kasper (President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity) about a matter of great interest to WDTPRS readers.  According to Mr. Allen, during the press conference before a congress to be held in Rome for the 40th anniversary of Dei Verbum (Vatican II’s document on Scripture) Card. Kasper had spoken favorably about, ‘“inter-confessional translations of the Bible in the various languages,’ i.e., joint projects involving Catholic and Protestant Scripture scholars, theologians, and linguists. Card. Kasper said he wants the congress to examine ‘the state of ecumenical collaboration’ in the Biblical field.”  Mr. Allen asked His Eminence about the Congregation for Divine Worship’s document Liturgiam authenticam which states that “Great caution is to be taken to avoid a wording or style that the Catholic faithful would confuse with the manner of speech of non-Catholic ecclesial communities or of other religions, so that such a factor will not cause them confusion or discomfort.”  Mr. Allen inquired of Card. Kasper: “How are we to reconcile … (this) positive stance on inter-confessional translations with the caution urged by the Congregation for Worship, now under the leadership of Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze?”  Card. Kasper replied, “I’ve written to Cardinal Arinze to suggest that we meet to discuss this. … There are some differences that exist. We haven’t yet had a chance to have the meeting. Perhaps after the congress we can talk about it.”

Fr. RF has written again in response to my comments last week about kneeling during the Eucharistic Prayer of Holy Mass and obligation in the USA to do so (cf. GIRM 23) from the end of the Sanctus, through the whole of the Eucharistic Prayer, to the end of the great “Amen” (edited): “Thanks for your response in the column.  The people here are kneeling.  I have two small parishes.  Regarding kneeling during the ‘Ecce’, one parish does, one doesn’t.  The one that doesn’t has a large percentage of elderly.  They decided, what with all the knee and hip replacements and walkers, it would be easier and safer!  One doesn’t often think of the increasing age of the population as a formative factor in liturgical practice.”   Thanks for that, Father RF.  The key here is the common sense being applied: people who are physically impeded can remain standing or sitting as the case may be.  However, people should not be instructed by an authority such as the celebrating priest to violate the law.

Veteran WDTPRSers undoubtedly know I think the “pro multis” question is the most important single issue in the ongoing battles being waged in the increasingly lengthy preparation of the new English text of Holy Mass.  I have learned there is available now for sale on the internet a small lapel pin of a chalice with host and a motto banner with the words “pro multis” superimposed.  I haven’t actually held one, but I saw the website of the group strc.org that sells them.  The group in question, STRC or “Society of Traditional Roman Catholics” is highly critical of anything having to do with Vatican II or the Novus Ordo.  I suspect this group is small.   These are folks for whom the phrase “Latin Mass” is narrowed to refer exclusively to the older so-called “Tridentine” form.  They pledge “fidelity to the Roman Catholic Church and to her teachings as handed down by the Sacred Magisterium through the centuries” but they are unburdened by respect for the present forms of Mass, even when not subject to the common abuses which so afflict many of us.  For what it is worth, at least the pin is pretty spiffy.  I wish I could give one to every reader and you in turn would send them to the members of ICEL and the Vox Clara Committee along with a kind, respectful note expressing warm hopes for a beautiful and accurate translation, especially of “pro multis”.

COLLECT - (2002MR):
Deus, qui omnipotentiam tuam
parcendo maxime et miserando manifestas,
gratiam tuam super nos indesinenter infunde,
ut, ad tua promissa currentes,
caelestium bonorum facias esse consortes.
 
This was, in a slightly different form, in the ancient Gelasian Sacramentary and in the 1962 Missale Romanum this Collect was prayed for the 10th Sunday after Pentecost.  Let’s now look at some vocabulary, the nuts and bolts of the prayer.  Parco means, “to spare, have mercy, forbear to injure” and by extension, “forgive.”   This verb is used quite frequently in liturgical prayer as, for example, in the responses during the beautiful litanies we sing as Catholics, especially in time of need: “Parce nobis, Domine... Spare us, O Lord!”  During Lent the hauntingly poignant Latin chant informs our penitential spirit: “Parce, Domine... O Lord, spare your people: do not be wrathful with us forever.”  The noun consors comes from the fusion of the preposition for “with” and sors (“lot”), in the sense of a chance or ticket when “casting lots”, destiny, fate).   A consors is someone with whom you share a common destiny.  The densely arranged Lewis & Short Dictionary reveals that consors is “sharing property with one (as brother, sister, relative), living in community of goods, partaking of in common.”  The English word “lot” can be both “fate” and a “parcel of land.”  Having been made in God’s image and likeness, we are to act as God acts: to know, will and love.  Since God spares us and is merciful, then we must be similarly merciful and sparing if we want to be sharers and coheirs in the lot He has prepared for us.  Shall we get the ICEL version out of the way and then get on to what the prayer really says?

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Father, you show your almighty power,
in your mercy and forgiveness.
Continue to fill us with your gifts of love.
Help us to hurry toward the eternal life you promise
and come to share in the joys of your kingdom.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
O God, who manifest Your omnipotence
especially by sparing and being merciful,
pour Your grace upon us unceasingly,
so that You may make us, rushing to the things You have promised,
to be partakers of heavenly benefits.

One of the ways God manifests His almighty nature is by being forgiving and sparing.   God is the creator and ruler, guide and governor of all that is seen and unseen, who keeps everything in existence by an act of His will, and reveals His omnipotence especially (maxime in our Collect) by means of mercy.  By violating God’s will our first parents, i.e. the entire human race, opened up an infinite gulf between us and God.  Since the gulf was immeasurable, only an omnipotent God could bridge that gap and repair it.  God did not repair the breach because of justice, but rather because in His goodness He is also merciful.  

People often slip into the trap of associating manifestations of power with acts of justice.   In this Collect, however, we affirm the other side of power’s coin.  The miracles worked by Jesus in the Gospels, loving gestures to suffering individuals, were acts of mercy often connected to forgiveness of sins.  The affirmation of divine mercy, however, does not diminish God’s justice.  Mercy does not mean turning a blind eye to justice, for that would be tantamount to betraying truth and charity.  Nevertheless, if justice must be upheld because God is Truth, so too must mercy be exercised because God is Love.  For God, balancing justice and mercy is simplicity itself, since He is perfectly simple.  Knowing all things which ever were, are or will be as well as the complexities of each act’s impact and every other throughout history God has no conflicts in the application of merciful justice or just mercy.  For man, especially in times of trial, the simultaneous exercise of mercy and justice is very difficult indeed.  Because of the wounds to our will and intellect, our struggle with passions, it is hard for us at times to see what is good and right and true or rein in our emotions even when we do discern things properly.  We often oscillate between being first just and then merciful. Bringing the two streams of mercy and justice together is a tremendous challenge.  When we encounter a person whom we find able to balance justice and mercy together, we are deeply impressed by him and hold him up as an example of wisdom because he is acting more perfectly as an image of God than many others.  We are moved by his example because deep inside we know how we ought to be conforming to God’s image in us.

One way in which we act the most according to God’s image in us, behaving as the “coheirs” Christ made us to be, authentic Christian consortes, is precisely when we act with compassion.  Is compassion the key to balancing mercy and justice?  In biblical language, such as the Hebrew racham, compassion is often interchangeable with mercy.  The Latin word compassio comes from Latin patior, “to suffer/endure with” someone.  Our whole being is moved and stirred when we witness compassion and suffering because they reveal in a mysterious way who we are as human beings and how we ought to act.  In a now famous passage from the Council’s Gaudium et spes, we are taught that Christ came into the world to reveal man more fully to himself (GS 22).  Christ did this in His every word and deed during His earthly life, but His supreme moment of revelation to us about who we are was His Passion and death on the Cross and subsequent rising from the tomb.  When we imitate His Passion, in sacrificial love and in the genuine “with suffering” which is compassion, we act as we were made by God to act.   In sincere and concrete acts of compassion we, in our own turn, reveal man more fully to himself!  We in our own way show God’s image to our neighbor and our neighbor is moved.  We cannot not be moved unless we are already stony and cold and dead.  Pope John Paul II wrote, “man cannot live without love”, both the love he gives and the love he receives.

As I write, it is the anniversary of the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the flood waters of Katrina have still not receded from New Orleans.  We have seen acts of genuine compassion from many people in the aftermath of both these disasters.  Something in them has been deeply moved to action.  Each gesture of compassion on the part of rescue workers, medical personnel (working in slow haste), members of the military, law enforcement, first responders, relief agency representatives, people in cities near and distant move the heart because in their actions we see that image after which every man, woman and child must resonate and long.  Unmerited acts of charity, mercy, justice, and compassion all make visible to our neighbor the God after whose likeness we ourselves are fashioned.  We are moved by these acts because we are seeing in other people something really real.  We are also moved by the suffering of others because suffering is a foundational element of human nature now transformed and given meaning by Christ’s Passion.  In sincere and concrete acts of compassion, in our biblical “bowels of mercy”, we in our turn reveal man more fully to himself.  Individuals can by their example effect great changes in a society.  If one person can do much, how much more could be done by armies of men and women thirsting for holiness and righteousness (i.e., a Church), striving to act in compassion, justice and mercy?  

By His justice, God will give us what we deserve.  By His mercy, He will not give us certain elements of what we deserve.  By His pouring forth graces upon us, God gives us what we do not deserve.  His justice must be received with joyful trepidation, whether we want it or not.   His mercy we must beg with humble confidence.  His grace, unmerited by us, we embrace with exultant gratitude.

What Does the Prayer Really Say? 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2005

Four year’s ago, in our column about the Collect of this same Sunday, I wrote comments on the terror attacks of 9/11 interspersing lines from an eerily prescient poem by Thomas Merton about the apocalyptic destruction of New York City. In the aftermath of the devastation of the Gulf Coast of the United States, Merton’s haunting epitaph for NYC returns to me. It could have been for New Orleans:

“This was a city
That dressed herself in paper money.
She lived four hundred years
With nickels running in her veins.
She loved the waters of the seven purple seas,
And burned on her own green harbor
Higher and whiter than ever any Tyre.
She was as callous as a taxi;
Her high-heeled eyes were sometimes blue as gin,
And she nailed them, all the days of her life,
Through the hearts of her six million poor.
Now she has died in the terrors of a sudden contemplation
- Drowned in the waters of her own, her poisoned well.”
…
But now the moon is paler than a statue.
She reaches out and hangs her lamp
In the iron trees of this destroyed Hesperides.
And by that light, under the caves that once were banks and theaters,
The hairy ones come out to play….

(Excerpted from Figures For An Apocalypse: VI – In the Ruins of New York (1947))

COLLECT - (2002MR):
Deus, qui sacrae legis omnia constituta
in tua et proximi dilectione posuisti,
da nobis, ut, tua praecepta servantes,
ad vitam mereamur pervenire perpetuam.

This week’s Collect was introduced into the Missale Romanum with the Novus Ordo but it had a predecessor in the ancient Veronese Sacramentary during the month of July (Deus, qui sacra legis omnia constituta in tua et proximi dilectione posuisti: da nobis horum propitius efficientiam mandatorum: quia inpossibile sibi nullus excusat, quod tanta brevitate concluditur, tanta aequitate percipitur: per.) and seems to have had a representation of some kind in the Mozarabic Rite.

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Father,
guide us, as you guide creation
according to your law of love.
May we love one another
and come to perfection
in the eternal life prepared for us.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
O God, who placed all things of the sacred law which were constituted
in the love of you and of neighbor,
grant us that, observing your precepts,
we may merit to attain to eternal life.

This Collect seems to be founded on the exchange between Jesus and a lawyer: “But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they came together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, to test him. ‘Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?’ And he said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets’” (Matthew 22:34 40 RSV).

All of the Law is summed up in Jesus’ two-fold command of love of God and neighbor. The first part of the two-fold law is about unconditional love of God. The second follows as its consequence. St. Thomas Aquinas glossed this verse in his Commentary on Saint Matthew: when man is loved God is loved, since man is the image of God. In 1 John 4:21 there is a good explanation of this double precept: “This commandment we have from him, that he who loves God should love his brother also.” We must be sure to keep these different loves in their proper logical order. God comes first, always. Always. Even a married person must love God more than a spouse. We must never put any creature, no matter how proximate to us in our hearts, closer than the God in whose image and likeness we are made. When this logical priority is properly in place, love of God and neighbor will not conflict or compete for they are simultaneous. Each love fuels the other, provided that love of God is logically prior. We must never love any creature more than God or put something, or even someone, in His place.

Our Collect for today reestablishes for us that we have a very special relationship with each person who lives, and not merely with God. Since people are made in God’s image, they are our neighbors, in a sense… some closer to us than others, of course. But there is no person on earth who is not our neighbor in some way. This reciprocal relationship reminds me of another act of reciprocity that the Lord prescribes for us: forgive or you will not be forgiven. The only thing that the Lord went back to explain when He taught us how to pray (what we now call the Lord’s Prayer of Matthew 6:9-13) is the obligation of forgiveness: “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (vv 14-15).

Reflect on what the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches. The second section of the fourth part of the CCC explains the Lord’s Prayer. When we get to the examination of the petition “...as we forgive those who trespass against us” we read (2842): “This ‘as’ is not unique in Jesus’ teaching: ‘You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect’; ‘Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful’; ‘A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.’ It is impossible to keep the Lord’s commandment by imitating the divine model from outside; there has to be a vital participation, coming from the depths of the heart, in the holiness and the mercy and the love of our God. Only the Spirit by whom we live can make ‘ours’ the same mind that was in Christ Jesus. Then the unity of forgiveness becomes possible and we find ourselves ‘forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave us.’”

Consider well the Lord’s own words to His disciples after He taught them to pray: “…if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses”. Death and judgment comes to us all. Are you ready? It will come, and maybe suddenly, unexpected. We pray that our deaths not be unprovided, that is, that we will not die without the final solace and strengthening of the sacraments. When it is time, will you be reconciled with the neighbors you leave behind? Will you be the sort of person for whom your neighbor will willingly pray? Will you have unfinished business?

Where are the merchants and the money-lenders
Whose love sang in the wires between the seaports and the inland granaries?
...

Where are the generals who sacked sunny cities
And burned the cattle and the grain?
Or is the politician any safer in his offices
Than a soldier shot in the eye?

Take time to tremble lest you come without reflection
To feel the furious mercies of my friendship,
(Says death) because I come as quick as intuition.

...
Flesh cannot wrestle with the waters that are in the earth,
Nor spirit rest in icy clay!

More than the momentary night of faith, to the lost dead,
Shall be their never-ending midnight:

Yet all my power is conquered by a child’s “Hail Mary”
And all my night forever lightened by one waxen candle!

(Excerpted from Death by Thomas Merton (1944))