How can we respond to the arrival of this text?

Over these weeks when the new Mass text has begun to be used, so many of my contacts in the Roman Catholic church have said: "I don't like it but what's the point in reacting? Its here."  Talking with them has led me to make three responses.  I invite ideas about what else should be on this list, but my three are:

1. To write to the Bishops.  The problems associated with the text must be named, and somehow reactions expressed, not suppressed.
2. To explore the website "What If We Just Said Wait?" .  It has important essays, a huge number of comments raising issues, and also invites people to respond to a survey about their experience of Mass with the new Missal.
3. To reflect on my feelings about this - what provokes my anger and frustration?  Are my feelings because I am being challenged or because deep down I might dislike change? What, of that which really matters to me, is not in this Mass text?

I'll attempt to summarise my own reflection. I noticed the contrast with how I reacted to the study days, liturgies, and books that did open me to new possibilities in the 1970's and 1980's - I saw new depths, new possibilities to enter into the  mysteries (as something to be explored, but never fully grasped) of being alive, of God, of the Church, of the Universe.  My heart beat faster, and I was drawn into these mysteries. This week I reopened the book "Our Faith Story", by Patrick Purnell S.J., and had the same reaction once again.  Yet when I read this Mass text, and now when I hear it, I feel sad and depressed.  It is as if it shrinks my spirit, that had been so energised in the past. I need to continue to discern about this reaction, but it is not one that resonates with what I am told about this text - that it will deepen my faith.

A major source of frustration is that the language of the Mass text now says too much - in effect it tells me how to feel as well as how to pray.  Something simpler, less heavy handed, would let me bring my relationship with God into the prayer, not limit me to that of he who made the final changes to the text. On the occasions when I understand what is being said, I keep thinking "no, that's not how I want to be with God".  Extracts from the new texts are shown alongside the never-used 1998 translation,  here    These 1998 prayers are advances on what we had until recent months; to me they are a delight.  They evoked prayerful response within me, and it seems a tragedy that we will not use that 1998 text. Yet I read about how the new texts will help us to pray more deeply!!

We are told by the Bishops to get used to the new text. That is patronising nonsense. It is as if the pilgrim people have been given boots two sizes too small and told to get used to them. These boots only point us backwards towards so many limitations that we had left behind in every important area of being Catholic, for in this Mass text and in its communication to us:

"Is it the Latin text, its translation or its communication that you dislike?"

A friend who likes the new text asked me this question, when he had read my early reflections on the translation.  Whether the pinch points in the revised liturgy actually arise from the Latin text or from the translation is neither here nor there to me: the effect matters. To my friend conformity to the Latin is his overriding concern, "not for its own sake but because it represents unity, where the words are the same the world over and they transcend time much like the Mass itself."

We agreed that the information given us had dodged important questions, such as about the process that led to the text (at what points did the English speaking Bishops give assent to the texts? - I'd just like to know). Above all we agreed that the communication of the text, and some of the recommended reading about the text was simply patronising assuming a childish, not childlike, faith among the laity. For example, "They do it this way in Italy" did not seem a good reason for justifying some of the text to me, having been there in a church around 2001 where only women communicated, and men turned up for the Blessed Sacrament procession once a year. (The feast of the Assumption in Catania was fantastic, though.... procession, celebration, and so many fireworks... all let off at once.)

Does change have to come via a centralised Latin text, or can we have some scope to respond to the Spirit in our regions and cultures of the world, if with guidelines and frameworks? That implies faith in the Spirit, and a decentralisation of power that is not seemingly in mind in the Vatican Curia.

I don't know how to put "God's love and life fill every nucleus and force in nature, every galaxy and every person", into Latin.  Nor can I say in Latin "May God forgive my sins against people, myself, the planet and its climate."   I just want to hear something like this said in the Mass - now.

So, is it the Latin text, its translation or its comunication that I dislike? Yes.

To what extent is the new text unwinding Vatican II?

A reaction among many of my contacts to the text is: we have gone back to the responses that we had when the Mass was first in English. The talk of sins, the phrases  "grievous fault", "and with your spirit", "enter under my roof.. my soul will be healed","I believe" are all familiar from my early adulthood, and were all left behind in the 1970's.  There were  good explanations then: we do and must acknowledge and confess sin (a flawed inner orientation) as well as sins,  but first we emphasise God's acceptance of us as we are;  it is God within us who changes us, not our efforts that make us acceptable to God; we had moved away from false dualities of body/spirit and the Church being seen to be in a parallel mode of being detached from the world; we come to God as God's people not only as individuals.

So for many in my generation in our 50s and older, going back to these texts is impoverishing not enriching and the fear is that it symbolises an unwinding of Vatican II.   It is an impression strengthened as we look at the prayers said by the priest. Two examples follow.  After the Gospel the priest "kisses the book, saying quietly:' Through the words of the Gospel may our sins be wiped away.'" Is that really the extent of our aspiration now? The collect for the 8th Sunday in ordinary time reads:

Grant us O Lord we pray
that the course of our world
may be directed by your powerful rule
and that your Church may rejoice
untroubled in her devotion.
Through our Lord....

I had thought that if our prayer was real then a) we would not be entering a parallel world, relying on a magic-working Old testament style of God to resolve the issues that should be worrying us; b) we would be accepting Jesus' challenge to be Good News to this troubled world; c) we would be engaging in liturgy and work informed by our knowledge of the world (so both would express a response to current challenges, including human-induced global changes.)

Vatican II is a symbol of the fact that the Church should change; it did not define a new fixed model of what we should be doing.  Don't many debates, including those around the liturgy since the 1970's, have as a pivot the fact that we cannot define a fixed point in time at which the Church had got it right and upon which  we balance our whole liturgy?  We are always changing - but there was a direction of change, and a vision that was strengthened in Vatican II. Balance is through dynamic not static equibrium - like  cycling,  stop and we'll fall over in a heap.

Many of my generation have been busy with family, work and sometimes church, making decisions and life choices informed by their faith, some being drawn into justice, peace and politics in the world we seek to serve.   We did not stay attentive to the politics of the church.  We went to sleep on it, and now have been shaken awake to find, like an inverse Rip van Winkle effect that we seem to be in the... well, where?  1950's?? We're paying lip service to the 2nd Vatican Council by sometimes-grudging liturgical roles for some laity; the Mass is in English, but not as we know it, with its slavish adherence to the minutiae of the Latin and decoration with terms like "graciously" - but so much in Vatican II seems to be ignored.

I say "sometimes-grudging" because the ministries the laity have are now so rarely explained by saying they express and celebrate our Baptismal calling: we are called to serve the world with love so we have ministries of hospitality, welcome and cleaning; to bring Christ to the world, and symbolise this as Eucharistic ministers; to speak truth so we read scripture at Mass.  The emphasis on sins far outweighs any expression that we are already baptised into Christ!  Similarly, the teaching associated with the Eucharist also holds us as passive consumers, not affirming that we are also offering ourselves and receiving what we are called to be.


The manner of the imposition of the text ignores Vatican II understandings of our Church through its exercise of centralised power (not only in arrogantly under-testing the text), the undermining of subsidiarity, collegiality, and ecumenism (leaving behind agreed texts), by abandoning notions of seeking an involved laity that is treated like adults (so much of the induction has been superficial and patronising - see elsewhere in the blog); the exaltation of the priesthood of the ordained while underplaying that from our own baptism.

My contention is that this text does do much more damage than just to insult the ear and the intelligence - it is intended to prevent the Roman Catholic Church from being what so many of us hoped it would become because it diminishes the liturgical expression of that vision.

See also the page of related resources and links.

(Latest edit to this post: 21 March 2012)

Why is inclusive language not used?

The terms used for God emerge from societies in which women were subservient.... many would say, "Yes, like the Church today"

At our first RCIA session this year someone questioned this, and has not returned since. That might not be the reason in her case, I do not know, but I am embarrassed by the non-inclusive language and wherever feasible do not say it, in RCIA or indeed in Mass.

I just noticed http://www.adoremus.org/297-CardsVat.html which indicates the extent to which some people once had hoped for progress in this. I've not decided how comfortable I am with all that is in that article -but the current Mass is not adequate in this aspect, and that article will challenge me to continue to reflect more.

Why was inclusive language not used in the new text?

Can we ever get a Mass text that is not constrained by 2000 yr old philosophy and worldviews?

"From the rising of the sun to its setting" replaces the supposedly less precise and/or poetic "from east to west"....

Does it mean
 a) about 12 hours on average during the year in any one place, or b) over the whole Earth, in which case it is flat?

It is mischievous to carp at this perhaps - there is so much else that really matters.  Yet why can't we have a Mass text that is exuberantly celebrating our universe in the light of what we know about it? Where is a text that  is not so totally rooted in past philosophies and world-views?

That is utterly different from being blown in the wind of current culture - although even here there is scope for a healthy, greater awareness that the Spirit blows outside the confines of the Church membership. (A current difficulty is gaining acceptance that the Spirit blows outside the Vatican and its Curia..)

Yet the dominance in the Mass of metaphors and terminology from past philosophies and worldviews leaves us with a weak connection to the world we are here to serve.

How can a Mass text that actually connects with current world views come about? 

"Never" seems the answer from those responsible.... for  we are told to be ready to use this text for the rest of our lives!  God help us!!

Christ the King in a struggling world

Last Sunday was the celebration of  Christ the King. The Gospel reading was about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked.... and about how when we do those things we are doing them to Christ.  It is a beautiful feastday, and that Gospel is a wonderful one for that day - no miracles, not even the Ascension, nor the Transfiguration - but a call to respond in love to needs we perceive and in so doing to meet Christ....

So that came to mind when I was having discussions about world hunger, about the challenges to be faced in providing food and water as the population grows, and as cities expand, and as the climate changes.

The discussions straight after Mass had been about anger and  frustration at the exercise of power in imposing this Mass text which seems so inadequate to so many.

The discussions about feeding the hungry were among climate scientists, during the week.

It is odd that the work I do during the week among these good people seems no longer resonant with the Mass, for me. The Mass text now accentuates remoteness of God, not God's presence in the daily struggles and suffering of so many, nor our efforts to make a difference.  In so detaching from the world it diminishes sacramentality, ignores Jesus teaching, and alienates those who should be at home within it. The Mass is now experienced as a symbol of power over the English speaking Catholic world. So many changes are small, and disrupt the flow enough to say "aha, its our Mass you are saying"  Even the doxology has relocated thereference to the Father - I now think this is a reminder to God that we have been praying to God, in case attention had lapsed in the onslaught of the many graciouslys and kindly's.

To attend Mass is indeed now a sacrifice of praise for me, in the wrong way.  I've only walked out during it once; I just go much less often.