English-speaking Catholics are in for a jolt later this month, as significant changes come to the words of the Mass they have been praying for more than 40 years.
To be sure, these changes pale in comparison to what happened in the 1960s, when, following the Second Vatican Council, the Mass was revised and translated from Latin into the vernacular. The updated Roman Missal, due to hit parishes three weeks from today, is simply a new English translation of the same prayers, albeit far more faithful to the Latin original.
But even modest changes can have a big impact on the way Catholics approach their worship — and on the way they interact with the rest of the world. Indeed, reforms like this one are key to understanding Pope Benedict XVI’s vision for the Church.
Put simply, the project is about restoring beauty and reverence to their rightful place in Catholic liturgy. It succeeds in a way that Catholics and non-Catholics alike should appreciate.
The background story involves the 50-year debate among Catholics over the meaning of Vatican II.
That Council, held from 1962-65, aimed to equip the Church to engage effectively with the modern world. It expanded the use of the vernacular at Mass, dealt with tricky questions like relations with non-Catholics, and attempted to re-propose the truths of the faith in light of the challenges facing contemporary man.
But what does “engaging the modern world” actually look like? A 1969 Vatican document on the topic shunned word-for-word substitution in favor of what was called “dynamic equivalence”; the idea was to get at the general meaning of a prayer and translate that into contemporary English.
It sounds good in theory, but much of the poetry that elevated the original text was simply stripped away.
More generally, the Church found that the drive to make the liturgy “relevant” often obscured the transcendant — fueling the impression, reflected by declining Mass attendance in most Western countries, that the Church had nothing meaningful to say. Before his election, Pope Benedict labeled this nothing less than a “crisis.” His 2000 book, “The Spirit of the Liturgy,” called for a recovery of postures of worship that emphasize the Mass as a humble encounter with a reality far beyond man’s power to create or contain.
Since becoming pope, he has labored to emphasize the continuity of the modern Church with its past, even permitting the more widespread celebration of the traditional Latin Mass. The effort to revise the English text, though it began before he was elected, is part of the same story.
In 2001, the Vatican revisited its translation principles, urging a “formal equivalence” that mirrors the sentence structure and imagery of the Latin text. A new edition of the standard Latin missal in 2002 gave bishops in English-speaking countries their first chance to put those principles into practice.
Of course, the true beauty of the Mass flows not from any human words, but from what God chooses to do through them.
But the new language does make a difference. A representative change occurs at the beginning of one form of the Eucharistic Prayer, which frames the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus at the climax of the Mass. Currently, the priest says:
“We come to you, Father, with praise and thanksgiving, through Jesus Christ your Son. Through him we ask you to accept and bless these gifts we offer you in sacrifice.”
This becomes:
“To you, therefore, most merciful Father, we make humble prayer and petition through Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord: that you accept and bless these offerings, these holy and unblemished sacrifices.”
Every newspaper editor in the country would prefer the previous translation to the new one. It communicates more or less the same thought, and it does so in short, concise sentences that avoid any repetition of ideas — precisely the norms of contemporary English style Church officials had in mind in the 1960s.
But notice what was lost in translation, which the new wording recovers. For one, the first words of the prayer subtly shift its focus. Emphasis is on the “we” who are offering the gifts, not where it belongs, on the “you” who is accepting and blessing them.
Then there are the adjectives. In the corrected translation, the Father is once again “most merciful,” the prayer is “humble,” and the sacrifice — Jesus Christ on the cross himself — is “holy and unblemished.”
An ancient principle of Catholic worship holds that the way one prays shapes what one believes. With the new missal, the English-language Mass is becoming a much better teacher of the faith.
Sure, its elevated language might be a hard sell in the society that invented the PowerPoint presentation. But as Benedict has argued, authentic prayer, by drawing man to a reality higher than any temporal power, is supposed to challenge culture as much as adapt to it. For the Church, “engaging the modern world” can happen only from the position of robust and properly ordered worship.
The pope’s recent statements provide clues to how he sees that engagement working. The secularism and relativism of the West have been a constant focus of his papacy, but the outsider surveying his sermons would be surprised by how little he fulminates against their alleged crimes. Instead, his attention is on the spiritual sickness of despair and cynicism he sees spreading as their natural consequence.
The great weapon against cynicism is beauty, which Benedict wants the Church to wield with skill. For English-speaking nations, the new missal is a good first step — and, thus, the Church’s gift to the world.
Might further changes be in the works? It’s possible; Catholic worship has developed regularly since the time of Christ, and the dust thrown up by Vatican II has hardly settled. The spirit of reverence the new missal is designed to promote may naturally suggest other reforms, and further improvements in the language might be found. But the Church is designed for such things to happen very slowly.
For now, Catholics will labor — imperfectly at first — to accustom themselves to a new way of praying. It will be worth the effort.