Changelings cry discipline

By Ephraem Chifley OP 

“To have been born into a world of beauty, to die amid ugliness, is the common fate of all exiles,” Evelyn Waugh lamented in his autobiography – an observation that we can easily make our own in matters liturgical. The latest document from the Roman curia, Redemptionis Sacramentum demonstrates the true dimensions of that exile.

Redemptionis Sacramentum takes as its point of departure Ecclesia de Eucharistia – last year’s document from the Holy Father that held out so much hope. It seeks to bring some principles to bear on the general chaos in which the western liturgical tradition currently finds itself, reinforcing or enacting regulations concerning vestments, vessels, extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion, who can give the homily (only the priest or deacon), the bread and wine for use at Mass. Notably the communion plate has made a comeback. There is even a list of graviora delicta (serious crimes) punishable by excommunication.

Harrowing 

This new call to order from Rome makes for harrowing reading. It is not so much the many reported abuses but its contradictory tone of optimism about the conciliar liturgical reforms. These abuses are just “shadows” on a brave program of plainly necessary aggiornomento. We’ve heard it all before but it still leaves us soaking in the warm bath of middle-class hospitality rites that characterizes most parochial liturgies. Despite the Instruction’s stern tone there won’t be much positive change in any Parish Sunday Mass anywhere in the world. Good “stern” was needed about 25 years ago. It was needed when Episcopal Conferences played fast and lose about communion in the hand, when altar girls were tolerated, then approved - thereby alienating any priest who had made a stand on the issue, when communion services became the norm in nun led parishes, when gyno-fascists enforced gender-neutral language. The list of occasions on which Rome backed down on liturgical questions is a long and sorry one. All of these abuses are still tolerated, arguably encouraged at the Episcopal level. Rome telling deacons that wearing the dalmatic is commendable is simply sewing sequins onto the Emperor’s new clothes.

Ungodly centred 

The progressive wing of the Church will resent and ignore this document as a bolt from the blue. It doesn’t represent Rome ’s accustomed position of measured accommodation to the Spirit of the Age – for this, at least, we can be thankful. A juridical document, though, based on a self evident paradox is an exercise in a non-existent authority. In Western countries at least, it was principally ideologically driven change in ritual and in its functional teaching that lost the Church two generations. “Shadows” these abuses may well be, they are not, though, unfortunate aberrations. They are a consequence of that anomie - that sense of personal and social displacement, exile if you like - engendered by radical change in such a total structure as the Catholic Church. What began as a de-mystification process, a making accessible to the common man, has become a thorough disenchantment, not just with ritual forms but with the realities they used to incarnate. When people stop kneeling for the Canon and to receive Holy Communion they don’t just give up a medieval worldview, they give up a living experience of the Eucharist as Divine Presence. Redemptionis Sacramentum is already a dead letter, because the vibrant God-centred liturgy it speaks of no longer exists - except in scattered pockets. Rome , in its misguided collegiality, killed it off by three decades of neglect and, on occasion, active opposition. That instinctive familiarity with the grammar of the Holy that once characterised the Catholic people no longer exists. Let us take but one example - the disrespect that is shown to the altar in our churches. It is not unusual to encounter the ladies of the parish having a good old natter around the sanctuary after mass, elbows and handbags resting conveniently on the pre-eminent symbol of Christ our Saviour and His Sacred Passion. Even the mildest of rebukes is met with philistine incomprehension – they’re just celebrating community after all. The task of liturgical catechesis that confronts a church which has so far forgotten its own ritual language is humanly impossible – certainly beyond the law to repair. You have to say, though, that it’s better to have Redemptionis Sacramentum than what we’ve been used to. At least these odd rituals cannot claim any longer to have the legal force of custom – perhaps Rome ’s main idea.

The new draft translation in English of the modern Roman Missal invites similar reflections. Though here an enduring contribution to sacrality in the celebration of the novus ordo could yet be made. It is literal to the point of being a bit clunky. Phrases that were not translated in the 1972 Missal have been inserted once more: the climactic, repetitive series of enunciations of the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist in the Canon; the threefold mea culpa in the Confiteor; “my sacrifice and yours” in the response to the Orate fraters; “And with your spirit”.

Latin in effect 

It seems that the Vatican is interested in the English not only because of its importance as a language, but because it has become the de facto Latin of the modern Church. `Translations into local languages frequently follow the English rather than being directly rendered from the Latin. If the English version fails the test then it has doctrinal and liturgical ramifications for churches in the Third World – hence the literalism of the new draft. This is a shame for the English liturgy, perhaps unavoidable but a shame nonetheless. The language of Gerard Manley Hopkins and T.S Eliot (we also have to mention Cranmer and Coverdale) is an elegant and sonorous instrument made by political necessity to play from an inferior score. On the positive side, time and solemn repetition wear away the rough edges of words. The ancient is good – eventually.

You have to wonder whether Rome has learnt much about changing wellknown texts. The shift from liturgical Latin and the various interim translations was bad enough. How the people will cope with another major interruption to their life of prayer remains to be seen. For all the best reasons, and maybe some of the worst, there will be spirited resistance to the new New Missal. For all its faults the 1972 translation has weathered 30 years and formed the Eucharistic life of two generations. Should it now be tossed to one side? Again curial expediency seems to have won out over a careful anthropology of human ritual and liturgical memory. There should be no joy in that for any thoughtful traditionalist. We need no more exiles in this vale of tears.

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