Coming Soon To A Church Near You

In the past couple of weeks I have been engaging in an email debate over the Ordinary versus the Extraordinary Forms of the Mass.

One of the participants made a compelling argument that one of the reasons some people dislike the Ordinary Form so much is that the old rite developed organically and gradually as a result of the people's devotion. The new rite was composed by a commitee and then imposed on the people. In other words, the old maxim "Lex orandi, lex credendi" has been inversed. Before our doctrine was the fruit of our encounter with the mystery of God in prayer and in the liturgy. Now, the "experts" - the theologians, liturgists or historians - were telling the people how we should pray based on their more exact "knowledge" of God.

Not 24 hours later I come across the USCCB's new translation of the Roman Missal, which is supposed to appear in all English-speaking parishes by late 2010 or early 2011.

Granted, this is not a whole new rite and the intention is to better reflect the Latin. In a strange way, we're living the Spirit of Vatican II. But, being of the generation who has only known the new rite, I can't imagine that this will be an easy thing to implement. My first thought, looking at the Ordinary parts, is that all new Mass settings will need to be composed immediately. Missals will have to be revised, and people will have to have sheets to follow along in order to say the appropriate response as there are just too many to remember without an aid. People not paying attention will revert to the old words. Others will not understand the reason for the change and will be resistant at the outset.

The only "change" in the Mass I remember in my lifetime is from when I was a teenage lector. (Sounds like a horror film when I put it like that!) For at least a couple of years, I had been saying "This is the Word of the Lord" at the end of my readings. Suddenly, I saw the priest crossing out the "This is" in ink. "Just say, 'The Word of the Lord' now," he advised me. "But that's a sentence fragment," my arrogant 16-year-old self argued. I am wiser now and understand that dropping "This is" served a two-fold purpose: it was a reflection of the Latin translation, and the "This is" implied the totality of the Word, which thank goodness, we were not being asked to read on the spot. But it did take some time to transition even to drop those two words.

Now the heads of the English Church have decided to change the Mass to reflect the Latin text, even the stuff that doesn't necessarily make a whole lot of sense in English. "And with your Spirit." I have never had cause to say that in English before. Let alone "Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof." I know what this means in the Latin but it doesn't exactly fly in the English.

Anyway, the point of all of this is not whether or not we should be reverting to the Latin translation, actually. It's just that on a pastoral note, I think the transition will be very difficult for people on the outset, and I wonder, forty years after the current rite was introduced, where is the lex orandi, lex credendi today? Once again we have experts telling us how to pray and what to believe. We've now got Jesus going to hell in the Apostles' Creed, which ought to be fun to teach to the kids. Theologians think it is more important for us to say and thus, believe "consubstantial" in the Nicene Creed, but I'm afraid that won't mean a thing to 98.3% of the parishioners in our pews.

Things change. I accept that. I even accept, on an intellectual level, the why behind the changes. I am just not sure that I accept how this change is being implemented as another sign of our hierarchical Church imposing a very non-organic, non-gradual transition to our prayers and beliefs.