Friday, June 23, 2006

WSJ on New Mass Translation

Diane at Te Deum laudamus, te Dominum confitemur has posted the text of Michael Foley's OpEd piece in the Wall Street Journal on the new Mass translation. It's worth reading.

1 comment:

Paul Halsall said...

Scott,

I am of course an unreconstructed liberal. I think the incarnartion (which I believe in absolutely) is about theodicy, not atonement, and I destested ICEL's shilly-shallying about terms. But on the creed they are just wrong. Homoousias should be translated "one in being" (which is literal from the Greek") and not "consubstantial".

We are NOT commmited as Catholics to medieval physics: we probably are committed to expressing a Jewish narrative approach to theology in Greek/Rational terms. Substance/Accident dichotomies are irrelevant in modern science (as I, imperfectly understand it), and to defend such terms we are reduced to claiming that such terms are "poetically" true. (As my friend, and confirmer Aidan Nichols used to claim about Freud).

Look, I would prefer the mass in Lation in its Novus Ordo (sp?) form (the 1962 and earlier rites are just awful), with Mozart, Hayden, and Tallis settings. I am gay after all, but a simplistic translation from the Latin is misleading.

In any case, none of this explains bad Catholic liturgies. We fail because a) we are too mean to pay for "ringers" in the choir; and those awful "cantors" who sing at the front of the Church into a mike.

How is it that the so-called "pagan" liberal Catholics in THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH, put on one stunning liturgy after another? [The girls need to get real about processions though!] Answer, the pay the choir and look at music history.

I would have have become a piskies years ago, but I went to one of their churches on August 15th and they did not even mention my mother and the Queen of Heaven.

I will stay a Catholic as long as she who is the boundry of the created and uncreated stays a Catholic.

But she is a mother, not Thatcher on acid like many neo-theo-cons think. She is the feminine face of God, and a mother will not desert her children at the time of death.

I wonder how many are like me - we stay Catholic because we know we will yell for a priest (one of OUR priests) at the moment of death.

Homily for Requiem Mass of Michael Carson, 20 November 2021

  Readings OT: Wisdom 3:1-6, 9 [2, short form] Ps: 25 [2] NT: Romans 8:31b-35, 37-39 [6] Alleluia verse: John 6:39 [...