A Sixteen-Year-Old on the New Translation
An American journalist Robert McClory writes the introduction to a letter written to the National Catholic Reporter. We reprint it with permission.
Erik Baker is a 16-year-old high school student who has been studying Latin since 6th grade. Now as a senior at Evanston Township High School near Chicago, he has completed all the Latin classes available at his school, including the Advanced Placement courses. He is pursuing his ongoing interest through Latin classes at nearby Northwestern University.
Erik has been raised as a Catholic and attends Mass with his family at the Sheil Catholic Centre at Northwestern. Recently, when materials were distributed explaining the new liturgical changes based on the original Latin text, he studied them with special interest.
"When I looked at the new version, I had a sort of knee-jerk reaction," Erik said. "What I saw didn't sit well with me. Yeah, the changes are more literal and faithful to the Latin, but are that desirable? Much of the phrasing and the changes seemed kind of ridiculous."
So he did an analysis and wrote a brief essay, not for class, but just to get his reaction down on paper and out of his system. He said he hadn't read any reviews of the translation before he produced his version. A friend of the family suggested NCR readers might be interested in Erik's critique.
WEEDS AMONG THE WHEAT
STUDY GROUP FOR GOOD CHURCH GOVERNANCE
[WERKVERBAND VOOR DE RECHTSCULTUUR IN DE KERKEN]
Contact address: Mr.P.J.Oudsingel 136, 6836 PT Arnhem, The Netherlands
WEEDS AMONG THE WHEAT
AN OPEN LETTER TO POPE BENEDICT XVI,
ON SEXUAL ABUSE IN THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH
Dear Pope Benedict
On March 19, 2010 you sent a ‘pastoral letter’ to all Catholics in Ireland, in connection with the disclosures about sexual abuse committed by ministers and other members of the Church in Ireland. As a study group for good church governance we read your letter with interest, and we feel invited to react to it. We are doing this because we consider your letter as also addressed to the Church Universal, and consequently also meant for the Church in our country. For your letter deals with a problem which unfortunately has also presented itself, or may do so, elsewhere.
In this open letter we take into account that a pastoral letter is a genre of its own: its subject cannot be treated extensively and exhaustively, and its content cannot be evaluated along strict and systematic theological criteria. Moreover, as you will see when you read this open letter, we are not dealing with every item discussed in your letter – we have selected a few items that touch upon our field of interest: church order and the way it is applied, whether laudably or debatably.
What if we just said wait?
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Women in the Church – Thoughts from a Laywoman
Yes, the Church in Britain has involved some fantastic women - women whose appeal for a project in the Dominican Republic led to the formation of CAFOD 50 years ago; the National Board of Catholic Women who gathered from around Britain last month in London to examine the legacy of Vatican II; the women who have run Catholic Peoples’ Weeks which offer families such a great opportunity to explore their faith. I could go on all evening about women who have given their lives to building up the Kingdom of God, inspired by their Catholic faith, and very often working on a voluntary basis or with minimal renumeration.
But I have been asked to highlight the problems women face in the Church and the possibilities. Let’s look at problems first. ...
The Unbearable Gravity of Stasis
Cardinal Raymond Burke recently gave the De Lubac lecture at Manchester University. In the course of the lecture he stated that stasis is to be preferred to change in the Church. Friedrich Nietzsche, father of post-Modernity, wrote in The Gay Science that he could not believe in a God who did not know how to dance. He went on to say that in looking at the church all he saw was gravitas and by gravitas all falls down.
Our institutional church has lived in a post-Trent, post-Vatican I mode for the past 400 years. The official Church struggled to remain in a permanent state of stasis. It had not promoted the formation of a laity able to explain and give witness to the person of Jesus Christ and the teachings of the Church. It had given itself a clergy attuned only to the life of the church, not to the life of the world, not to the poor of the earth.
The bishops of Vatican II tried to open the church to the needs of a wounded world. To do that an alert, articulate and committed laity was an essential necessity. That laity came forward, men and women who wanted a church for the world, able to be salt, light, leaven and mustard seed. It was an adult laity who wanted to assume adult responsibilities in the pastoral mission of the church according to the charism and vocation of each. But that was going to mean that the laity would exercise its baptismal powers of priesthood and mission. Generally speaking, bishops and priests felt threatened and moved to curb an ebullient energy generated by the Spirit who wanted to dance, to move mountains, to bring joy—in a word, to renew the face of the earth.
Sadly, our church leadership is opting for stasis and gravitas. It is reaching out to the most reactionary forces in its fold to forward a march to the past when everything appeared as God wanted: static, uniform and patriarchal.
Our church is losing its soul because it cannot hold opposites in creative tension. Those opposites are: male/female; heterosexual/homosexual; lay/cleric; married/divorced; leader/led; secular/religious; have/have not and others. Our leadership is resolving those tensions in favour of its own institutional needs; thus it relegates huge numbers of talented and committed persons to the margins.
The church cannot be a Good Samaritan sort of neighbour to the divorced and remarried, to the abused child and its family, to the single parent, to the homosexual et al because it is incapable of crossing the frontier of exclusion and woundedness to become healer and pastor. The present church wants only the “pure”, the docile, the infantile and the co-dependent. From a culture of change, openness and hope we are reverting to a culture of fear, suspicion and reactionary conservatism.
We want a church in the spirit of Vatican II’s Gaudium Et Spes. That church will be engaged in the struggle to nurture and conserve our planet against a man-centred exploitation. It will be concerned with poverty global and local which lacerates the human spirit and threatens human life. It will be a Peace church which ceases to bless tanks and bombs. It will be person-centred able to accompany those on the spiritual journey in their search for depth, meaning and identity.
The institution wants to inaugurate a New Evangelisation. That will not happen because the church rejects inclusivity, transparency and accountability. These so-called modern values are the hallmark of an institution which has credibility and which deserves the trust of souls given into its care.
Stasis as a preferred way of existence is an invitation to a living death. The exterior will be pomp and circumstance, Disney-style international Youth encounters, Eucharistic mega-meetings and papal decrees and audiences. But what is there but a hollow body and a dispirited soul? Therein lays the tragedy of our institutional church.
Frank Regan
November 2011
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