Growing Pains

As we make the transition into chanted liturgy (here I am deliberately avoiding the phrase "come the revolution"), there will inevitably be unanticipated changes. If I am reading the prevailing winds correctly, one of the hopes of some people on the Traditionalist "side" is that a return to the True Words of the Liturgy will substitute very serious and formal language for the current warm fuzzy feelings.

I beg to differ. It seems to me from the admittedly very little work I've done with the Latin ecclesiastial books that we are going to discover a warmer and fuzzier Catholicism than the one we now know. This is hardly a bad thing. Catholics are meant to be on very intimate terms with the Lord God. We commune with Him, body and soul. Old songs and prayers have it that we hide in His sacred wounds. There's quite a bit of contact.

With contact comes the desire to speak tender words. Like these, which, according to What Does the Prayer Really Say's Fr. John T Zuhlsdorf, were the Post-Communion prayer for this past Sunday: O Lord, having been fed with heavenly delicacies, we entreat you, that we may always strive earnestly for these same things, by which we are truly alive.

You may have missed these warm and tender sentiments (Latin= Caelestibus, Domine, pasti deliciis, quaesumus, ut semper eadem, per quae veraciter vivimus, appetamus) if you were at an English-language Mass, because the current translation is: Lord, you give us food from heaven. May we always hunger for the bread of life.

Inaccuracies abound. But what strikes me immediately is that the current translation implies almost no relationship between the Lord and the Church--certainly not the moment-by-moment drawing of life from God that we find in the Latin prayer. Whereas in Fr. Zuhlsdorf's rendering the implication is that there is a relationship of total dependence of the Church upon the Lord. We beg Him even for our own earnest striving! The original is a love letter between children and Father in a close family; the current translation reads pretty much like a memo.

Onward to warm and fuzzy land!