AP’s tour de force on the Roman Missal

August 24, 2010 By

Anyone who understands religion news at the level of pews and altars understands that few stories matter more to dedicated readers, and appeal less to mainstream editors, than stories about changes in the books, laws and traditions that shape how people worship.

Want to start a war? Arguments about sex will stir things up, but if you really want to touch people at the local level all you really need to do is change their prayer books and hymnals. Obviously, this is especially true when you are covering the ancient, liturgical traditions, but the “worship wars” in modern megachurches tug at the heartstrings in a similar fashion.

Thus, the biggest possible story one could imagine on this subject in the context of North America, the story that would impact the most people, would be a story about a complete revision of the English translation of the Roman Missal. And the story about this subject that would read by most newspaper readers — since few local editors are going to gear up for early coverage on this topic — will be the report produced by the Associated Press.

Thus, it is important that the following basic AP story on this subject functions as a kind of press release for critics of the Vatican and the new English translation of the Roman Missal, which will reach worshipers at the beginning of the pre-Christmas season of Advent in 2011.

What would you expect in such a story?

* A quote from the omnipresent Father Thomas Reese of Georgetown University, the patron saint of mainstream journalists in need of a quick quote that is, roughly 90 percent of the time, critical of the Vatican.

Check. In fact, Reese is granted the first direct quote in the story.

* Defenders of Rome are allowed only bland, vague, dull paraphrased quotations in defense of their actions.

Check. The story does not contain a single direct quote from a Catholic expert who defends the new Roman Missal.

* Material produced by an outspoken bishop who was on the losing side of the ecclesiastical wrestling match that produced the new texts. If possible, he should be cited in a way that identifies him as an expert on the topic, yet without clearly identifying his partisan role in the debate.

Check. Check.

Put it all together and you have something that looks like this, in the body of the AP story that ran in newspapers from coast to coast.

Pope John Paul II announced the new missal in 2000 and it was first published in Latin in 2002. It’s the first significant change in the English translation since the Mass was first celebrated in English after Vatican II in the 1960s, said the Rev. Thomas Reese of the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.

“It will impact every Catholic in every parish because they will have to learn new responses in place of the ones they have been using since Vatican II,” Reese said. “I believe that the new translations are a step backwards and confusing to the people in the pews.”

Proponents of the new missal’s translation into English have said its language is more poetic and true to the spirit of the original Latin. Critics contend the translation is too literal and includes too many theologically complex terms.

Bishop Donald Trautman of Erie, Pa., who formerly ran the U.S. bishops liturgy committee, criticized the new translation as “slavishly literal” during a lecture last year at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

Let’s see. And what kinds of changes would critics want cited?

Prayers offered by the priest will include more complex terms such as “consubstantial,” “inviolate,” “oblation,” “ignominy” and “suffused.”

Critics like Bishop Trautman argue that Jesus Christ taught in the language of the common man and, further, that Vatican II reforms that first allowed the Mass to be translated from Latin to the vernacular are being unraveled by the more complicated words used in the new translation.

In response, readers receive another vague paraphrase from supporters of the new version, who are not — again — named or quoted.

It’s a clean sweep, a tour de force.

Readers seeking more information about this press release can go directly to one of its likely sources, the PrayTell weblog produced by the St. John’s School of Theology and Seminary. A sample of its criticism can be found at this edgy FAQ.

Those seeking a length defense of the new Missal — including plenty of links to voices on both sides of the debate — can check out this essay at the Adoremus Bulletin website. The official website on the transition, offered by the U.S. Catholic bishops, can be found here.

For a coverage that offers the mirror image of the AP report, readers might want to check out this Catholic News Service report, which includes the following material which I am sure could have been used in the Associated Press story as quick and easy commentary from the other side.

At several points during the Mass, for example, when the celebrant says, “The Lord be with you,” the people will respond, in a more faithful translation of the original Latin, “And with your spirit.”

The current response, “And also with you,” was “not meant as ‘you too’ or something like ‘back at you,’” Father Richard Hilgartner, associate director of the USCCB Secretariat of Divine Worship, told Catholic News Service. Rather it is “an invocation to the priest as he celebrates the Mass, a reminder that he is not acting on his own, but in the person of Christ” — a distinction that the new language will highlight, he said.

I hope that GetReligion readers will help me spot any significant follow-up coverage in the mainstream media. Might I suggest setting a Google News alert for these terms — “Roman Missal,” “Latin” and, of course, “Reese.”

In conclusion, may I offer an old joke that, on this occasion, will almost certainly be quoted by activists on both sides of the Roman Missal debate (as opposed to its popularity for several decades on the Catholic traditionalist side of the aisle):

“What is the difference between a terrorist and a liturgist?

“You can negotiate with a terrorist.”

Photo: The second photo is of St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minn., which is linked to the school of theology and the seminary.

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Filed Under: Academia, Catholicism, Journalism, Religion, World, Worship
About TMatt

Terry Mattingly directs the Washington Journalism Center at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. He writes a weekly column for the Scripps Howard News Service.

  • Martha

    “It will impact every Catholic in every parish because they will have to learn new responses in place of the ones they have been using since Vatican II,” Reese said. “I believe that the new translations are a step backwards and confusing to the people in the pews.”

    And this seems to be one of the main objections that is trotted out, and always makes me want to go “Yo, Tommy! Howzabout when I was six and had to learn “new responses in place of the ones” I had been using? And all my family and neighbours? Lemme tell you, I still cherish resentment since I was seven years old and when all of us in First Communion class had *finally* learned off by heart the long Confiteor and could say it all, they turned around and we had to learn the new short-form one.”

    So, no, not terribly convincing to me as a reason to protest, particularly when talking about adults and allegedly the most educated laity in the history of the Church ever :-)

  • Martha

    By the above rant, I mean that the precious, delicate “since Vatican II” responses that Fr. Reese is so worked up about were also inconvenient, troublesome, and different in their day.

    Somehow we poor pew potatoes managed to stagger on regardless over the past forty years, so I really don’t see how going back to versions of the first English translation (which yes, I am old enough to remember) are going to cause the collapse of the entire Catholic faith.

  • http://rub-a-dub.blogspot.com MattK

    It is interesting that the new translation is at once described as being too literal and more poetic. I wish the reporter had included more examples than to little ones offered.

  • Leonard

    Obviously, the arguments advanced in the mainstream press’s “Tour De Force” indicate clearly why Pope Benedict XVI is the Pope and they are not!…or in terms they perhaps can grasp, when it comes to Catholic Liturgy…”Some Cats Got-It and Some Cats Ain’t.”

  • bob

    No mention is made of the poor lost souls in the 70′s…Like Episcopalians, who so faithfully (not to say slavishly) imitated the Roman usage in the 1979 Prayerbook. Now they’ll be in the dust of history saying “And also with you” as the more serious translators move on to accuracy. It’ll be interesting to see how fast they scramble to keep up.

  • Justin

    I would say that maybe it means woodenly literalistic in direct equivalency of terms when translating, rather than going for direct translation of meaning. When going for a more woodenly literalistic translation of one language to another, you often get something that may not give the direct intent of what you are translating, thereby making people have to “interpret” the text in the new language for greater understanding. Which is likely what the writer was going for, however badly, with saying it would be more “poetic”, because of course whenever you have to dig for meaning in anything, the text is poetic…

  • http://kingslynn.blogspot.com C. Wingate

    re Martha: As one of those Episcopalians who has to deal with this every time we switch between Rites I and II, you would think they could come up with more shocking changes.

    Having actually looked at the new texts, I noticed something which seems to have completely escaped everyone else: the new texts completely abandon the old ICET versions of the Gloria and Sanctus (and use a weird hybrid on the Lord’s prayer), so that they no longer have any commonality with the versions said in other churches.

  • Chris

    I echo Martha’s comments. In many cases, we are going back to the English responses of the 60′s, put in place immediately after Vatican II. “And with your spirit.” was the response 40 years ago in English. I remember being told that “spirit” was dropped because many people though of ghosts when faced with the word (some elementary age kids certainly did).
    Many diocesan papers are running series going over the new text. Frankly, some of the new phrasing seems better, and some opaque. Some of the concepts do require specific, and rather daunting words–the technical terms of theology.
    One thing I have noticed that journalists (and others) sometimes insist on, is that all information can be presented accurately and usefully in lay language. The Executive Summary school of information transfer… This is not true, for any technical enterprise. Technical words are developed to explain concepts for which words do not exist. Sometimes, you just have to learn what they actually mean!

  • http://www.ocf.net pxs155

    I am personally, as an Eastern Orthodox Christian, pleased with the few changes I have found online, notably “And with your spirit”, which occurs time and again in place of “And also with you”. I will surely watch for more thorough and fair coverage on this story, but at least we know it has time to pop up again before late next year.

  • Deacon John M. Bresnahan

    What caught my eye in coverage was all the media outlets and internet sites that are referring to the “NEW MASS.” But it is NOT a “New Mass.” It is a new translation of the Latin. As far as I can tell it was headlined and written about as a “New Mass” first in the RNS (Religious News Service) then picked up and headlined as a “New Mass” in everything from the Huffington Post, to the Pew Forum, and sites inbetween.
    You would never know from some of the versions of this story about the large number of Catholics in America who have been disdainful of the currently used translation as inaccurate to the point of near doctrinal error in some parts and in other parts its pathetically pedestrian use of language to the point of lacking any beauty or appeal.

  • Jason

    For those of us who are blessed to be able to assist at a Tridentine Mass every Sunday, these translations have no direct effect. But they are, I think, an improvement to the Novus Ordo Mass which is good for the Church.

    Despite the various improvements in translation, the N.O. Mass is still deeply flawed. Valid, but flawed.

    It’s akin to trying to fix a bad painting. You might be able to make it presentable, but it will never be a masterpiece.

    Fortunately, the Church already has a liturgical masterpiece, and has for many centuries.

    May the implementation of Summorum Pontificum continue at an even greater pace.

  • http://www.mosaicmiamichurch.com kevin sutherland

    I like that last joke….liturgist can be very stubborn.

  • Jon in the Nati

    As one of those Episcopalians who has to deal with this every time we switch between Rites I and II

    I didn’t realize that this was ‘actually’ a problem for many Episcopalians; I have never been to an Episcopal church that uses Rite I (or if they do, it is NEVER for their primary Sunday Eucharist). For better or for worse, the Episcopal church is still stuck in the ‘modern language’ movement of the 80′s.

  • Dan Crawford

    Jason’s comment assumes that the Tridentine Mass is a “masterpiece”. I doubt Jason was raised in the heyday of the Tridentine Mass. Having worshipped with it for nearly thirty years and having been mystified (in the worst sense of the word) by its rubrics for just as long, and having endured the funerals of loved ones according to the Tridentine Mass with an organist caterwauling the Gregorian Requiem, his assumption requires more than a little proof. And like a good Protestant, he tends to believe that the liturgical masterpiece came about in the 16th century – the liturgies of the East and West in preceding centuries apparently having little worth.

  • http://www.tmatt.net tmatt

    FOLKS:

    I have let these arguments about the pluses and minuses of the services run on to long. Please return to the actual journalistic issues of the post.

    For example, who should the AP have talked with to get the other side, other than Helen H. Hitchcock and some other obvious voices?

  • John

    tmatt,
    I don’t think AP worried much about research on this. I don’t know who they should’ve inteviewed, but the Church’s authorities have been arguing and debating the matter for 8 years in committee(s). Bishop Trautman, Fr Reese, and others may not like it, but they didn’t hold the majority opinion. If AP wanted a decent story, they could easily have reviewed the list of committee members and requested interviews.

    Where journalistic accuracy arises, I offer this little morsel: During my week of Close-Up in Washington back in ’93, I heard a big fuss about “media bias”. They were right, er, correct, but not enough. Afterward, watching for media bias, I discovered I had more to complain about than did the Close-Up instructors! Oops!

    Long story short? I’ve long since quit taking journalists’ view of anything at face value. They almost never report without some “liberal” bias. That the AP would report this in favor of Bishop Trautman et al isn’t surprising. …

  • Kyle

    Bishop Serratelli would have been an obvious source for any AP reporter attempting to do actual journalism here. He has been one of the point people in the United States for this work and an articulate spokesman in the critical USCCB discussions.

  • Chris Jones

    who should the AP have talked with to get the other side

    How about Father Zed?

  • Julia

    I can’t resist saying that many people refer to the PC Bishop Trautman as Bishop Fishperson.

    Getting to serious matters: it would be interesting to see a report about what the missals immediately AFTER Vatican 2 set forth as the English translations for the people to say. There is a big hole in the coverage of the switch from Latin to English.

    There were a fair number of years of Masses in English BEFORE the Novus Ordo was promulgated in 1969, settling things down. In the preceding years, from one Sunday to the next, you never knew what Mass was going to be like.

    Compared to the constantly changing mishmash that lasted for years in the 1960s, this change will be nothing.

  • Greg

    I don’t know why so many bishops and priests are against the re-translation of the Liturgy to reflect the actual Latin Rite wording.Half of them make it up as they go along anyway.

  • Lives7

    Hey, I like the change.
    Change we can Believe in!
    Just the Facts.

  • Jason

    Jason’s comment assumes that the Tridentine Mass is a “masterpiece”.

    And indeed it is. It is not the only liturgical masterpiece of the Catholic Church. The Novus Ordo is not, nor will it ever be counted amongst those.

    I doubt Jason was raised in the heyday of the Tridentine Mass.

    I was raised with the Novus Ordo. An awful scourge perpetrated on young Catholics that drove many, and almost drove me, away from the Church. The numbers don’t lie.

    Having worshipped with it for nearly thirty years and having been mystified (in the worst sense of the word) by its rubrics for just as long, and having endured the funerals of loved ones according to the Tridentine Mass with an organist caterwauling the Gregorian Requiem, his assumption requires more than a little proof.

    I can’t help it if your were “mystified.” Perhaps you should have studied a little harder.

    And like a good Protestant, he tends to believe that the liturgical masterpiece came about in the 16th century – the liturgies of the East and West in preceding centuries apparently having little worth.

    Nice parting shot. Very charitable. The only thing Protestant is the theology behind the Mass you find easy to understand.

  • L

    Wow, what a one-sided piece of journalism. Considering that the USCCB has a rather large website devoted to the topic (http://www.usccb.org/romanmissal/index.shtml), including side-by-side comparisons of the old and new translation, there really is no excuse for this. Surely the writer could have gone to the USCCB website and looked up the members of the Committee on Divine Worship, and solicited comments from at least one of them who was in favor of the new changes.

    I think that this whole story is very lazy. It seems that the writer couldn’t be bothered to do some minimal research and contact someone not in his well-worn list of usual sources. I’m tired of reading only quotes from Bishop Trautman or Fr. Reese — come on, folks, be more creative!

    (As an aside, Bishop Trautman reaches the retirement age of 75 next year. I don’t see that mentioned in MSM coverage much when he’s quoted. But I do recall seeing a certain conservative bishop quoted a couple years back as “Bishop X, who must submit his resignation on his 75th birthday next year….” I always thought that was an interesting way of minimizing that bishop’s position, but of course MSM writers generally don’t do that to Bishop Trautman.)

  • http://sanluisespolon.blogspot.com Jorge Calderón

    el problema lo tienen los que van a la misa protestantizada,modernista y adúltera,posterior al concilio vati II. De la cual tengo mis serias dudas de que consagren bien , y ante cualquier duda dice S. Pablo recurrid a la tradición, por lo tanto en mi caso no me muevo de la verdadera y Santa Misa de la Iglesia Católica, la MIsa con el ritual de San Pio V. ver la bula “QUO PRIMUM TEMPORE”, los saludo en CRISTO Nuestro Señor. POR EL REINADO SOCIAL DE CRISTO. Jorge.

  • http://www.tmatt.net tmatt

    A little help please?

  • http://www.tmatt.net tmatt

    Doing some spiking.

    Back to journalism, folks.

  • http://intellectual-wannabe.blogspot.com/ Woodrow

    Agreed: this is a lazy piece of journalism.

    On the New Translation: I can barely contain my excitement! I can’t wait for the new Missal because I loce to pray the Mass and am looking forward to an English translation of it that reflects what the rest of the world prays, too! There are two dozen people at my parish for whom I plan to buy copies of the St. Joseph Sunday Missal 2011*. The cathedral in our diocese gave these out freely in 2005, and I’ve gotten them every year since because I love to pray the Mass. I was very grateful a few years ago when the seasonal missals our parish uses began including the opening and closing prayers. I love to pray the Mass!

    *Published, I think, by Catholic Book Publishing Company.

    P.S. I love to pray the Mass!

  • Jason

    I think a good journalist has an obligation to present the strongest arguments on every side of an issue, as long as he thinks his/her duty is to educate their readers.

    Does the AP think people are edified by dumbing down of anything? Are textbooks, designed to inform and enlighten, serving their purpose when “big words” are replaced? Is the dumbest kid in class catered to? Does your average newspaper write articles dumbed down so any 10 year old can read it? Are we better served if they do?

    The author doesn’t need a PHD in theology to ask such obvious questions, which makes me believe the slant in coverage was intentionally in favor of the liturgical vandals.

  • Julia

    The reporter could have and should have interviewed at least one person who was a lay adult during the transition time from Vatican II (circa 1965)to the start of the new Mass in 1969. Those big English words were in all the missals prior to 1969. How did the people weather the huge changes then – when a vastly different Mass became the norm? What advice might they give to the people today who only know the 1969 Mass and its simplified language?

  • John

    Uh, Jorge, I hate to be mean, but..I don’t speak Spanish. During my college days, academia tried to force me to change that fact, but it didn’t really work.

    Jason, I understand your frustration with the manner in which the Novus Ordo usually comes, but….don’t forget, the problem doesn’t lie in the Novus Ordo itself.
    Most of the problems with the NO, including Protestant incursions, stem from clergy and faithful who aren’t well catechized and don’t know it/refuse to admit it, or who aren’t interested in learning the whole of the faith.

    Insisting on the Extraordinary Form, and ONLY the Extraordinary Form, won’t change that state.

    At my parish, we offer the NO according to the preferred rubrics. It’s far more reverent and dignified than most because of that.
    Ultimately, my dream would be for the two forms to be recombined into one, universal form for the Roman Catholic Church. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’ll happen until both ultra-traditionalist AND ultra-modernist die off. Maybe we’ll have one form in 30 to 50 years? We’ll see.

  • Passing By

    Like John’s, my parish prays the Novus Ordo in a reverent and dignified manner. People grumble about this or that, but the fact is, they show up to pray. Grumbling and showing up is pretty much what Catholics do.

    And there’s a story in that, but the reporter would have to understand that people actually believe things and aren’t just consumers shopping for a happy Sunday morning experience. Granted, what a fair number of Catholics believe in is tribal loyalty more than the Catholic Faith, but they still show up and listen to the Gospel.

    It may be my contrary nature, but I would also like to see a story about the reverent celebrations of the Mass when the Extraordinary Rite was the who shebang. The favored myth is that it was rushed and pretty much ignored by the people in the pews. That was certainly true enough, but also certainly not universally true. What about the other side?

    By the way, for those not among the cool kids, the joke about Bp. Trautmann is that he is a proponent of “inclusive language”, which led to “mann” being changed to “person”.

  • Vianney1100

    Just a side note concerning St. John’s as the picture of the hideous church caught my eye. I am an alum of the university. The Theology department, monastery and seminary are filled with dissenters. The monastery also has a considerable amount of sexual abusers (check out behindthepinecurtain.com). As always from rebellion springs lies, distortions and deviance. Is it any wonder they don’t like the more literal translation?

  • Hector

    Jon in the Nati,

    The middle-of-the-road, broad-church Episcopal churches often have an early morning Rite I service, and then a Rite II later in the morning. And of course when I’m in a larger city I tend to seek out the nosebleed-high, Anglo-Catholic parishes where they do use the old style language. “And with thy spirit”, etc.

    I tend to much prefer the old-fashioned language (and high church ritual in general) to the modern language & lack of ritual.

  • http://kingslynn.blogspot.com C. Wingate

    Watching the discussion, and especially the way it keeps getting dragged back into discussion of the liturgy itself, brings up another point. Practically all the people who really are going to care about the substance of the changes already have some idea what they are in for. The AP story completely and utterly misses the actually rather important point that the Latin isn’t changing now, but that it did change radically as a result of Vat. II. Therefore, for people who have a problem with what the text is supposed to be saying the re-translation probably isn’t that important; it’s still wrong in the same way it was before, although perhaps more accurately wrong. On the other hand it’s pretty obvious from reading around that the new translation is important to some people as a symbol of the Benedict’s supposed attempts to impose some discipline on a church that has gotten rather sloppy. This is in my opinion wishful thinking, but again the AP story misses that angle entirely.

    Ironically, however, the AP story implicitly covers another angle in the way it looks at the detail of the changes: that it’s quite possible that in the end the changes aren’t going to mean much to the average parishioner other than having different words in the missalette.

  • Jon in the Nati, non-Catholic

    On the other hand it’s pretty obvious from reading around that the new translation is important to some people as a symbol of the Benedict’s supposed attempts to impose some discipline on a church that has gotten rather sloppy. This is in my opinion wishful thinking, but again the AP story misses that angle entirely.

    Actually, I think this is sort of assumed (and dismissed) a priori. Any attempt by the Vatican to ‘impose discipline’ or regulate anything would be seen as bad by most of the MSM; if Papa Bennie said the sky was blue, they’d assert otherwise.

    Read otherwise: Rules and regulations = bad; letting people do whatever they want = good.

  • Martha

    If we’re doing liturgical jokes, my favourite is “When God saw that the Church was no longer undergoing persecution, He sent liturgists.”
    :-)

  • http://kingslynn.blogspot.com C. Wingate

    Jon, Benedict’s name appears exactly once in the AP article, as a contributor of a fairly minor change. You would think that he had little to do with the project otherwise, to read the article.

  • Julia

    By the way, for those not among the cool kids, the joke about Bp. Trautmann is that he is a proponent of “inclusive language”, which led to “mann” being changed to “person”.

    And to be truly inclusive, [ wouldn't want any pouting scaley creatures] “Traut” is also inclusively broadened to “fish”. Voila! – Fishperson.

  • http://knapsack.blogspot.com Jeff

    This is not a journalism comment, either — Oh, dear Lord, that is the UGLIEST church I have ever seen. And it’s not as if there isn’t competition out there: I’m thinking of a Catholic parish in Muskegon, MI I once drove past, and of course the semi-legendary former western Michigan Episcopalian cathedral, which I believe is now sold (for what, I can’t imagine).

    But that’s just #epicfail bad. Wow.

    I assume there’s a bit of a liturgical comment embedded in that choice of graphics, which might have nudged the discussion over to theological aesthetics. Put the fire out, Terry, but in this case, I think you lit the match with that photo. (“My eyes — It burns, it burns….”)

  • http://none treejammer

    So the new translations are a “step backwards.” “Stepping backwards” is not that bad. Crawfish and lobsters do it all the time.