The new Roman Missal: Latest step in organic development of the Roman liturgy

May 11, 2011 - Later this year, in Advent, the Church will introduce a major new English translation of the Mass with the third typical edition of the Roman Missal.

What are Catholics going to make of changes in the words they pray and  hear the priest praying? Will the changes make any difference in their experience of the Mass? In the way they worship? In the way they live their faith in the world?

The answers will depend a lot on you and me.

This new edition of the missal is a unique gift to our generation. It restores the ancient understanding of the Eucharist as a sacred mystery. It renews the vertical dimension of our worship—as a spiritual sacrifice that we offer in union with the sacrifice that our heavenly High Priest celebrates unceasingly in the eternal liturgy.

For the Church to realize the full potential of this gift, we need to understand why this new translation is so important. The changes are not superficial ritualism.  A deep liturgical and theological aesthetic is at work, and we need to grasp its “inner logic.”

I was ordained a priest and a bishop in the Novus Ordo. I’ve spent my entire priesthood praying this form of the Mass with deep reverence. Although I have a great love for the older Tridentine rite and celebrate it from time to time, I also know that the Novus Ordo belongs to an ongoing, legitimate and organic development of the Roman liturgy.

It’s useful, however, to recall the “culture shock” that the Novus Ordo caused when it was first introduced.  A vivid example of that shock was Evelyn Waugh, the author of “Brideshead Revisited” and the “Sword of Honor” trilogy, among other memorable works.

Waugh was a brilliant novelist and Catholic convert.  And he wasn’t bashful about sharing his views on what was “wrong” in the Church. In particular, Waugh thought the Church had a made a wrong turn at the Second Vatican Council.

Waugh especially disliked the council’s plans for liturgical reform. The reformers, he complained, were “a strange alliance between archeologists absorbed in their speculations on the rites of the second century, and modernists who wish to give the Church the character of our own deplorable epoch.”

Waugh was razor-keen in his insight.  His worst fears came to pass when the Mass finally appeared in the vernacular.  In early 1965, he wrote to a friend: “Every attendance at Mass leaves me without comfort or edification. … Church-going is now a bitter trial.”

He said often—as did many others—that the Novus Ordo stripped the Mass of its beauty and destroyed the liturgy’s contact with heavenly realities. Waugh never recovered from the shock.  He said: “The Vatican Council has knocked the guts out of me,” and “I shall not live to see things righted.”

On Easter 1966, he asked a Jesuit friend to say a Latin Mass for him and his friends and family at a private chapel near his home. People later remarked that Waugh seemed at peace for the first time since the council. About an hour after the Mass, he collapsed and died.  

It was a dramatic end to a fascinating life.  The lesson to draw here is this: Evelyn Waugh sensed that something about Catholic worship had gone awry.  He was wrong to distrust the Holy Spirit’s guidance of the pope, the Church and the council fathers.  But he was right in foreseeing much of the post-conciliar foolishness that ensued—errors that sometimes deformed, in an inexcusable way, the historic beauty of Catholic liturgy.

The Novus Ordo is an organic development of the Church’s ancient rites and traditions. It is a genuine sign of Christ’s faithfulness to his promise—that his Spirit would guide the Church into all the truth and would glorify him in all things. 

But the new does not replace the old in the Church.  Continuity, not rupture, marks every authentic development of doctrine—including the authentic development of the liturgy.
 

Most Rev. James D. Conley is auxiliary bishop of the Denver Archdiocese.

His three-part series on the new Roman Missal continues next week.

To learn more about the new translation of the Roman Missal, visit www.archden.org/newromanmissal.

Related Reading:

• www.archden.org/newromanmissal
• www.usccb.org/romanmissal