Category: Liturgy

There’s a line in Ecclesiastes that says:

with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
the more knowledge, the more grief (Eccl. 1:18).

I don’t know how much I wisdom I’ve accumulated in my short span of years, but I have accumulated knowledge of certain subjects, and it can indeed cause grief. This frequently comes home to me when I am at Mass and listening to the way the standard American liturgical translation butchers what is said in the Scriptures. A few years ago, this really drove me nuts, and every time I would go to Mass (which was basically daily), I would tense up at the readings, waiting to see what would be translated wrong this time.

But I got over it.

I realized with time that God doesn’t want us to give away our peace to others, including incompetent translators. Getting mad has a purpose if there is something one can do about it, but if one can’t do anything to bring about positive change then it only hurts oneself. God doesn’t want that. So I chilled out, and these days it takes a bit more to rattle me. But it does happen from time to time.

Yesterday, Palm Sunday, it did.

You may recall how a few years ago a new lectionary for Sunday Mass and there was a big hullabaloo about the use of gender-revisionist language in it. The Holy See appointed a commission of three American cardinals to go over the text and strip out the revisionist language. This they did–almost. They left in some allegedly "minor" instances of "horizontal" revisionist language, such as representing St. Paul as having said "brothers and sisters," where in fact he said "brothers."

I’ve never been happy with this. Any tampering with Scripture to suit a social-political agenda is sacrilege, as far as I’m concerned. The text should be translated as faithfully as possible, given the capacities of the receptor language, and any needed side explanations (like the fact that Paul includes female Christians when he says "brothers") should be made as needed in the homily. It is, after all the function of the homily to explain the readings (not to share jokes and anecdotes and bland exhortations to niceness).

Well, yesterday at Mass I ran into another–particularly inept–manifestation of gender-revisionism in the readings at Mass. Here’s the relevant passage:

They lit a fire in the middle of the courtyard and sat around it, and Peter sat down with them. When a maid saw him seated in the light, she looked intently at him and said, "This man too was with him."

But he denied it saying, "Woman, I do not know him."

A short while later someone else saw him and said, "You too are one of them"; but Peter answered, "My friend, I am not."

About an hour later, still another insisted, "Assuredly, this man too was with him, for he also is a Galilean."

But Peter said, "My friend, I do not know what you are talking about." Just as he was saying this, the cock crowed [Luke 22:55-60].

When I heard those "my friend"s in the text, I said to myself, "There’s no way that that’s what’s in the Greek," and indeed, it’s not. What Peter says is anthrōpe (pronounced AN-throw-peh), which is a form of direct address translating as "O man" or just "man." There is no way it means "friend," much less "my friend." That’s simply not what Peter said (and if he had, the guys might have turned to him and said, "You’re no friend of mine!"–not wanting to be associated with a follower of Jesus).

What makes this instance of revisionist language particularly inept is that the text has not been consistently gender-sanitized. Notice that Peter is left saying "Woman" to the maiden, which is what he does say in Greek (gunai, pronounced GOO-nai). This suggests that the gender revisionists who were at work on this text had a specific agenda. They weren’t trying to bring about gender "neutrality" in the texts, but to eliminate references to men.

The final twist in this is that there is another gender bungle in the text. You will notice that Peter is twice identified as "this man." Yet the word "man" is not in the Greek. The word is the pronoun houtos (HOO-toss), which just means "this." It’s true that this is the masculine form of the word, so you’d use it for a man (or a boy, or a thing referred to by a noun of the masculine grammatical gender), but the word "man" isn’t there. I’d want my Greek students to translate it as "this one" and save the word "man" for when the word anthrōpos or anēr is in the original.

What a mess. Too bad the cardinals didn’t get it completely cleaned up.

A reader writes:

What’s the deal with ‘Life Teen’ Masses? Are they a total no-no?

The canonical status of "LifeTeen Masses" is complicated at present. Here’s a list of some of the complications:

1. Liturgically speaking, there is no such thing as a "LifeTeen Mass." This is not a category that is recognized by Church law.
2. As far as I have been able to determine, the LifeTeen organization has no special indults to perform Mass differently than what ordinary liturgical law provides. As a result, LifeTeen needs to celebrate its Masses in accord with liturgical law.
3. Yet there are what appear to be clear violations of liturgical law in "LifeTeen Masses" (e.g., having teens stand around the altar during the consecration), as well as things of (at best) questionable status (e.g., saying things like "The Mass never ends" in place of "The Mass is over," the selection of music used in Mass).
4. LifeTeen advocates might argue that they have quotes from some ecclesiastics saying nice things about them, but Church officials say nice things about all kinds of organizations without implying a blanket endorsement of everything the organization does. In particular, nice quotes from ecclesiastics do not constitute permission to vary the way in which the liturgy is celebrated, and the Holy See would not want them represented as such.
5. LifeTeen advocates might argue that the unique features of their Masses are justified by the Directory for Masses with Children, but there are significant problems with this claim: (a) the directory in question does not appear to be intended for use with teenagers, (b) the directory does not authorize the kinds of changes found in "LifeTeen Masses," and (c) the directory makes the explicit point that children’s Masses are to be done in such a way as to lead children into the ordinary liturgy celebrated by adult Catholics; thus as the children get older, their experience of the liturgy should come to be more and more "normal," yet LifeTeen is giving them a far more divergent experience of the liturgy than normal childrens’ Masses, and just at the time they should be settling in to normal adult Masses according to the document. Also, (d) this directory is likely to be revised substantially as part of the current tightening up of liturgical law.
6. We don’t at present have an up or down statement from the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, but if they get enough inquiries from the faithful about "LifeTeen Masses," I suspect that we will. It’s always hard to predict what the Vatican would do, and it probably wouldn’t be as severe as what some might want, but I strongly suspect that LifeTeen would have to make significant adjustments as a result of one.
   

Another reader writes:

I love the work you are doing for our faith, and include you and
Catholic Answers in my prayers daily.

Thanks! I (and we) can use them!

Our pastor wants to have all the First Communicants sitting at tables
between the front row of pews and the Sanctuary steps, close to the
altar. The First Communicants will stand in front of their respective
tables to face the priest when he administers the Eucharist to each in
turn. This will occur at a special First Communion mass, apart from
the Sunday masses.

Is this an abuse? If so, could you please cite the appropriate
documents?

I’m not hearing anything here that is an abuse. It’s certainly one of those "please don’t eat the daisies" situations in that the legislator could not be expected to envision people putting tables between the pews and the sanctuary, but as long as the kids aren’t in the sanctuary, I’m not hearing anything that is a violation of law. The kids do need to kneel at the appropriate points in Mass, but if they do that at their tables, it doesn’t seem that anything illicit is being done. There’s nothing that says you have to be in a pew or seated with the rest of the faithful during Mass, or that you can’t use tables in lieu of a Communion rail. It’s just kind of an odd situation.