| Post Vatican Translations |
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| Written by Joanne Engel |
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The
The local priests who taught senior Religion scrapped the final text in our four-year religion course (an excellent series called, “Our Quest for Happiness”.) To replace it, they collaborated on a thick volume full of psycho-babble and situational ethics. I only remember one paragraph from the whole book. This paragraph was written in praise of a “wonderful” organization that was helping people to “plan” their families. (Hint: It wasn’t the Couple to Couple League!) My mother and father, both converts were well-grounded in the Church’s teachings on that subject. They helped me navigate this and other minefields. What about those whose parents didn’t know? I think it is very telling that I, with only seven children, am considered by my peers to be the mother of a “large” family. What does that make my mother with 13, or my sister with 12? Irksome, Father? We were torn from a beautiful, scripture and prayer-filled liturgy into a world of hootenanny and clown “masses”; Our Corpus Christi processions and Marian devotions were replaced by “liturgical dance”. Our Eucharistic Lord was shoved off the central altar, many times into a converted broom closet. Our main altars and Communion rails were chopped up to build Jacuzzis in the center aisle of our churches, so our priests could frolic during baptisms. Irksome, Father? We were ordered up off our knees into cafeteria lines to receive Holy Communion. Many of us are still persecuted for genuflecting, and for refusing to touch the Body of Christ with unpurified hands. You might say I’m just getting warmed up, but I don’t want this to be a diatribe so much as a catalyst for thought and conversation about the havoc wreaked in the name of some nebulous “Spirit” of Vatican II, by priests who now find it “irksome” to change a word here and there back to its original meaning. We’ve had our forty years in the desert. We must just hope that’s all it is, and not another Babylonian captivity!
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Irksome, Father? Where were you some forty years ago when the rug was being pulled out from under us? I was in my last year of high school. Some of it is sort of a blur (happening as fast as it did.) Some of it, however, is burned into my memory.
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Re:Post Vatican Translations
Oct 28 2007 03:05:29 I think I see a lot of tridentine movements shooting themselves in the foot. I personally love the tridentine...but a priest asked me not to return with my children because they were too loud (I had taken the crying baby to the vestibule, but that wasn't good enough). With a total 'no-tolerance' policy that traditionalists seem to hold, I don't see the movement going anywhere.
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Post Vatican Translations
Oct 22 2007 23:16:10 This thread discusses the Content article: Post Vatican Translations
I converted to the Church in 1980, so all I have ever known has been the Novus Ordo, and it was a gradual process to lead me towards Tradition. I am a lay Eucharistic Minister, and I see the looks on people's faces when they come through the Communion procession - their expressions say 'yeah, whatever...', as though they cannot wait to leave. I don't know if the current crop of folks under 40 is just not taught, not only to accept by faith Christ's Real Presence in the Eucharist - but if His Real Presence is even mentioned at all... One of the Dominican priests at my Church mentioned this at Mass yesterday, and you should have seen the looks on some people's faces. (Yes, I'm telling on myself: I admit I looked around a little to see how well received would be the idea of Christ, physically present, in the Eucharist.) Even though I have only been to two Tridentine Masses, just since 7 July, I long for Latin and bells and incense and altar rails, and above all, FOR REVERENCE. I'm sick and tired of kids slouching up the aisle in grungy jeans and rapper T-shirts, with their hands in their pockets. If they quit coming to Church at all, one half of me says 'I will pray that they will miss it badly enough to have second thoughts about leaving', and the other half says 'weed out the deadwood'. If they have to kneel at an altar rail and receive on the tongue instead of slouching up the aisle and sticking out a hand and then running for the door, either it will 'weed out the deadwood' or it will make them realize 'hey - this is for real...'. I realize I probably sound wayyy too judgmental; if so, I apologize. Even though I was in elementary school when all the changes took place, and was not raised in a Catholic family, even so I am drawn to "Mass as it was celebrated 100 years ago" and I figure 'hey - if it was good enough to be done this way for 2000=/- years, why throw out the baby with the bathwater overnight?" Like yesterday's Mass reading said: "When the Son of Man returns, think you that He will find faith on the earth?" Hmmmmm...... |
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