Inside
NCR
The recent column by Kathleen
MacInnis Kichline, a parish liturgist, on the General Instruction on the Roman
Missal and this week’s story on the General Instruction, as voted on by
the U.S. bishops earlier this month, reminded me of a session I attended in
1983 just after the revised Code of Canon Law was released.
The story on Page 5 in this issue and the Kichline column (Nov.
15) are about new norms for the celebration of Mass and are a further rollback
of reforms that grew out of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). The norms
represent the latest chapter in a long struggle by some in the church to shove
all of those reforms back into the pre-Vatican II tube.
They have succeeded, at least on paper, along the way ambushing
good people, demeaning long and distinguished careers and generally telling
bishops, scholars and theologians that they and the late Pope Paul VI had it
all wrong and didn’t really understand the intent of the council they
oversaw, attended and helped to fashion.
It all sounds rather arrogant -- and it is. Last year I had a chat
with a young priest who worked in a curial office in Rome. We got talking about
liturgy. A few minutes into his speech on the need for the church to be
pastorally attentive to all the world, not just the English-speaking part of
it, I ventured a question. When, I asked, did the bishops who attended the
Second Vatican Council and understood its fulfillment in organizations like the
International Committee on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) and with translation
processes approved by a previous pope, cease to be our pastors? How can we roll
back, as the church is now doing, what they had achieved?
“Good question,” he responded, then explained that what
was being done now is not a rollback, because “those bishops did not have
the authority to do what they had done.”
More than arrogant, it is sad. But that kind of thinking and
ecclesiastical freelancing is in the ascendancy during this papacy.
I said earlier that the revisionists
have won, at least on paper. But there is another arena where, I believe, the
renewal is out of the tube and it is more difficult to put it back -- in the
parish.
I have been to too many places where the prayer books say one
thing and the congregation says another. Where the official rubrics say one
thing and the congregations and priests do another. Inclusive language flows
freely and easily from the lips of the congregants because it makes sense.
Prayer books, after all, don’t pray; people do.
I don’t mean to suggest that one should simply dismiss
anything that comes from Rome, or that liturgy and the rules governing worship
should not come under scrutiny or discussion. But the rules governing whether a
priest can bless a child in the Communion line or when and to whom a priest can
give a kiss of peace or who can or can’t clean Communion vessels and about
kneeling and standing, as if the faith and the life of the community depended
upon them, simply seem irrelevant. They can cause enormous upset and even
conflict at the local level if you let them.
A suggestion occurs from that 1983
session I attended. It was essentially a panel discussion (a very long one, as
I recall), to pick over all the changes in the revised Code of Canon Law.
Scholars parsed, sometimes line by line, their sense of whether and what
laypeople were gaining, or how religious women were viewed by virtue of how
they were portrayed in the code. In tedious detail they tried to determine if
the church were becoming a “more equal” society or if clergy still
trumped every other category.
At the end of the session a priest who had lived a long time in
Rome and who was asked to sum it up, applauded all the experts for their fine
presentations, but added that they were missing one element in their
interpretation of the new code: the Italian shrug. Law to Italians means
something far different, he said, than to those of us raised in the
Anglo-American tradition where every punctuation mark, every word, has to mean
what it means, where the law is reverenced in its fine details. Italians --
important to understand because the new code had come from that environment --
like to have good laws, but having fashioned the law, they then say, “Now
we’ll make an arrangement. We’ll find a way around it.”
So, be more Roman than the Romans. Applaud the blizzard of new
rules issuing from the Vatican. And make some arrangements.
-- Tom Roberts
My e-mail address is troberts@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, November 29,
2002
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