We're into the third week now of using this new hybrid translation and people have started to talk to me about it. The reaction, to be honest, is universally negative. Strange language, sentences that seem awkward and hard to pronounce, words no one has ever heard before (no points for guessing they mean consubstantial, but a number of people have also asked me what oblation means). I said the first Eucharistic Prayer today because it was in the weekly missalette we use and people really didn't like it, long and verbose was the reaction.
Having said that, they're soldiering on and making the responses but no one likes it very much. In another parish, in another diocese, the priest was explaining that this was the new translation that had been provided and someone shouted out "what for?"
Scots Catholic (adults at least) are very non-confrontational. There's no left right tension here and neither Joan of Arc nor St. Agnes (parishes in MN) would gain any following. People are all in the centre and supportive, but this has gone down like a lead balloon.
I've also had mass in the two schools. In the primary school they had practised it the day before (I was there for that too) but when I said mass there were no responses at all. At the high school there were only teachers and they all made the old responses.
If it's this way in a radically non-Bolshie centrist place, what on earth will happen in the States and Canada, for instance, where people feel much more free to speak their minds.
As I say, just for your information and contemplation.
AND HERE IS ANOTHER ONE:
I’m in the UK, and have now had five or six Masses with the new words. For the record, I find the experience jarring and the translation near-illiterate. The biggest difficulty I find, for myself, is that I must endure the words because I cannot separate myself from the Mass. I must go back, week after week, and endure it, for where else do I go to receive the body blood, soul and divinity of the risen, glorified Jesus Christ?
Our priests are completely stuck, too. Their parishoners have the right to a proper Catholic Mass and, as much as we, priests and people, hate it, that is what they have to deliver. We are over a barrel, and we’re stuck with it for now and will remain so unless and until we can get something done about it.
The letters posted above, from the Praytellblog.com site, tell the story of how the faithful have been betrayed by imperious Roman bureaucrats. The stupidity and spinelessness of church leaders, especially the bishops who rubber-stamped this dreck (at least in its 2008 form, for the 2010 form has ten thousand unauthorized corrections), simply beggar belief. Faith needs to find a firm basis, to overcome the scandal posed by the ineptitude of its teachers.
Posted by: Spirit of Vatican II | October 03, 2011 at 07:50 PM
A 11-year old points out the obvious: they've made it worse! http://www.paulvallely.com/?p=4324
Posted by: Spirit of Vatican II | October 04, 2011 at 01:01 PM
If you really want to poke those imperious Roman bureaucrats in they eye, try this: boycott that horrible new translation and say the mass in Latin instead! That'll learn them fascists.
Posted by: Radicalfeministpoet | October 06, 2011 at 10:48 PM