The weather is too nice today in New York. Come back to this page on Monday. We start this post with three quotations.

“Nonviolence seeks to ‘win’ not by destroying or even by humiliating the adversary, but by convincing him that there is a higher and more certain common good than can be attained by bombs and blood.
Nonviolence, ideally speaking, does not try to overcome the adversary by winning over him, but to turn him from an adversary into a collaborator by winning him over.”
Thomas Merton in Toward a Theology of Resistance p. 12.

Colin Powell, This I Believe.

“I believe in an America that each day gives new immigrants the same gift my parents received.

An America that lives by a constitution that inspires freedom and democracy around the world.

An America with a big, open, charitable heart that reaches out to people in need around the world.

An America that sometimes seems confused and is always noisy.

That noise has a name – it’s called democracy.”

"... doctrine develops and evolves, just as a seed grows into a tree".

Cardinal Newman, quoted in Jonathan Hill, The History of Christian Thought, (2003).

Thanks to all who passed these along.

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I have no idea where this appeared; I don't know who Donagh and T.S. are. Apologies, and the promise of attribution if and when the source is revealed. Thanks to Joe who provides many of these wonderful reflections.

Dear Donagh,
Have you any comment to make on the resurgence of Latin in the liturgy, and the new translation of the Mass? How do you honestly feel about it? T.S.

Dear T.S.,

I was with a group of people last year when one of them asked me if I intended to say Mass for them in Latin. “No,” I replied. “May I ask why not?” she said, “are you unable?” I replied that I was old enough to have said Mass in Latin many times. “Why not, then?” she persisted, “It’s a sacred language.” That was an interesting point. I said, “No. It was the language of the four soldiers who crucified Jesus. As they hammered metal spikes into his wrists and feet they were chatting in Latin.” Chatting about their pay, probably, and their holidays, and their girlfriends…. No, Latin was never a sacred language.

I failed to tell her that I have loved Latin since childhood - for a succession of reasons, beginning with a good teacher. It is a great language for clarity and precision. It was the language of western mediaeval Christendom, and it is very useful to be able to read mediaeval texts in the original; strange to say, it is easier to read them in Latin than in translation. Latin is one of the languages of tradition, but this does not make it a sacred language. It was once the vernacular. The Nicene Creed, which we say at Mass on Sundays, was originally written in Greek. It is named after the city of Nicaea where it was formulated at the first ecumenical council in 325 AD. Only later was it translated into the language of the people: Latin. Incidentally, the earliest Greek version had ‘We believe’ (pisteuomen), not ‘I believe’ as in Latin (credo). The present translation of the missal has ‘We’, but the new ‘translation’, due to come into force on the first Sunday of Advent, reverts to ‘I’.

People who want Mass in Latin will have it. My difficulty is with a language that is neither Latin nor English. Translating a text is like shipping goods from one country to another. They should be brought the full distance, not dumped half-way, in the middle of the sea. Unlike Anglicans, Catholics are fairly new to English in the Liturgy. The translation we have is good, but needed repairs in a few places. It is proper English, even if the collects are sometimes a bit flat. I'm afraid the new translation has more in common with the language of popular piety that we knew in the distant past: words and phrases half-translated from Latin or Italian. “Compassionate your Saviour thus sorely afflicted.”

It was not only popular piety that was afflicted with this hybrid language. The naming of the feast of the Assumption, for example, showed complete disregard for English. The word ‘translation’ itself was lost in translation; it meant the reburial of a saint’s remains in a different place. It is hard to see what was gained by such obscurantism.

I confess that I am not looking forward to the new translation of the missal. The danger is that it will only increase the feeling of vertigo that many Catholics experience at present. When we are being swept into a hurricane of change by events in the Church and in the world around us, we would have liked the Liturgy to remain as it has been for several decades. We are now taking such a great risk, and for so little – for less than nothing. “Only Son of the Father” is English; how is “Only Begotten Son” an improvement on that? How can you have a sentence that has no verb? – a sentence that begins with ‘And’? What is the word ‘therefore’ doing in the Liturgy? (it has a different weight from ‘ergo’ in Latin)… and hundreds of similar mistakes. We can only hope and pray that this new ‘translation’ will not be too great a distraction or an irritant. One thing is guaranteed: every day will be a field-day for liturgical spies.

In the end, the Liturgy is an action, not a lecture. What makes a real difference is the way it is celebrated, not just the words used. We all have our wish-lists. Mine would be for a liturgical speed-limit, and mandatory pauses – a more prayerful and contemplative experience. Now that this new translation is a done deed, let’s pray that nothing will hurt the Eucharist, this supersensitive nerve-centre of our faith.
Donagh

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An NCR editorial entitled, "Gay marriage, bishops and the crisis of leadership"

The vote approving same-sex marriage in New York is the latest and most glaring confirmation of some gloomy news for the Catholic church in the United States, and it’s not that gays have achieved the right to marry.

Rather, affirmed in the recent vote is the disturbing reality that the Catholic hierarchy has lost most of its credibility with the wider culture on matters of sexuality and personal morality, just as it has lost its authority within the Catholic community on the same issues. There are reasons -- and they have little to do with secularism, relativism or lingering influences of the wild 1960s -- why people are no longer listening to the bishops.

While we don’t want to minimize the seriousness of the concern of some over a societal redefinition of marriage, there are reasons we think the bishops’ hyperbolic reaction to laws such as that enacted in New York are not only wrong-headed but counterproductive.

First, even if bishops retained the stature they once had in the wider culture, it is evident in polls and politicians’ votes that neither most of the Catholic world nor the wider culture buys the church’s teaching that homosexuals are disordered and are thus relegated to sexless lives in order to remain in the Christian community.

A recent Quinnipiac University poll of registered New York voters found that 70 percent of voters say protestations of the law from religious leaders made no difference in their decision to support or reject it. According to Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, “On gay marriage, many of the people in the pews split with their bishops.”

That attitude does not spring so much from a stance of defiance, as some bishops would assert, but more from the experience of gays and lesbians themselves and their parents and siblings, extended family and friends who increasingly understand gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons as far more than the sum of their sexual orientation while also understanding that sexuality is at the core of a person’s identity.

To parents of a gay child, the idea that a group of men can claim to know the mind of God so perfectly that they can proclaim with unyielding certainty that God deems a significant portion of creation “disordered” is absurd. The label is not only demeaning but to contemporary Christians has no resonance with the heart of the Gospel.

To be sure, legislative battles are messy affairs. In Albany, the state’s bishops were embarrassingly outmaneuvered by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a divorced Catholic and parent; by the pro-gay-marriage lobby; and by both Democrats and Republicans. The bishops’ lobbying apparatus is a fangless relic. It is not a formidable opponent to seasoned political operators and elected officials, and it lacks any real threat of reprisal, the currency of politics.

If the bishops actually want laws to reflect Catholic values, they need a new, more sophisticated and potent model of legislative engagement.

Second, even if the bishops had a persuasive case to make and the legislative tools at their disposal, their public conduct in recent years -- wholesale excommunications, railing at politicians, denial of honorary degrees and speaking platforms at Catholic institutions, using the Eucharist as a political bludgeon, refusing to entertain any questions or dissenting opinions, and engaging in open warfare with the community’s thinkers as well as those, especially women, who have loyally served the church -- has resulted in a kind of episcopal caricature, the common scolds of the religion world, the caustic party of “no.” ...

The larger problem for the hierarchy, of course, is not persuading the secular culture of its point of view on sacramental marriage, but persuading its own adherents, and particularly young Catholics who now tend to drift off in scores before adulthood, that staying attached to the church is a compelling good, that the church is in fact relevant and will draw them closer to Christ and thus the freedom and fullness of a life of faith.

The bishops have little credibility in the wider culture and diminished authority within the church because in the case of sexual violence against young people by members of their clerical culture, they responded in ways that any reasonable and healthy segment of society would have considered disdainful.

... The vote in New York sends a strong message to Catholic leadership. The danger is not in the vote itself. The danger they face is far deeper -- a crisis of leadership and authority for which they have only themselves to blame.