The one-year countdown to the new Missal is about to begin. Priest friends of mine tell me that they are so excited that they almost try not to think about it. Why? Because contemplating what is coming up might engender too much dissatisfaction with the current translation. Though it is now a lame-duck translation, there are still a year’s worth of daily and Sunday Masses to say, and too much disgruntlement is not good for the soul.
As a layperson, I’m beside myself with anticipation and glee about the change. For most people, it will not be a dramatic change. The words, and the music too we can hope, will be more fitting, more engaging, more compelling, more believable, but the difference will not strike people immediately. The big change is what the new translation will provide for people’s conception of the faith over long term. The new Missal translation will gradually but determinedly bring into alignment what we believe with how we pray as Catholic people.
The results, I predict, will be very profound.
We can read the Catholic Catechism and have those beliefs reinforced at Sunday Mass. We can read the old writings on the meaning and theology of the Mass and not be puzzled by references to to its sacrificial aspect and its theocentricity. The language will be more remote from everyday speech and thus elicit a deeper sense of reflection on the part of everyone present. Whereas the lame-duck translation has all the drama of a phonebook, the new translation with its high tone and accurate rendering of the Latin will impress upon everyone a sense of the profound significance of what is taking place.
Scholars and journalists will be busy for decades hence trying to make sense out of what happened to make this corrected translation so necessary. Regardless, what we are seeing here is a dramatic chance for a second liturgical reform long after the first one faltered so terribly and high very high cost.
The differences between the two are striking and reach into the very structure of even the ordinary chants of the Mass. The opening lines of the Gloria, for example, in the old translation seem to be an obvious mistranslation, but they had a purpose: to convert a beautiful hymn written in prose into metrical poetry.
To be clear here, the prayers of the Mass and all Catholic liturgy are not supposed to have a poetic meter (sequences are a different issue); they are elegant prose such as we find in the Psalms and Holy Scripture generally. For this reason, chant has always been the favored form of music. Even the polyphony that elaborates on the chant is not structure in a way to have the same catchiness and regular text-rhythm that you find in pop music.
Consider the Gloria. The current translation opens with the following accents:
Glory to God in the highest
and peace to his people on earth
This has the lilt of a limerick that sets well in metrical form. Notice where the accents occur and how they fit so well with a 6/8 musical meter, almost as if the translators intended it this way.
The new translation is different. It makes no effort to cram the words into some sort of metric pattern:
Glory to God in the highest
and on earth, peace to people of good will.
Composers complained bitterly about this second line, that it doesn’t fit into their models. The publishers of existing settings of the Gloria – settings that we know all too well – have had a terrible time attempting to shove this new translation into their existing melodic frameworks. Some of the results have been strained at best; laughable at worst. I’ve yet to hear even one “revised” Gloria based on an existing tune that sounds like it was written to work this way. You can put a square peg in a round hole, but it takes a lot of pounding and there is always something lost in the process.
I personally consider all of this great. And why? Because it tilts the balance of decision making toward chant-based settings. The purpose of chant is to give flight to the text. That is the central concern. It is not about writing catchy tunes or causing you to want to dance or sway side to side. It is supposed to be about prayer. We pray in prose. There are prayers written in poetry but guess what? Those are for children.
This new translation, then, gives a great new push forward for the third option that was never taken after the Second Vatican Council: English chant. What happened to it back when? Well, it was squeezed out in the great battle between two sides. One side was understandably reluctant to accept any compromise with the core of Latin chants. They worried that English chant for either the ordinary settings of the Mass or for the propers would end up as a deadly blow to the masterpieces of Latin chant. They were right to fear this, and, had I been alive and active at the time, I might have taken this position. It is a defensible position, one that attempted to hold back the tide.
The downside of this point of view is that it ceded the entire reform effort to people with an agenda that can only be described as goofy. The worst among this bunch exhibited an iconoclastic impulse: topple the power of the conductors, the organists, and fancy-pants scholas and replace them all with folk musicians without training so that they can lead the People of God into a new age! This was the catastrophic idea, one that ended up prevailing in more places that most people care to admit.
Lost in this entire struggle were the voices of moderation, the people who very sensibly saw that the liturgical reform provided an opportunity for chant in English and for learning from what was in fact a very long tradition of doing this very thing in the Anglican community. There were some people out there who took this position but their voices were drowned out and their manuscripts barely saw the light of day. We know the results.
Something of the same dynamic threatens us today as we look toward the new Missal release. On one side, there are growing numbers of people attached to the 1962 form, and it is wonderful thing that they have that attachment and the freedom to attend the old Mass. Once again, it is understandable but these people have very little interest in getting involved in the reform of the rite of Paul VI. They figure that they do not have a dog in this fight. On the other side, we have the publishers and advocates of “praise music” who do not want to see the market dry up for their existing styles and approaches. To them, English chant, especially that which is distributed at no charge, represents a threat to their long-term fiduciary interests.
I suspect that it is going to be a Herculean task to overcome this problem as we look forward to the new Missal release. ICEL is doing everything that it can. It has released a DVD (and at some point, this DVD might actually be made available for purchase, provided the USCCB can find someone who knows who to run a website). The publishers are being required to print the Missal chants in their liturgical materials. ICEL itself is sending people out to do workshops and explain to people who to sing the Mass. The goal is to promote a national Mass setting and a national model of sung dialogues.
There are several editions of chant propers in English currently being made available for free online. The Chantcafe.com is posting weekly propers. Fr. Samuel Weber is making his weekly propers available. By next November, some of these will be in print in books for sale.
The Church Music Association of American (which needs your support!) has already produced youtubes of all the chants of the Missal, beautifully sung with the sheet music on display as the voice proceeds. These have been viewed thousands of times by priests and directors of music. These are great first steps.
There are 12 months remaining, and there is a role for everyone here. It is actually possible that we might yet see something closer to what the fathers of the Council imagined. Now is the time. English chant in the Catholic Mass might be given a second lease on life. It is important that everyone who cares about solemn liturgy and the Catholic faith join in the effort.
