Editor’s note: The following essay does not necessarily reflect the views of Pray Tell or its sponsors. It is posted because we think that it will be important, for the successful implementation of the new missal, to take account of the feelings of all members of the church.

I was really interested to read here a couple days ago about Clare Johnson’s talk in Australia, in which she dealt with the psychological issues raised by the new translations. [Could we please have the text in full?] If—and for me it’s still if—we have to introduce the new translation in its current form, we will certainly need all that psychologists can give us on the dysfunctions and pathologies at work when important change is just forced upon us.

But I fear that something more radical is required from our psychologists. Clare reads like a good and sensible person who, like many pastoral bishops, has been browbeaten into letting these regressive new texts be imposed. I deplore the resignation, the weary recognition of the inevitable, in Clare’s saying, “the transition to the MR3 is going to happen, … and as the ones who are going to have to implement and explain the MR3 … we need to begin now to prepare ourselves adequately ….” For me, that still presupposes too much. I know now that only something like a miracle will enable me to collude in the imposition of these texts. They do violence to our language, which has a beauty of its own quite unlike that of Latin (though is the missal good Latin anyway?). They do violence to at least my sense of what holiness is, what Church is. We can’t just let this catastrophe happen.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received when training for the priesthood was, “don’t preach what you don’t believe.” When these new translations are finally imposed, presumably on the First Sunday of Advent 2011, the only sermon I will be able honestly to preach will begin: “The lunatics are now running the asylum; the animals have taken over the zoo.” With the addition of “trust the Lord anyway”, this will be quite a good sermon for that particular Sunday. But there won’t be any other sermons possible. And by Christmas, it will have become boring.

Of course I won’t actually preach that sermon, out of reverence—reverence for God’s people at prayer. If the new texts are finally imposed, it will become impossible for me to continue functioning publicly as a priest in English. Presiding at Mass will require too much suppression of anger, of frustration, of passionately held conviction. I stand no chance of being able to preside at the eucharist responsibly and reverently, no chance of being able to pray publicly in a way that helps and incorporates others rather than hinders them. I see no alternative but to desist from a ministry I love, and which I have no desire on any other grounds to abandon.

I have noted that I live within walking distance of Sunday masses in modern foreign languages that I happen to speak; through the week I have a sensible Anglican church with daily Eucharist near me. But it will be a canonical hinterland. Priests outside parish ministry who couldn’t cope with the changes in the 1960s could nevertheless continue “saying their Mass”; then they got on with their lives. Some of them were distinguished and holy; some I have known and loved. I’m wondering whether I—once a young Turk in the liturgical vanguard—can emulate them and move into the eucharistic margins. Is it possible for me to cross a boundary and start “saying Mass” on my own? But I’ve never done that in many years of priesthood. Both because of the formation I received and as a matter of personal conviction, I believe that such a practice is itself a notable “liturgical abuse,”—a good friend recently pointed out how the Vatican has taken to using this phrase just when our systemic failures regarding child abuse have come to light— confusing the corporate prayer of the Church with the priest’s personal piety. It’s far from clear what to do: neither going Anglican, nor going it alone, nor just giving up are attractive options. It feels like I’m being spiritually strangled.

MR3 and its new translation will throw daily into our faces a repudiation by Roman authority of how the English-speaking churches have received Vatican II (critics, please note the precision of my language). The conflicts—about doctrine, liberation, sexual morality, social justice and the rest—do not need to be rehearsed here. But so far they have been manageable, because the liturgy has remained substantially a reformed space, a warm and human space, a place of the Father and Jesus making their home with those who love them. It has enabled those of us who are right-thinking, generous and liberal as God is right-thinking, generous and liberal, to cope in faith with the successive erosions of the renewal that once captivated us. But if—let’s hope it’s if—the forces of reaction come to mold the language of our worship, it will be as though the Council, and the liberation it brought to a generation of Catholics damaged by the inhumanities of old-style Catholicism, has been finally reversed.

Exceptionally, this contribution is appearing anonymously. Because I am a priest with a modest public profile, and have commitments of loyalty to others, I cannot say on the public record what I think about many issues. And this need for anonymity indicates an important part of the problem. If you love truth and the church enough to bother criticizing authority when it behaves abusively, you are smeared as a dissenter, as a “disloyal Catholic,” as “unfaithful.” Moreover you run up against important considerations about “avoiding scandal,” because there are good reasons why Catholic ministers should not in normal circumstances criticize their superiors in public. But these dynamics of loyalty have a terrible shadow side; they prevent reality from being seen for what it is. We come to confuse orthodoxy with conformity, fidelity with compliance, obedience with lack of imagination.

Healthy Catholicism requires a respect for authority; but it also requires an authority which does not behave like a brick wall. I contributed to the new translation of MR3 indirectly when my ordinary was consulted, confidentially of course (what were they trying to hide with this ‘not in front of the children’ policy?), regarding a draft version. Helped by a number of his priests, he sent in a detailed, constructive, not entirely negative set of reactions. The episcopal office in question—or so I am told—could not be bothered even to acknowledge the letter. The message was clear: Rome was bullying this through regardless, and nothing coming from the countries concerned was going to make any difference. No one was interested in listening.

I am sure that Clare Johnson is right to highlight the psychological issues raised by the way the new texts are simply being imposed on us. Admittedly there was consultation of a sort among the bishops about the new texts—though I remain to be convinced that any sane and pastoral bishop, when not befuddled by deference, thinks these changes are for the better. There was no consultation about the key document informing them, Liturgiam allegedly authenticam. That was where the trouble started. The truth is that the demonic forces behind the impending changes avoid the light that would come with real consultation, with actually listening to people and reality, just as their agenda is to prevent human reality find its proper expression, in its own language, within the Church’s liturgy. I see little point in trying now to introduce some element of “involving people in how the changes happen.” If Clare is right that we are really past a point of no return—and again, I am hoping against hope that she is not—then we need something more than strategies of a belated and spurious co-ownership. We need to cultivate holy resistance.