People on PrayTell, including me, have been making connections between the abuse crisis and the upcoming imposition of the newly translated Roman missal. It’s a delicate topic, and the editor has been careful. But with the Church very much in the headlines these days, perhaps the time is now ripe for it to be explored a bit more.

As I see it, there are four different ways in which the connections can be made between magisterial failures regarding child abuse and the magisterial solicitude regarding “liturgical abuse” that the new translations evince.

Firstly, English-speaking Catholics who are broadly content with the liturgical status quo may claim to experience Rome’s unilateral and high-handed imposition on us of Liturgiam- allegedly-Authenticam as a remote (obviously no more that that) echo of the plight of children under abusive adult authority. The sacking of the previous ICEL and the junking of the 1998 ICEL translation contribute here. Important considerations from us below—after all it’s we who actually speak the language in question—have been ignored; power has being exercised unfairly, unwisely and against any spirit of collegiality. “You must accept the changes, even if you do not like them, in order to preserve the good order of the Church” echoes, however distantly, the damaging message that can so easily be unconsciously absorbed by the abused: “you mustn’t tell anyone about what’s happening to you in order to preserve the family’s reputation.”

Second, at least some of us—I’m not claiming that this applies to everyone—who were on the wrong end of abusive behavior from Catholic authority in the preconciliar church experienced the loosening up of the late 1960s as a liberation, and as an important support in our struggles not just to survive emotionally and psychologically, but to grow towards mature Christian discipleship. If we are now to go back to a version of how things were, the grief issues, as Clare Johnson has suggested on this blog earlier, are indeed large ones. (For what it’s worth, it’s this line of connection that is for me personally the most significant—see this.)

Third, in post-V2 liturgy at its best, there is a holy intimacy and noble simplicity, a plain-English truthfulness and sincerity, a naming things for what they are, that are now going to be removed, and replaced with something more distant, more elevated, and more Latinate. Even when their content is valid and fair, Vatican statements on the abuse crisis, when literally translated, often have an abstract tone that comes across as off-putting and insensitive. There is a danger that what’s intended as greater reverence and “fidelity” in the liturgy will be discredited in its hearers’ experience by its similarity to he Roman evasiveness regarding the abuse crisis—an evasiveness that decent people in non-Latin cultures have found so exasperating. Literal, ‘formal equivalence’ translations from Latin into English can easily sound stilted, unclear and obfuscatory. The point applies to the Vatican’s style of communication generally; the point also applies to the proposed new translations. And the abuse crisis gives it a new sharpness.

Fourth, authority can introduce change successfully only with the consent of the wider body. If the immediate instincts of sane Catholics are against the new translations, such consent is going to require an act of trust. It’s doubtful that church authority, in the wake of the abuse crisis, now has enough emotional credit in the bank with the faithful at large, in the way that it did in 1964, for that trust to be given. It’s going to be much harder than it was in 1964 for church authority to carry people along a path of change—especially when most English-speaking bishops are projecting loyalty and deference in their implementing of the Rome-imposed changes rather than any real pastoral conviction of their own.

Though plenty might be said against these arguments, they all seem to me at least broadly cogent. And if this overall analysis is remotely correct, then it’s important we recognise:

  • how in different ways the abuse crisis is interacting with the proposed liturgical changes and generating a range of different arguments for not implementing them;
  • how each of the arguments has a distinctive force in its own right;
  • how the close association of the arguments at once compounds their emotional force and obscures their precise imports;
  • how a point for or against any one of the particular arguments will not necessarily apply to any of the others.

One is obviously hesitant to invoke the sexual abuse crisis in connection with the forthcoming translation. There is something tasteless and below-the-belt about doing so when authority’s position on the abuse question is so difficult, and when it is receiving criticism from outside that is sometimes unfair. I still hope that our bishops (note: it’s properly their job, not the Vatican’s) will come to their senses and call a halt to the new translation, not because of the overlap with the abuse crisis, but simply because the new translation represents bad liturgical policy and bad pastoral care. But if they can’t or won’t hear more high-minded arguments, then maybe more emotive considerations will persuade them.

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