At the end of Keith Peckler’s book Dynamic Equivalence: The Living Language of Christian Worship, he quotes the Italian Benedictine liturgist, Salvator Marsili, writing at the end of the Second Vatican Council about this issue of the changeover from liturgy entirely in Latin to the use of modern languages in worship.
In light of the coming fiftieth anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s first celebration of liturgy in the vernacular, I thought it might be worthwhile to post at least part of Marsili’s thought-provoking reflection. I’ve put into boldface type the parts that seem to me to be particularly interesting.
If a new liturgical language is not created, the liturgy will remain always and uniquely a ‘festive garment’ which, as we know, can have exotic forms and colors that glitter but fail to express what lies within them. Above all, this would be the sign that our theology has not rethought revelation as something new, as the announcement of presence (kerygma), and that the ‘eternal’ reality of the ‘history of salvation’ has not been ‘temporalized’ in a language which ‘incarnates’ it in our time, and that therefore it has ceased to be a ‘history’ and remained only an ‘account’ of a history made in terms and accents of other times.
But today, precisely because of the summons of Vatican Council II, there is ever-increasing, lively awareness that not only did God speak ‘in diverse manners… and in times past (olim)’ but also ‘at the end of these days (novissime)’ [that is, today] he has spoken to us by his Son (Heb. 1:1-2); therefore it is just and proper that we respond to this modern Word with a new liturgy which is equally modern and not merely with translations. Only in this way will the liturgy cease to be a ‘monument of the past’ and become an expression of the mystery of Christ and of the Church in the ‘present moment.’1
In my recent column at Commonweal, I drew a connection between the vernacular liturgy and the famous “opening to the world” which was the achievement of the Second Vatican Council. I asserted that the liturgy constitution, Sacrosanctum Concilium, and the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et spes, ought to be read together and that if we forget Gaudium et spes, we lose sight of the essential outward orientation of the whole reform.
The passage from Marsili quoted above goes even further, suggesting that a theological challenge and obligation lie within the reform of the liturgy — a challenge to incarnate the message of salvation in our own times, and an obligation to continue the story of salvation by so doing. This is not only a moral imperative but a theological one.
Marsili wrote this long before Liturgiam authenticam took the opposite view of the challenge and obligation that is laid upon the Church with respect to texts. The task of preservation was uppermost in the minds of those who wrote the 2001 instruction on translation. In fact, it might not be too much to say that the instruction actually collapses the two concepts: the mystery, and the monument to the past.
These are two divergent views: the imperative to temporalize the mystery in our own time as a way of continuing the story, contrasted with the imperative to preserve a monument to the past as a guarantee of the presence of the mystery in the liturgy.
Which view is the truer one? Are both pointing to important realities and the question is where to set the balance? It is something to think about.
Because I am unable to monitor discussion at this time, and the vernacular has already been discussed at length elsewhere on Pray Tell, comments on this thread are closed.
1 Quote taken from Keith F. Pecklers, SJ, Dynamic Equivalence: The Living Language of Christian Worship; Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 2003, p. 226-227.