Imagine attending a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry V in which the actor playing King Harry decided to improvise the St Crispin’s Day speech. Or consider making the annual cultural pilgrimage to Stratford only to hear the England speech in Richard II bowdlerized by an overly zealous actor driven by a desire to make the speech “relevant” or “meaningful” to twenty-first century Canadians. Chances are that you, your guests, and colleagues would be so offended that you would leave the theatre early, request a refund, and make plans to explore the offerings at Niagara-on-the-Lake later in the season. After all, you had every right and legitimate expectation to hear the words of Shakespeare declaimed by an actor who had the necessary skills, training, taste to present such speeches on the stage. Who could blame you for your disappointment and anger?

Handing on sacred words

            Greater than any stage play contrived even by the genius of William Shakespeare or the wit of Oscar Wilde is the sacred liturgy entrusted to the Church by Christ Our Lord through His apostles and their legitimate successors. As St Paul explains to the Corinthians,

For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. 1 Cor 23-26

The Church places on the lips of her priests and ministers antiphons, prayer formulae, dialogical exchanges, readings, and proclamations that have been transmitted over the centuries from one generation to the next. Whether delivered in Hebrew or Aramaic, Greek or Latin, Glagolitic or English, these phrases and formularies and scriptural passages all represent God’s self-communication to the Church and the Church’s own response to her Lord. They constitute a dialogue between earth and heaven that ought to inspire awe and wonder in every minister of the sanctuary and every member of the congregation. Each participant in the liturgical action ought to be transported by the sacred liturgy.

            Then why do we find ourselves so often bored, distracted, or generally out of sorts when we get to church on a Sunday morning? The reasons of course may be many. Granted, those who aspire to higher things in music and literature may find fault with the performance of the choir or the inept delivery of the liturgical or biblical texts. Perhaps poor translations play some role in your malaise. Homilies, too, when ill prepared, if prepared at all, can wear on the patience of even the most steadfast members of a congregation. But what grates on the system more than the tawdry spectacle of untrained servers fumbling through the intricacies of the offertory rite or the groans evinced by too ambitious a soloist is the liturgical improviser who insists upon breaking up the flow of the sacred rites with his own spontaneous remarks or his own substitution for the liturgical texts.

Pope Pius XII

            When in the first half of the twentieth century the question arose whether the vernacular ought to be introduced for use in the Mass of the Roman Rite, Pope Pius XII, who issued the first papal encyclical on the sacred liturgy Mediator Dei (20 November 1947), withheld permission to use the vernacular until such time as the Apostolic See should determine it feasible to do so. Pius XII, while recognizing that “the use of the mother tongue in connection with several of the rites may be of much advantage to the people,” nevertheless regarded the Latin language as “a manifest and beautiful sign of unity, as well as an effective antidote for any corruption of doctrinal truth” (MD 60). He hesitated to grant widespread use of the vernacular in the Mass lest the doctrinal terminology so carefully refined over the centuries by various councils of the Church and endorsed by the successors of St Peter should suffer any compromise. Such a risk is involved in any translation.

New translations

            As most church-goers are aware, the current translations of the sacred texts prayed and proclaimed at Mass have undergone intense scrutiny over the last few decades. New translations are currently awaiting the approval of the Holy See. Great care is being spent on the accuracy and the “proclaimability” of the new translations of the Order of Mass and the many texts proper to particular feasts and celebrations. This level of attention is required because inaccuracies in liturgical expression usually give rise to errors in doctrine.

Errors in doctrine

            Pelagian and semi-Pelagian language in Collects—which imply that we are the principal agents of our own salvation—put at risk the faith of clergy and laity alike. If we keep petitioning God in our prayers simply to help us do this or that, we may well conclude that God is merely a secondary agent, and that the burden of our own salvation really rests with us. Take for example the opening prayer of the Fourth Sunday of the Year: “Lord, help us to love you with all our hearts and to love all men as you love them” (emphasis added). This is considerably weaker than the great refrain of Father Frederick Faber’s well-loved hymn, Jesus My Lord My God My All: “Sweet Sacrament, we Thee adore! Oh make us love Thee more and more!” Note the stronger verb in that refrain: “O make us love Thee more and more!” God is not just some glorified cheerleader urging us on to exercise our power to save ourselves. It is He who gives us everything that we are and everything that we have. Yes, it is for us to accept or reject His grace; but the impulse of grace is always His. The collects have undergone close review, and we may expect at Mass to hear, rather soon, stronger verbs than hitherto have been used in reference to God’s action: “pour forth,” “increase,” “grant,” “bestow,” “strengthen,” “send,” “give,” “inspire,” “enlighten,” “direct,” “bedew,” and “bless.”

No to improvising celebrants

            More serious issues have arisen when celebrants take it upon themselves to introduce into the sacred liturgy their own terminology rather than the Church’s carefully nuanced language. One glaring example involves the use of the names of the divine Persons of the Holy Trinity in the sign of the cross and in the rite of baptism. Eager to appease unfounded feminist claims that the Church’s language somehow was “excluding” women from full, active, and conscious participation at Mass and in the other sacraments, some celebrants in the past few decades presumed to change the formula from “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” to: “In the name of the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sanctifier.” The personally “revised” formula refers to attributes of the Holy Trinity and may well lead to widespread confusion.

            Were not the world and all creation brought into being by the Word (the Logos) of the Father? The Son then can be recognized as having created the universe. The Church sings the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus at Pentecost and at ordinations. Is the Holy Spirit not correctly called by the Church in her hymns “the Creator Spirit”? Yet only the first Person of the Blessed Trinity is accurately called “the Father,” for He generates in eternity His Logos, His Word, His Son (the “sole-Begotten”). Likewise both the Father and the Son eternally breathe forth (spirare) their Love for and to each other. This perfect Love is the Holy Spirit, the Breath of God! Hence the short phrase “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” expresses several profound truths that accurately refer to the processions within the communion of love called the Holy Trinity. For any priest or minister to presume to change, even in a translation, the Church’s venerable and ancient language in the very exercise of her own liturgy is to betoken an unprecedented arrogance.

A case in point: the Sign of the Cross

            The harm done to the faithful by such reckless behaviour is incalculable. This is particularly true regarding those who may have been presented to the Church as candidates for baptism but who were baptized not “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, but “In the name of the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sanctifier.” The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith recently clarified that any person putatively baptized “In the name of the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sanctifier” has not undergone Christian baptism. Hence such a person was not baptized validly, and therefore must undergo a valid baptism in order to be recognized by the Church as a Christian.

            The words of liturgical formulae are laden with doctrinal and theological meaning. They deserve therefore to be delivered accurately and with conviction. Priests who have suffered lacunae in their formation ought to avail themselves of the best means possible to remedy such shortcomings. Refresher courses for clergy formerly caught in the theological maelstrom of the 1960s and 1970s are provided by various dioceses and monastic communities. Reading the actual texts of the liturgy in a spirit of prayer and meditative discernment can likewise help a priest to deepen his appreciation of the prayers and readings that he daily pronounces at Mass and in the Divine Office.

            The lay faithful, too, stand to profit from carefully reading ahead of time the prayers and lessons of the upcoming Sunday Mass. Now that the Mass is offered widely in the vernacular, there is little if any need to carry about in church a hand missal or missalette to be read in the pews during the actual liturgical rites. The vernacular allows participants an immediacy of understanding without need for recourse to such a prayer aid as a missalette. Hand missals and missalettes afford us the best service today by furnishing us with the texts of upcoming liturgies so that we may plan them with care and meditate upon these readings and formulae with much spiritual profit.

It takes only a few minutes to prepare

            If we were to take some time on the evening before attending Mass to review the readings and prayers, we would begin to recognize the connection between our last Mass and the one that we are about to celebrate on the morrow. The readings serve as the kindling for our prayer. They become the texts of our lectio divina, our spiritual reading. As we read them and then re-read them slowly and meditatively, “chewing” as it were on God’s Word, and savouring His message, they become more intelligible to our mind and more delightful to our inward sense. Then certain phrases begin to speak to our heart, our affections. This is what the Church calls the prayer of meditation. This kind of prayer matures the Christian, by cultivating spiritual taste and tutoring the affections; it opens up the powers of the soul, thereby preparing the Christian for full, active, and conscious participation at Mass. Our own piety becomes less subjective and governed by whim. We begin to intuit the mind of the Church and allow the great mysteries of the Faith to exercise their formative influence on us.

            If we allow the sacred liturgy to form us, rather than to presume to re-form the liturgy, we will begin to plumb hitherto unknown depths in the texts prayed and proclaimed in church. We will find no need to improvise the words of the Church. In fact, we will be properly attuned to hear and to cherish these beautiful prayers and readings as reflections of what the Church teaches and what she is at her deepest, most intimate level.

Preparation leads to meditation

            Duly disposed and diligently prepared for liturgical worship, we will find ourselves less distracted by the infelicities of limited musicians and more intent on the liturgical proceedings. We will have come to appreciate the great continuity in the biblical readings from one week to another, from one day to the next. Once we have given the content of the liturgy some thought beforehand, we may just find ourselves ready and eager to engage the homilist after Mass in the parish hall amid coffee and doughnuts.

            The lay faithful come to Mass and to the sacraments for spiritual nourishment. The readings and prayer texts may be as familiar to them as Shakespeare’s speeches are to theatregoers. For this very reason, they have legitimate aspirations to hear the readings proclaimed without the intrusion of agenda-driven alternatives. The prayers, addressed to God, ought to be framed in the language of the Church, not her individual ministers however intense they may be (or not) in their personal piety. The Church provides us with entire cycles of prayer that reflect her own passage through the sacred mysteries over each year, each week, each day. The least we can do is to speak and sing with her voice so that we may hope, one day, to hear the voice of the Lover reply in tones familiar to the Beloved.

Fr Neil J. Roy, a priest of the Diocese of Peterborough, Ontario, teaches Liturgy and Sacramental Theology at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.