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New missal to address 'serious theological flaws'
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| By Anthony Barich
21 February, 2010 |
The newly translated Roman Missal to be issued in Australian parishes in 2011 will help address the serious theological problems of the 1973 missal currently in use, said Archbishop Mark Coleridge.
In the process, it will more faithfully implement the liturgical vision of the Second Vatican Council and also fulfill the reforms of the much-maligned 1570 Council of Trent, Archbishop Coleridge told approximately 200 liturgists gathered in Perth in early February.
Archbishop Coleridge of Canberra-Goulburn is chairman of the Roman Missal Editorial Committee of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy; he is also chair of the Australian bishops’ Liturgy Commission.
While Archbishop Coleridge acknowledged that the missal used since 1973 has made gains in accessibility, participation, Scripture, adaptation and inculturation, he said it also has “serious problems theologically” and “consistently bleaches out metaphor, which does scant justice to the highly metaphoric discourse” of Scripture and early Christian writers.
This is the result of a misunderstanding of Vatican II’s reforms, he said.
Occasional claims of the Roman Missal revisions being a “merely political right-wing plot of the Church” to turn the clock back miss the point of reform and of the purpose of the Mass, which is “a gift from God, not something to be manipulated,” he said.
“Nothing will happen unless we move beyond ideology and reducing the Church to politics and the slogans that go with them, which are unhelpful,” he said.
Archbishop Coleridge said that one of the ironies of criticism of the new missal is that “we can fail to attend to history even though perhaps the most fundamental achievement of Vatican II was the restoration of historical consciousness to the life of the Catholic Church.”
“A claim that troubles me is that this initiative is somehow a retreat from all that Vatican II tried to promote and enact and a betrayal, therefore, of the (Second Vatican) Council and, by implication, the Holy Spirit,” Archbishop Coleridge said.
He said if that were true, he and thousands of others involved in the missal process “would not have shed the blood, sweat and tears of the last seven years.” CNS
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