June 11, 2006

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity will always be beyond complete intellectual grasp because it is not the invention of human minds. So the Holy Trinity is foremost the object of worship rather than speculation.

The Holy Spirit moves the faithful to worship the truth of the Triune God. Where worship is banal and uninspired, where it becomes isolated in the cultural moment as a self-congratulatory entertainment, it fails to apprehend the heavenly mysteries. The disastrous state of the Liturgy across our country is a sad commentary on the failure of revisions in the last generation, and the appalling attrition in Mass attendance is mute testimony to that failure. Recently I watched a group of visiting college students, zealous and well-intentioned, reduced to singing the most cloying and inferior “gathering songs” because they had been deprived, through no fault of their own, of solid Catholic worship and, instead of transfiguring a low culture, were infected by it. They were much like those Christians who told St. Paul (Acts 19) that they had “not so much as heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”

To help restore the heavenly vision in our sanctuaries, the Holy See in March of 2001 published Liturgiam authenticam on how the sacred texts should properly be translated. The “Vox Clara” commission, headed by Cardinal Pell of Australia, has been assiduous in improving the texts now in use. Some American bishops have been hesitant about this. Nothing so bespeaks a creaky bureaucracy as its failure to admit its mistakes. Addressing this reluctance from those who a generation ago radically disrupted the order of worship and now plead that any reform would be unsettling, Cardinal Arinze, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, reminded the U.S. bishops that they are bound to follow the directives in Liturgiam authenticam launched by John Paul II and coming to fulfillment under Benedict XVI. Arguments that there should be no reform because people have become accustomed to inferior translations are not acceptable. The Holy See has determined that there are strong reasons why the texts should be revised. Finally, the positive attitudes of the clergy in the United States will help the understanding of these reforms. Cardinal Pell and Cardinal Arinze recently have said Mass at our parish altar and we pray for their endeavors.

It will require humility and vigorous new leadership to admit that liturgical confusion in the last generation has harmed the Faith. As the Liturgy is the prime fountain for priestly vocations, authentic Catholic reform will inspire young men to the service of the altar. Liturgical abuses of the past generation have impeded the “Song of the Heavenly Jerusalem” appealing to future priests. The number of priestly vocations in our own archdiocese has been dismal in recent years, and we pray to the Holy Trinity that worship “in Spirit and in Truth” will change that.

Fr. George W. Rutler