L'Audace

By Patrick Lally
1941 - 2002 R.I.P

Rome is seldom bold. The Church moves prudently, Her eyes always on the long and ceaseless march of the centuries. But she can move quickly and decisively. The recent appearance of Liturgiam Authenticam should dispell the liberal notion that Rome is arthritic or irrelevant. Our Mother can still hurl thunderbolts with youthful enthusiasm. It seems that we loyalists were right all the time about a lot of things and will eventually be able to say Credo instead of Credimus.

Eventually. The startling declaration that the liturgical goals of Vatican II have been frustrated by the endless adaptions, variants and downright treasonous interpretations of the Missal of Paul VI has been tempered by a prudent qualification. The people who caused the mess in the first place have five years to comply with John Paul's order to clean up the Mass texts. And we can expect some major stonewalling by all the usual suspects, the liberal bishops, their liberal chanceries and the liturgical Huns and Visigoths who are still out there twisting, obscuring and smashing things.

And Rome will be prudent, and I will have to wait. But I am Irish and prudence is not one of my race's strongest characteristics. We Irish understand, and usually follow to the extreme Napoleon's great maxim, l'audace, l'audace, toujour l'audace! Boldness, boldness, always boldness!

Five years is long. We Traditional Latin Mass lovers know, if we really are honest, that the Church will never roll back the clock to 1962. Adoremus is on the right track, but, God bless them, they are too academic and scholarly and prudent for Irishmen like me, gritting our teeth and hiding from the liturgical commandos. What to do then?

Here's what. Some years ago I came home from Mass steaming as usual. I suppose I should have been grateful that the old Roman Canon had made a rare appearance. So rare that I had never paid much attention to the English translation. But this day I had. It was awful. Besides the inaccuracies, the ICEL version had all the beauty of the directions for the assembly of a Wal-Mart charcoal grill...poorly translated from Korean.

Anybody can do better than this, I thought. So I sat down and in two hours had a translation that was far better, and faithful to the Latin text. I am no Latinist, nor am I a theologian. And, St. Patrick be praised, I am certainly not guilty of being a liturgist. If I can do this, then all those big guns at Adoremus could turn out a complete Ordinary of the Mass in week or so, and then maybe some even bigger guns could start putting the squeeze on Rome.

There is an urgency to this. No one should have to put up with these mediocre, tasteless, gray and beige renderings of something scarlet and gold and silver, that has shouted out glory for all the centuries. And it is not only a matter of taste and art and literary excellence. It is a matter of Truth.

The day I did the translation, the whole problem of the modern Church leaped out at me at the beginning of the Canon. The great You of the Te igitur, the infinite and everlasting Te which draws us into the mystery had been changed to We! And thus away goeth the English-speaking Church, staggering and lurching perilously near the edge of Pelagianism, that perennial, once again popular notion that God is not in charge. We are. The We come to you Father with praise and thanksgiving is not heretical in itself, but it was deliberately inserted without any good reason. It is not a matter of Latin word order or the transposition of a clause to a more prominent position. The text appears nowhere in the Canon. Someone made it up, did violence to the Truth.

And this distortion of the Canon is at the center of the virus, the contagion that has spread wildly and afflicted the liturgy with a myriad other symptoms. It is time to eradicate it, and a lot else besides. I could go on forever, pointing out what else is wrong, but it would be redundant in the face of this clear evidence, that the holiest prayer in Christendom has been defaced, scribbled upon with Pelagian graffiti.
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