Back in Christianity’s early days, petty semantics could cause powerful schisms. A big reason the western and eastern churches split was a bitter dispute over the addition of three words, “and the Son” to the 4th-century statement of Christian belief, the Nicene Creed.
But if you thought modern Christendom was beyond that kind of medieval nonsense, think again. Despite all the really weighty issues Roman Catholics face, including the latest sexual abuse scandal playing out in Philadelphia, the most passionate debate this year may well be whether the Nicene Creed should say “one in Being with” or “consubstantial with.” That’s because the Vatican plans to introduce a new English-language Roman Missal, the prayer script we Catholics use at Mass — and its awkward changes to prayers and the liturgy are raising a chorus of complaints from priests and the laity. It’s tempting to dismiss the clash with the old saying about fights inside academia: they’re so fierce because the stakes are so low. But the Catholic missal melee is unfortunately a reminder that the tiresome practice of theological hairsplitting is still alive and well in the 21st century.
The source of the fuss, like so much Catholic dysfunction today, is Vatican II. That modernizing 1960s church council reformed the Catholic liturgy, allowing Mass to be said in the more accessible vernacular instead of Latin. But one of its more tedious byproducts was the way it emboldened liturgical liberals — the Kumbaya crowd, who often turn Masses into hand-holding, guitar-strumming services that even progressive Catholics find grating — and how it embittered conservatives, including Pope Benedict XVI, who want to take the Mass back, at least partway, to the Latin of the more rigid and remote Tridentine tradition.
The Vatican’s new missal in English, which debuts next November at Advent, is a result of that conservative backlash. Even if it doesn’t restore the Latin, it requires the vernacular to be as faithful a translation of the Latin as possible. And that’s where the trouble starts, not just for Catholics but also for English majors. It’s sad when Rome’s cassocked scholars subordinate their intellectual gifts to church expediency. The specious logic they use to justify an all-male priesthood
