Woodward: Feast of St. Juan Diego

Happy Juan Diego, true and faithful man! We entrust to you our lay brothers and sisters so that, feeling the call to holiness, they may imbue every area of social life with the spirit of the Gospel. Bless families, strengthen spouses in their marriage, sustain the efforts of parents to give their children a Christian upbringing. Look with favour upon the pain of those who are suffering in body or in spirit, on those afflicted by poverty, loneliness, marginalization or ignorance. May all people, civic leaders and ordinary citizens, always act in accordance with the demands of justice and with respect for the dignity of each person, so that in this way peace may be reinforced.

--Pope John Paul II, Homily on the Canonization of St. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin

Woodward: Feast of the Immaculate Conception

Perhaps the greatest of many great gifts to the Church from my favorite Pope, Bl. Pius IX:

Let all the children of the Catholic Church, who are so very dear to us, hear these words of ours. With a still more ardent zeal for piety, religion and love, let them continue to venerate, invoke and pray to the most Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, conceived without original sin. Let them fly with utter confidence to this most sweet Mother of mercy and grace in all dangers, difficulties, needs, doubts and fears. Under her guidance, under her patronage, under her kindness and protection, nothing is to be feared; nothing is hopeless. Because, while bearing toward us a truly motherly affection and having in her care the work of our salvation, she is solicitous about the whole human race. And since she has been appointed by God to be the Queen of heaven and earth, and is exalted above all the choirs of angels and saints, and even stands at the right hand of her only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, she presents our petitions in a most efficacious manner. What she asks, she obtains. Her pleas can never be unheard.

--Apostolic Constitution Ineffabilis Deus

Here are two very no-nonsense little commentaries on the dogma, by two world-famous Catholic preachers who were very good at talking to Protestants.

A Protestant is apt to say: "Oh, I really never, never can accept such a doctrine from the hands of the Church, and I had a thousand thousand times rather determine that the Church spoke falsely, than that so terrible a doctrine was true." Now, my good man, WHY? Do not go off in such a wonderful agitation, like a horse shying at he does not know what. Consider what I have said. It is, after all, certainly irrational? is it certainly against Scripture? is it certainly against the primitive Fathers? is it certainly idolatrous? I cannot help smiling as I put the questions. Rather, may not something be said for it from reason, from piety, from antiquity, from the inspired test? You may see no reason at all to believe the voice of the Church; you may not yet have attained to faith in it--but what on earth this doctrine has to do with shaking your faith in her, if you have faith, or in sending you to the right-about if you are beginning to think she may be from God, is more than my mind can comprehend. Many, many doctrines are far harder than the Immaculate Conception. The doctrine of Original Sin is indefinitely harder. Mary just has not had this difficulty. It is no difficulty to believe that a soul is united to the flesh without original sin; the great mystery is that any, that millions on millions, are born with it. Our teaching about Mary has just one difficulty less than our teaching about the state of mankind generally.

I say it distinctly--there may be many excuses at the last day, good and bad, for not being Catholics; one I cannot conceive: "O Lord, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was so derogatory to Thy Grace, so inconsistent with Thy Passion, so at variance with Thy word in Genesis and the Apocalypse, so unlike the teaching of Thy first Saints and Martyrs, as to give me a right to reject it at all risks, and Thy Church for teaching it. It is a doctrine as to which my private judgment is fully justified in opposing the Church's judgment. And this is my plea for living and dying a Protestant."

--John Henry Cardinal Newman

Just suppose that you could have pre-existed your own mother, in much the same way that an artist pre-exists his painting. Furthermore, suppose that you had the infinite power to make your mother anything that you pleased, just as a great artist like Raphael has the power of realizing his artistic ideas. Suppose you had this double power, what kind of mother would you have made for yourself? Would you have made her of such a type that would make you blush because of her unwomanly and un-mother-like actions? Would you have made her exteriorly and interiorly of such a character as to make you ashamed or her, or would you have made her, so far as human beauty goes; the most beautiful woman in the world; and so far as beauty of the soul goes, one who would radiate every virtue, every manner of kindness and charity and loveliness; one who by the purity of her life and her mind and her heart would be an inspiration not only to you but even to your fellow men, so that all would look up to her as the very incarnation of what is best in motherhood?

Now if you who are an imperfect being and who have not the most delicate conception of all that is fine in life would have wished for the loveliest of mothers, do you think that our Blessed Lord, who not only pre-existed His own mother but who had an infinite power to make her just what He chose, would in virtue of all the infinite delicacy of His spirit make her any less pure and loving and beautiful than you would have made your own mother? If you who hate selfishness would have made her selfless and you who hate ugliness would have made her beautiful, do you not think that the Son of God, who hates sin, would have made His own mother sinless and He who hates moral ugliness would have made her immaculately beautiful?

--Archbishop Fulton Sheen

Woodward: Feast of St. Edmund Campion

On this day in 1581, the Jesuit priest Edmund Campion was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn, the appointed location for the execution of criminals in London. The official charge of which he had been convicted was treason, but as he himself made eloquently clear both before and at his execution, he was in fact put to death for being a Catholic priest.

Campion had become famous (or infamous, depending on one's religious affiliation) during the year preceding his arrest and trial for the daring way in which he invited -- taunted, in fact -- Queen Elizabeth I to persecute him. He was a man of wide and deep learning, and a man of supreme confidence in his God, his Church, and his own ability to preach and defend the faith. He challenged the members of the Queen's Privy Council, the doctors of England's two universities (Oxford and Cambridge), and the law courts to listen to his defense of Catholicism and the rights of Catholics, and to offer arguments against him. No one took up the challenge. Instead he was hunted down, captured, and tortured. Even in the course of his "interrogation" (according to some reports), Queen Elizabeth offered him riches and offices if he would renounce his Catholic faith and come into the Anglican Church. He turned down the offer.

He must certainly be counted, not only among the Catholic Church's bravest martyrs, but among her most charming as well. Here is the way in which he concluded his challenge to the Protestant establishment of England in what has come to be known as Campion's Brag:

I doubt not but you, her Highness' Council, being of such wisdom and discreet in cases most important, when you shall have heard these questions of religion opened faithfully, which many times by our adversaries are huddled up and confounded, will see upon what substantial grounds our Catholic Faith is builded, how feeble that side is which by sway of the time prevaileth against us, and so at last for your own souls, and for many thousand souls that depend upon your government, will discountenance error when it is bewrayed [revealed], and hearken to those who would spend the best blood in their bodies for your salvation. Many innocent hands are lifted up to heaven for you daily by those English students [Catholic seminary students at the English College in Douai, France, where Campion studied], whose posterity shall never die, which beyond seas, gathering virtue and sufficient knowledge for the purpose, are determined never to give you over, but either to win you heaven, or to die upon your pikes. And touching our Society, be it known to you that we have made a league—all the Jesuits in the world, whose succession and multitude must overreach all the practice of England—cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God; it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted: So it must be restored. If these my offers be refused, and my endeavours can take no place, and I, having run thousands of miles to do you good, shall be rewarded with rigour, I have no more to say but to recommend your case and mine to Almighty God, the Searcher of Hearts, who send us his grace, and see us at accord before the day of payment, to the end we may at last be friends in heaven, when all injuries shall be forgotten.

Wouldn't it be refreshing if modern-day apologists -- Catholic and non-Catholic -- could all be that self-confidently humble, and that gracious?

I have one more reason to venerate St. Edmund Campion (who was beatified in 1886 by Pope Leo XIII and canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1970). He should, I think, be the patron saint of Latin teachers, on the strength of this exchange that occurred as he stood in the cart waiting to be hanged. (The account is from Evelyn Waugh's admirable biography.)

Campion stood in prayer. The lords of the Council still shouted up questions to him about the Bull of Excommunication [Pope Pius V's excommunication of Queen Elizabeth I], but now Campion would not answer and stood with his head bowed and his hands folded on his breast. An Anglican clergyman attempted to direct his prayers, but he answered gently, "Sir, you and I are not one in religion, wherefore I pray you content yourself. I bar none of prayer; but I only desire them that are of the household of faith to pray with me, and in mine agony to say one creed."

They called to him to pray in English, but he replied with great mildness that "he would pray God in a language which they both well understood."

That passage may be the best example I've ever seen of Hemingway's famous definition of courage: "grace under pressure."

I'll conclude with Campion's advice to those who are tempted by the world's riches and rewards, written in that language that Campion and God "both well understand."

Christus dives est, qui vos alet. Rex est, qui ornabit. Lautus est, qui satiabit. Speciosus est, qui felicitatem omnium cumulos largietur. Huic vos adscribite militanti, ut cum eo triumphos, vere doctissimi vereque clarissimi, reportetis.

[Christ is rich, who will nourish you. He is a king, who will provide for you. He is an elegant host, who will entertain you abundantly. He is beautiful, who will shower you with every happiness. Enlist therefore in his army, so that with him, truly most learned and truly most illustrious, you may carry home the victory.]

St. Edmund Campion, pray for us.

Woodward: "Be Good for Goodness' Sake"

It's a bit of conventional moral advice best known by most people as a lyric from "Santa Clause Is Coming to Town." Doing something "for goodness' sake" originated, the linguists tell us, as a euphemism, a circumspect alternative to doing something "for God's sake." The earliest example of the phrase I can find is in Shakespeare. It is spoken by Cardinal Wolsey in Act III, Scene 1 of Henry VIIII. The Cardinal (not one of the good guys of the play, or of history) is urging Queen Catherine of Aragon not to make trouble for the King in his pursuit of a dissolution of their marriage. Catherine remains unpersuaded, and the Cardinal lobs an oblique threat in her direction: "For goodness' sake, consider what you do." Elizabethan Englishmen were not shy about swearing what we moderns (or at least we modern Christians) would consider blasphemous oaths. So perhaps Wolsey's "for goodness' sake" -- which would have sounded in the ears of Shakespeare's audience much the way "gosh darn" would sound in our own -- was intended to make the Cardinal seem a bit prissy, or perhaps even hypocritical. Everybody in the audience would have known that Wolsey was thinking "for God's sake," no matter what he actually said.

Well, enough of linguistic history. The American Humanist Association has launched its 2009 "holiday ad campaign," which will involve the placement of public transit ads in four cities offering commuters the following bit of philosophical insight:

No God?

No Problem!
Be good for goodness' sake.

Humanism is the idea that you can be good without a belief in God.

Umm...okay. I am apparently a humanist, much to my own surprise. I freely acknowledge an acquaintance with at least six people whom I know to be good and whom I also know to be disbelievers in the existence of God.

So what?

As a Catholic, I too maintain that one can be good without believing in God. That's not the same thing as saying -- and I wonder how long it would take me to explain this distinction to a member of the American Humanist Association -- that one could be good if God did not exist.

Every sane person goes about his business every day as if he assumes that (1) there is an objective order of good and evil; (2) life has some meaning in a realm of absolute value ; and (3) the perceptions and conclusions of the human mind bear an ontological relationship to an objective reality outside itself.

As a Catholic (again), I believe that those three premises are grounded necessarily in a belief in the existence of the Christian God. If you want to have some fun with a humanist interested in following up on the conversation suggested by his "2009 holiday ad campaign," ask him to name something he thinks is good. Then ask him to explain why the thing he has mentioned is good. Then ask him to explain why that makes it good. Then ask him...oh, you get the idea. If you're persistent -- and polite -- maybe he'll begin to wonder whether ethics is a subject small enough to fit in a transit ad. Maybe he'll even begin to wonder whether doing something "for goodness' sake" isn't a lot like doing it for God's sake.

Woodward: Happy Thanksgiving

Some very random thoughts on the day:

• Abraham Lincoln's November 1863 proclamation of a national "day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens" makes for interesting reading. It moves well beyond the customarily vague and treacly religiosity of other such presidential documents to make a substantive theological point. We owe God not only thanks for the material blessings he has showered on us as a nation, but also penitence for the sins we have committed as a nation. Collective guilt would understandably have been on Lincoln's mind in the middle of the Civil War; but every generation of Americans can profitably be exhorted to meditate on "our national perverseness and disobedience" and be mindful of those who suffer as a result. (I wonder if Lincoln's proclamation makes him one of those "America-hating liberals.")

• Like other presidents before him, Barack Obama yesterday "pardoned" the official White House Thanksgiving turkey. Every year, this ceremony strikes me as perhaps the stupidest thing a president is required by his office to do. Does anyone believe that the Obamas don't (or that the Bushes or Clintons or Reagans before them didn't) eat turkey on Thanksgiving? Of course they do and did -- some anonymous turkey killed dispassionately and efficiently in some undesignated packing plant. But the fortunate bird that gets a name and a photo op on the South Lawn is magnanimously spared and goes to a petting zoo (or, this year, Disneyland -- perfect). Does this foolish annual charade, I wonder, have some ominous sociological significance? Is it a symptom of creeping vegetarianism? Or is it merely the age-old spectacle of politicians trying to look like "nicer" people than they really are? Just once I'd like to see the President of the United States stride briskly out of the White House with the official Thanksgiving turkey Robespierre clamped firmly under his arm, make a few brief remarks about the significance of Meleagris gallopavo in the settling of America and the history of Thanksgiving, thank the National Turkey Federation and the Poultry and Egg National Board...and then chop the turkey's head off.
  

• As we dress our children up as pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians and sing "Come, Ye Thankful People, Come," it might be well to remember that Thanksgiving began not in the Plymouth Colony in 1621 but 80 years earlier than that. Francisco Coronado and his expedition camped in May 1541 on the rim of Palo Duro Canyon and celebrated a thanksgiving service in gratitude for abundant game and deliverance from severe weather. Which means that the first Thanksgiving on the North American continent was both (1) Catholic and (2) Texan. We win again.

Msgr. Ronald Knox: Feast of Christ the King

"The substantial victories of the Church have lain, always, in the sphere of the human conscience. Christ has reigned, not in the councils of nations, but in men's hearts. If every country in the world professed the Catholic religion, set up religious emblems in its market places and voted special honors, special privileges, special revenues to the clergy -- that would not be the reign of Christ on earth. It would not be the reign of Christ on earth if the homage which men paid to religion was merely external, merely political; if they treated the emblems of Christianity merely as an ancestral tradition they were proud of, and a convenient rallying-point for civic sentiment, no more. Christ will reign in the world only where, only in so far as, he rules in human hearts."

Woodward: Veterans' Day

Woodward: Dame Joan Sutherland

I'm ashamed to have forgotten her birthday yesterday. The great lady is 83.

In 40 years of opera-going, I never experienced anything else like the excitement of a Sutherland performance. From a Lucia di Lammermoor in Philadelphia in 1972 to her final U. S. appearance in a staged opera -- a Dallas Merry Widow 20 years ago this coming Wednesday -- I went to hear Dame Joan every chance I got. In retrospect (which is, alas, all we have left now) she represents a standard of classical singing that is pretty much gone. (Every generation of opera fans says that, of course. And the sad truth, which is dawning on me now in late middle age, is that every generation of opera fans has probably been right.)

There is in music a kind of transcendent expression that prompts religious thoughts. At various times in my life I have genuinely believed that the Mozart clarinet concerto might be the most persuasive argument for the existence of God. I realize that evolutionary psychologists probably have a stock explanation handy for the ability of music to exalt the human spirit. Probably has something to do with drums and hunting -- I really don't want to know.

One thing I do know is that listening to Joan Sutherland sing has made me happy every single time I've done it. Here are a couple of reasons why.




For some reason, this wonderful performance of an old Victorian song can't be embedded.

Woodward: October 16, 1978

Thirty-one years ago today:


O Blessed Trinity, we thank You for having graced the Church with Pope John Paul II and for allowing the tenderness of Your fatherly care, the glory of the Cross of Christ, and the splendor of the Spirit of love to shine through him. Trusting fully in Your infinite mercy and in the maternal intercession of Mary, he has given us a living image of Jesus, the Good Shepherd, and has shown us that holiness is the necessary measure of ordinary Christian life and is the way of achieving eternal communion with You. Grant us, by his intercession, and according to Your will, the graces we implore, hoping that he will soon be numbered among Your saints.

Amen.

Woodward: St. Teresa of Avila

The feast of this great saint is October 15.

I have read a great many Catholic mystics without managing to move even one inch towards mysticism. But if I ever do make any progress, I have a feeling that it will be under the tutelage of St. Teresa. There is something so down-to-earth, so (this sounds wrong) commonsensical in her mysticism that she really does make it sound like a path that anyone could follow. For example:

There's no need for us to be advising God about what He should give us, for He can rightly tell us that we don't know what we're asking for [Mt. 20:22]. The whole aim of any person who is beginning prayer -- and don't forget this, because it's very important -- should be that he work and prepare himself with determination and every possible effort to bring his will into conformity with God's will...It is the person who lives in more perfect conformity who will receive more from the Lord and be more advanced on this road. Don't think that in what concerns perfection there is some mystery or things unknown or still to be understood, for in perfect conformity to God's will lies all our good.

--The Interior Castle II:1

Perfect conformity to God's will. I knew there was a catch....


Hear our prayer, O God our Savior. The feast of the blessed virgin Teresa fills us with joy; may her holy teaching also inspire us, and the example of her virtuous life guide us.

Woodward: St. Edward the Confessor

His life is practically a whole chapter in English history all by itself. He was instrumental in bringing about the Norman Conquest by promising the throne to two different successors at two different times. Upon his canonization in 1163, the translation of his incorrupt remains to their final resting place in Westminster Abbey was presided over by Archbishop Thomas Becket, with his good friend King Henry II in attendance. And the gold crown that he wore was, according to some reports, destroyed in the wake of the English Civil War by Oliver Cromwell, who was good at destroying things.

Edward was a model of Christian piety, if not a particularly forceful king. And he is the patron saint of the British royal family, which perhaps explains that tired expression on his face.

His feast day is today.

O God, you gave the blessed confessor king Edward a crown of everlasting glory. May we who honor him on earth be worthy to rule with him in heaven.

Woodward: Shakespeare and Religion

My wife and I encounter at least ten reasons a day to be glad we home school our children. The most recent occasion of rejoicing for me was the text I'm using to teach Twelfth Night to our eleventh-grade daughter. It's a highly respected and widely used edition of the play, part of the Oxford School Shakespeare series, complete with copious and illuminating notes on the text, and appendices that offer suggestions for classwork, outside research projects, and -- here's where the problem presents itself -- "background" information on Shakespeare's England. I'm beginning to learn that one man's (excuse me -- one person's) "background" is another person's collection of ideological hobbyhorses.

The text's "background" information on the subject of "Religion" contains this bit of historical analysis:

Following Henry VIII's break away from the Church of Rome, all people in England were able to hear the church services in their own language. The Book of Common Prayer was used in every church, and an English translation of the Bible was read aloud in public. The Christian religion had never been so well taught before! [exclamation point in the original]

Where to begin? "The Book of Common Prayer was used in every church." True, because Roman Catholic churches had all been destroyed and outlawed. "An English translation of the Bible was read aloud in public." That "in public" is a nice rhetorical touch, suggesting that reading the Bible in public, or in English, or in public in English, had been impossible under the tyrannical "Church of Rome." In fact, English Catholics had an English New Testament 29 years before the King James Bible was published. As for the assertion that "the Christian religion had never been so well taught before," that is a matter of prudential judgment, as we Catholics say. And the prudential judgment of the Oxford School Shakespeare series on this point (in the prudential judgment of this Catholic) leaves something to be desired.

But then there is this:

Attendance at divine service was compulsory. By such means, the authorities were able to keep some check on the populace -- ensuring a minimum of orthodox instruction through the official "Homilies" which were regularly preached from the pulpits of all parish churches throughout the realm.

"A minimum of orthodox instruction" sounds about right.

There is no such thing as unbiased history. Home-schooled children, at least, know that, and they know what their teachers' biases are. Government-schooled children are allowed -- no, encouraged -- to believe that all biases have been conscientiously purged from the intellectual atmosphere in which they breathe. That is the most dangerous intellectual atmosphere of all.

Woodward: Seedtime and Harvest

Maclin Horton's picture of a magnolia seed got me thinking about seeds in general, and red seeds in particular. We have a Texas mountain laurel by our front door that produces huge clumps of purple blooms in the spring (they smell like grapes) and, thereafter, leathery little seed pods each of which contains a single large red seed, about the size of a pinto bean. (In fact, one of the names of the Texas mountain laurel out in far west Texas is frijolillo -- the little bean tree.)

The seeds -- impossibly, almost cartoonishly red -- look like something you might trade a cow for and then pay a visit to a giant. And while Maclin considers it a wonder that he never ate a magnolia seed, I consider it a blessing that I never ate a Texas mountain laurel seed. They are reportedly hallucinogenic in small doses, deadly in larger doses, and the dosage is tricky.

Our Texas mountain laurel was about four feet tall when we planted it 12 years ago and is only about eight feet tall now. It is -- in the words of Neil Sperry, the dean of Texas horticulturists -- a "deliberate grower." Perhaps my grandchildren will be able to rest in its shade. Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure I don't have time to grow any more from these seeds.

Woodward: The End of the Season

Tomorrow marks the end of the regular baseball season (and the season, period) for the Texas Rangers. Time to go into hibernation until spring training. (Well, not quite. I guess I'll stay awake and watch the Phillies win the World Series.)

To be a baseball fan in Dallas is to cultivate, of necessity, a taste for the kind of goofy (yet somehow endearing) existential optimism exemplified by MLB.com's account of the Rangers' performance this season:

"The victory allowed the Rangers to clinch second place in the American League West for the second straight year after eight straight seasons of having finished no higher than third."

Ah, yes, the coveted AL West Second Place Trophy. Again. One word of advice to all you struggling major-league clubs out there: Before accepting Lucifer's offer to make you the "Team of Destiny," find out exactly what destiny he has in mind.

I don't mean to sound bitter. The Rangers gave me some genuinely thrilling moments this year, and some reasons (I think, I hope, I pray) to look forward to next year (when we'll be defending our second-place title with everything we've got). But I worry about how long a place like Dallas-Ft. Worth can keep on going without a pennant and still preserve any semblance of being a baseball town. It's not like we have a century-long tradition of being a loser. We're not Chicago. Or Boston. When it comes to professional sports, we're used to instant gratification.

I try to post either at the beginning of each baseball season or at the end. So I'll close out Baseball 2009 with a recent picture of Michael Young (my middle daughter's favorite player) tagging out the Angels' Erick Aybar at third:

...and a suggestion to Vehige about adding this to our reading list:

Woodward: Moral and Linguistic Chaos

Orwell might say that they are sometimes the same thing, and so it would seem to be with this report about the exciting strides being made in Britain toward what the headline writer cheerily calls "assisted suicide reform." That phrase is Newspeak-y enough, but then we get this:

The Australian doctor...is travelling the world to teach people how to end their lives safely with a suicide drug-testing kit.

"End their lives safely"??? I guess it's all fun and games until somebody winds up still alive....

Woodward: New English Translation of the Mass

Sometime next year, English-speaking Catholics at celebrations of the ordinary form of the Mass in the Roman rite will stop professing a belief that God created everything "seen and unseen" and start professing instead their belief that God created everything "visible and invisible." They will no longer proclaim that Jesus was "born of the Virgin Mary and became man" but rather that he was "incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man." When the priest, in the Consecration, narrates the institution of the Eucharist, he will no longer say that Jesus took "the cup" but rather that he took "this precious chalice into his holy and venerable hands." Most controversially, perhaps, the priest will no longer say that Christ's blood will be "shed for you and for all" but that it will be "poured out for you and for many."

Does any of this make any difference?

In the way that counts most, the answer (I believe) must be no. The Mass is the Mass -- ordinary form or extraordinary, Latin or vernacular, well translated or ill. The Mass is what the Church says it is. If you disagree with that, then you understand neither the Church nor the Mass.

In another way, the answer must be yes -- it does make a difference. There are good translations of Latin texts and bad translations. On purely linguistic grounds, the English translation of the Roman Missal that has been in use for almost 40 years is a pretty bad one. It is denotatively inaccurate (prompting each of the changes cited in my first paragraph). It is clunky and tin-eared in innumerable places. For instance, I can never hear the Prayer after Communion for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time...

Lord, bring to perfection within us the communion we share in this sacrament. May our celebration have an effect in our lives.

...without feeling sorry for the priest who has to pray it. "May our celebration have an effect in our lives"?? That's really laying siege to heaven, isn't it? (Needless to say, the original Latin of that prayer bears no discernible resemblance to the absurd English rendering -- so I guess that particular translation belongs in both the "clunky" and "inaccurate" categories.)

And occasionally, the current English translation -- beyond being inexact and graceless -- even descends into outright ungrammaticality. I can't be the only former English teacher who cringes at "all glory and honor is yours."

For years, liberal and conservative liturgists argued not so much about the quality of the English Mass translation (nobody claims it's a masterpiece), but about the alleged motives of the translators. Was the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL), which produced the current translation, devoted simply to a particular philosophy of translation (simplified vocabulary and sentence structure, avoidance of rhetorical decoration, paraphrase when necessary to achieve wide intelligibility), or was it committed to something more ambitious -- putting its own stamp on the Mass, emphasizing inordinately a communal, lay-centered, "spirit-of-Vatican-II" understanding of the Sacrament?

At one time I had a firmly held opinion on that question, but with the new translation on its way I find, blessedly, that I don't have to have an opinion any more. The old ICEL "dynamic equivalence" philosophy of translation is gone, relegated to a footnote in liturgical history by the Vatican's directive Liturgiam Authenticam and the subsequent ratio translationis for English-language translations, in which the Vatican undertook to give English-language translators of liturgical texts fairly explicit instructions on how to do their job. So the new translation that is nearing final approval reflects translating principles like these:

• The translator should strive to maintain the denotation, or primary sense of the words and expressions found in the original text, as well as their connotation, that is, the finer shades of meaning or emotion evoked by them, and thus to ensure that the text be open to other orders of meaning that may have been intended in the original text.
• To be avoided in translations is any psychologizing tendency, especially a tendency to replace words treating of the theological virtues by others expressing merely human emotions.
• Certain expressions that belong to the heritage of the whole or of a great part of the ancient Church, as well as others that have become part of the general human patrimony, are to be respected by a translation that is as literal as possible, as for example the words of the people’s response Et cum spiritu tuo, or the expression mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa in the Act of Penance of the Order of Mass.
• That notable feature of the Roman Rite, namely its straightforward, concise and compact manner of expression, is to be maintained insofar as possible in the translation. Furthermore, the same manner of rendering a given expression is to be maintained throughout the translation, insofar as feasible.
• In the translation of terms contained in the original text, the same person, number, and gender is to be maintained insofar as possible.
• The literary and rhetorical genres of the various texts of the Roman Liturgy are to be maintained.

--Liturgiam Authenticam

Not surprisingly, a translation of the Mass that is as close as possible to the original Latin text will also be as close as possible to the actual faith of the Church. There are things in this world that are not merely unseen but invisible. Jesus did not "become man" when he was born but when he was incarnate, conceived in his mother's womb (a particularly important truth for us to be reminding the world of nowadays).

The Mass is the Mass, despite whatever little distractions may come by way of inept translation. But it will be nice when those little distractions are gone. I'm really looking forward to the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2010.


[NOTE: For a handy overview of the changes made in the new English translation of the Mass, go here.]

Woodward: The Alamo, Part II

My nine-year-old sons were captivated by the story of the Alamo, especially after watching -- from the edges of their seats -- the very loud and gunpowder-laden movie. They came away from the gift shop with a set of toy soldiers -- half Mexican regulars, half Texan volunteers (which inaccurately represents the relative strength of the contending forces). As I should have been able to foresee, this purchase required the construction of a scale-model Alamo once we got home, so that the belligerants could fight it out in front of an authentic-looking backdrop.

Thanks to Google images, Photoshop, cardboard, and Elmer's glue, the forces of Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and Col. William Barret Travis can now battle it out over and over again until we get it right.

According to the Woodward family's resident nine-year-old military historians, Davy Crockett met his death more or less like this:

Charles Kuralt: The Interstate

Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything. -- Charles Kuralt

Woodward: The Alamo, Part I

My wife (a native Texan) and I (not) have been waiting until the youngest of our children, twin boys now 9, were old enough to appreciate it before embarking on the preeminently obligatory Texas family trip -- a visit (make that a pilgrimage) to the Alamo. Last weekend, a brief vacation with some old friends in the hill country of central Texas made such a trip easily do-able, and so down to San Antonio we went.

Perhaps this registers on me more than it does on my wife, for whom it is simply an accepted fact of life, but I have never lived in another state that inspires as much patriotic fervor in the hearts of its citizens as Texas does. I realize that such fervor fits perfectly with the rest of the country's stereotyped view of the loud and boastful Texan, but it is a reality nonetheless, and it works in a more wholesome and admirable way than most people who never come here would ever be able to see. Texans are proud of everything about Texas, but there is nothing they're prouder of than the Alamo and the chapter in Texan and American history of which it is the emblem. People refer down here to the Battle of the Alamo as "America's Thermopylae" and, in doing so, they mean to pay Thermopylae a compliment.

After watching the slightly romanticized but roughly accurate IMAX movie, the Woodwards moved on to the shrine itself -- and yes, that's right, the Alamo is officially a shrine -- where the younger members of the family dutifully listened to Dad's exhaustive running commentary on the historical and cultural significance of what they were looking at. Rent those touristy headphones with the pre-recorded guided tour? Please. Not when Dad is around....

If one knows in any detail what happened at the Alamo, it is impossible to stand within its walls and not feel something. The first time I was ever in San Antonio, it was to attend a professional conference. I befriended an attendee from Connecticut, who was absolutely as far west and as far south as he had ever been in his life. One free afternoon, we ran into each other by chance at the Alamo. With a funny look on his face and a note of urgency in his voice, he grabbed me by the sleeve and said, "Come here and look at this." He literally pulled me across the room to a plaque on the wall on which were inscribed the words of William Barret Travis's "Letter from the Alamo" -- the one that ends with these words:

"The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, otherwise, the garrison are to be put to the sword, if the fort is taken -- I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, & our flag still waves proudly from the walls -- I shall never surrender or retreat. Then, I call on you in the name of Liberty, of patriotism & everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid, with all dispatch -- The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily & will no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days. If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible & die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor & that of his country -- Victory or Death."

"Isn't that something?" my friend asked. Yes, I said; it was, indeed, something.

Heroism is more common in this world than is often thought. There are lives of quiet heroism being lived all around us every day -- the heroism of accepting the terms that life offers us and performing our obligations -- often onerous ones -- willingly, happily, and without complaint. But there are, just occasionally, acts of exceptional heroism, the heroism of doing more than simply accepting the terms life offers us -- the heroism of taking upon ourselves the terms life has imposed on someone else, and of making those terms voluntarily our own. That's what the heroes of the Alamo did. They did what others would not do and what they themselves need not have done. They died -- "a death they freely accepted," to paraphrase one eloquent description of heroism in its most absolute example -- for an abstraction. In a materialist age that mistrusts and usually ridicules abstractions (truth, liberty, virtue), their example is all the more to be revered.

Woodward: St. Joseph of Cupertino (September 18)

I've already gone on record with the opinion that St. Augustine is probably the Church's greatest saint. But my favorite saint is Joseph of Cupertino, in part because he reminds us that God delights in making saints out of what the world would regard as very unpromising raw material. (Being very unpromising raw material myself, I always contemplate St. Joseph with a feeling of hope.)

His life story can be found here. The flying business, while undeniably interesting in its own right, is far from being the most interesting thing about him. In an age when Catholic spirituality was beginning to run the risk of becoming over-intellectualized, Joseph showed the world that a pure heart is more important to God -- and ultimately more eloquent -- than a subtle mind. This is what my old St. John's Missal has to say about him:

Despised and afflicted with infirmities, he appeared as an object of scorn even to his own. By a singular disposition of Divine Providence, he passed successively through the three great branches of the Order of St. Francis. Finally he remained with the Minors Conventual, where his virtues became so striking that, in spite of himself, he was raised to the priesthood. The almost illiterate Joseph became the preaching companion of his Provincial, and it was his words that the people wanted to hear. He became the counsellor of all the great men of Italy of the 17th century, and he died in a radiance of honor and glory in 1664.

He is the subject of one of the finest films ever to be made about the life of a saint. If you've never seen it, you should give it a look.


O God, at your command your only-begotten Son was lifted up above the earth that he might draw all things to himself. May the merits and example of your seraphic confessor Joseph help to raise us above all earthly desires so that we may come to Jesus.