New Liturgy?

[Brendan]

Japhy, with all due respect, it is what it is. I question this translation. Why had it been a Catholic belief for 400 years that the Mass was not to be vernacularized and the words of the Consecration were not to be said in a low tone?

As a CATHOLIC belief, that is not the case. The Byzantine Rites were generally vernacularized. There were Papal approved English texts for the Byzantine Liturgies from the 1800’s.

And, of course, there was the Papal approval of SS Cyril and Methodius translating both the Sacred Texts, and the Mass into Slavonic.

And then there was the Union of Brest, when the Rutherian Church was brought in to the fold. If Trent really did prohibit the Liturgy to be conducted in the vernacular, why was that never enforced by any Pope since. Heck St. Pius X even said the Divine Liturgy in Slovanic once. Was that contrary to Trent?

And there is also the case of the Melkites. Their liturgy was in Arabic for centuries, even after Trent. And they had always been in Communion with Rome. Was their communion false for having their liturgy in Arabic?

So to say that it was a Catholic ‘belief’ is a bit of a stretch, don’t you agree? A common feature of the Latin Rite, sure, but a ‘belief’ …No.

 

[Brendan]

can you give examples please of these errors, especially of heresy, in the Mass?

A big one would be from the Creed “one in being with the Father”

This is not heresy per se, but it is theologically and metaphysically way off.

"being’ is a statement of existance. There is no being\existance apart from God, so the grass on my lawn, or my keyboard, are all “one in being with the Father”.

However,my grass and my keyboard are not Consubstantial ( of one substance) with the Father. Only the Son and the Spirit are Consubstantial.

So that line in the current Creed tells us nothing about the Divine Nature of Christ, It doesn’t deny it ( and hence is not heretical), but it does not carry the essense of what we believe.

 

[BernadetteM]

Let’s be clear: I didn’t say there are heresies in the English translation of the Mass, nor in the Latin text of the Ordinary Form. But there are errors in the current English translation that can lead people to heretical conclusions.

Here are two examples from the Nicene Creed. First, remember that everything we say in the Creed is there for a reason: it is defining and defending catholic faith against various heresies that came up challenging it.

1. We currently say that God is the “maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen.” That is an inaccurate translation of the Latin "… visibílium … et invisibílium. By saying visibilum in the Latin text, we mean all of physical creation, even that which is visible but yet unseen by us (like the farthest reaches of space), and by invisibilum, we mean all the spiritual realm, even that which sometimes manifests itself to us in ways we can detect, even with our eyes. The invisible includes, first and foremost, angels and souls.

The belief that the same God created both the physical and the spiritual attacks one of the early heresies which plagued the Church, Gnosticism (and specifically, Manichaeism). The Gnostic viewpoint generally considered the flesh and all material, physical things as evil (as opposed to “good” and “very good” as God declares them in Genesis 1), the product of an evil god, while the spiritual and non-corporeal things were created by a good god. To advance this heresy, the Gnostics taught that the god of the Old Testament was an evil corruptor who captured pure spiritual beings in bodies of flesh and subjected them to laws and statutes, and that Jesus defeated this demon and revealed the true god in the New Testament.

The faith of the Church, contrary to the Gnostic heresy, testifies that the God Who revealed Himself to Israel and the God Whom Jesus revealed to His disciples are one and the same God. This means that there is a unity in the Scriptures, because this one God is the divine Author of both the Old and New Testaments.

A person could conceivably believe God created all that is “seen and unseen” without actually meaning he or she thinks God created the spiritual realm – he or she could deny the existence of angels, for example.

1. In the current translation of the Creed, we say Jesus was “born of the Virgin Mary, and became man.” That is an inaccurate translation of the Latin incarnátus est … ex María Vírgine, et homo factus est.

In the old translation of the Creed, the phrase “incarnatus est” was translated as “he was born” instead of “he was incarnate.” By saying “he was born (natus est) of the Virgin Mary and became man,” one might assume that He only “became man” at His birth. This is contrary to the true text of the Creed, and also to the faith of the Church concerning the humanity of the unborn: at the moment of conception, there is a living human being, a person. Jesus became man at the moment He received His flesh, at His conception, not at His birth.

So those are two mistranslations that can lead to people believing heresy and thinking that it’s actually the faith of the Church!

From what you are saying then I assume that the Creed said in the Anglican Use liturgy is correct. They use visible and invisible and the word incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary. Of course much of it was as accurate translation from the latin as possible.

God Bless

Bernadette