The most pressing issue for the Church over the last year has been sexual abuse. Given the Royal Commission and other enquiries, it will surely also dominate this year's news. So it is understandable that there has been no space to celebrate such anniversaries as that of the introduction of the New Mass Translation. But this bears reflection because language is the underlying canvas on which life and conduct in any community are painted.
One year on it is clear that the more dramatic hopes and fears about the new translation were not realised. There were no reports of widespread rebellion in the pews, of continuing cacophony as different versions of responses mingled, of mass defection.
But nor has the introduction of the new translation been accompanied by the great spiritual renewal, the fresh understanding of the liturgy and the heightened sensitivity to scriptural echoes within the liturgy that some promised. The reverence and sense of transcendence claimed for the translation seem to have been perceived by few of those exposed to it. Nor has it changed the way in which people conduct themselves in church.
The lack of spectacular consequence is hardly surprising. Few people attend church services simply for the beauty of the language. Their faith is more deeply grounded and has endured worse challenges. The ways in which they engage with the liturgy, combining variously participation in a ritual duly conducted, identification with a community gathered in prayer, space for personal prayer and reflection, and presence to memories and hopes, are unlikely to be touched substantially by a change in wording only half attended to.
Nevertheless, the new translation is important because it will shape in small ways the sense of what it means to be Catholic. It is hard to see that it will be helpful in the longer run. Any change from the familiar to the new inevitably makes new boundaries. In this case it divides regular participants who are familiar with the new responses from occasional church goers who are rendered silent. Such discriminations are not helpful at a time when links with the Church are already so strained.
But perhaps the more important challenge facing any community is to find words that its members can identify and own. In many churches, such as the Greek and Russian Orthodox, this language is associated with their national and cultural history. Even though the liturgical language is archaic and is not understood by many hearers, its resonances have been incorporated into common language and people see it as their own.
The same was perhaps true of Anglican liturgy, when the language of Cranmer and of the King James Bible, brought together the memory and the experience of a people.
Certainly the language of liturgy needs to have purchase in the world of its time. It need not be demotic — the language of the King James Version was deliberately remote in its formality, but it was what people might imagine the speech of kings to be. Kingship was a central fact of Jacobean life, and its language could be stretched to other forms of communication.
Similarly, the language of the recently superseded English translation was deliberately plain, aiming at the rhythms and clarity of ordinary speech. Plain and sparse speech is part of our everyday life from newspapers to government forms. We can imagine it being stretched to become, if inadequately, the language of love, grief, passion, contemplation, and declamation. It is grounded in both senses of the word, but it could be given wings.
The experience of most Catholic celebrants is that the language of the new translation is not grounded. It is self-referential in that it belongs to no living part of our world. It suits neither prayer nor declamation nor passion nor love, nor wonder. To be understood it needs adaptation, but even then it remains ungrounded in any shared discourse. That of course is not the fault of the translators, but reflects their riding instructions.
This malady is not fatal. But at a time when Christians increasingly experience a gap between faith and their world, a language of liturgy that is disconnected from the ways in which people can speak about things that matter puts unnecessary lead in the Catholic saddlebag.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.