PETER STANFORD


‘Expending so much energy on making small changes to the Mass feels introspective’


The much quoted partnership of school, parish and home as the bedrock of children’s Catholic education is certainly proving its worth when it comes to our stumbling domestic attempts to adjust to the new English translation of the order of Mass. My son and daughter, both well prepared in RE lessons at their Catholic secondaries for this liturgical switch-over, have even been able, on the car journeys home from Mass, to give their grumbling parents a short lecture on the thinking behind the changes. My 14-year-old (who is doing


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14 | THE TABLET | 24 September 2011


Latin at GCSE) went so far as to venture a definition/explanation of “consubstantial”, which trips me up every time in the Creed, but I can’t say I am much the wiser. Still, no matter, because there is a positive sense in such discussions that the children somehow regard the new translation as “theirs” as opposed to the one which it replaces which is or was “ours”. This is the same simple logic that also applies, for instance, to cassette recorders and what they call “vinyl players”, which are “ours”, while iPods, iPads and that clever little wireless device that my son has, which enables him to play his iPod through the car radio, are “theirs”. There are all sorts of reasons behind this almost unconscious allocation into past, present and future. The children are better briefed on the changes. They are better equipped in general to take change in their stride, and without the same instinctive attachment as those older than them often possess to what they have already. I can still remember the last set of changes coming in, and the bewilderment among the adults in the pews as we all learnt to do things differently. I must have been about the age my children are now, and looking back, I can recognise the ease with which they adapt, and their impatience with grown-ups dragging their feet. So, here I am in middle age and apparently I find myself a stick-in-the-mud when it comes to tinkering with the translation of the


Mass, right down to objecting to having to remember to take my glasses with me to church so I can read the card with the new responses. And yes, I can be as grumpy as the next older Massgoer about how many times “graciously” and “spirit” crops up. (On which point, I do feel a bit uneasy about the priest saying “peace be with you”, and us replying “and with your spirit”, as if he is somehow better endowed spiritually than we are, but it is a minor gripe.) But I hope I still have a foot in the camp of youth in, more generally, and possibly more substantively, sharing young people’s bewilderment that our leaders have given so much time to what it is hard to see as anything more than tinkering when there are so many urgent, practical problems facing the Church, and the world. The Anglican Communion has been under fire yet again this week (in response to hints that Rowan Williams may be stepping down early as Archbishop of Canterbury) for its apparent navel-gazing over gender and sexuality. Expending so much energy on making small changes to the Mass translation feels similarly introspective. But then – and again this logical thought came from the youngsters – it is just as inward-looking to waste time fussing over what is effectively a done deal. That’s me told. That sense of powerlessness is


always a double-edged one in Catholicism. We live in an age and a society that sees democracy as essential to life as water. Yet here we are accepting Mass changes that no one voted for. Curiously, though, it is often that willingness to allow ourselves to be told from on high, and then humbly to accept, that draws us closer to the Church. John Mortimer had a good line about getting older. “Breakfast seems to come round every 20 minutes,” he quipped. One of the reasons why life does seem to whizz by ever faster as you age is that so much of what fills the day has grown familiar. If we do the same thing day in, day out, without a break in the routine, the details slip by unnoticed and it all becomes a bit of a fast-moving fog.


So change, breaking the routine, making us think afresh about the familiar words we use each week at Mass, has the potential to keep us young, and slow down the ticking clock. For which reason alone, it is to be welcomed. “Rome likes to keep us on our toes,” as our parish priest remarked, only half in jest.


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