Hidden Riches
February 12, 2010, 7:51 am
Posted by Robert P. Imbelli
On days, where there is no feast or memorial of a saint to be celebrated, one often hears at Mass the prayers of the preceding Sunday.
However, the Sacramentary contains an entire section of “Prayers for Various Needs and Occasions.” Here is one, from a set of prayers “For the Universal Church:”
God, our Father, by the promise you made in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ your Son,
You bring together in your Spirit, from all the nations, a people to be your own.
Keep the Church faithful to its mission: may it be a leaven in the world, renewing us in Christ, and transforming us into your family.
To be renewed and transformed in Christ: the disciples’ daily prayer and commitment.
Bob: Here is the Latin of this prayer: “Deus, qui in Christi tui testamento ex omnibus gentibus populum tibi congregare non desinis, in Spiritu ad unitatem coalescentem, concede, ut Ecclesia tua, missioni suae creditae fidelis, cum hominum familia iugiter incedat, et tamquam fermentum et veluti anima societatis humanae in Christo renovandae et in familiam Dei transformandae semper exsistat.”
More literally translated, this would be: “God, in your Christ’s covenant you do not cease to gather to yourself out of all nations a people made one in the Spirit; grant that your Church, faithful to the mission entrusted to her, may always walk with the human family and may always be a yeast and as it were the soul of human society which is to be renewed in Christ and transformed into the family of God.”
This clearly is an oration composed after the Council. In fact, it is directly inspired by this sentence in Gaudium et spes 40: “Ita Ecclesia … una cum tota humanitate incedit eamdemque cum mundo sortem terrenam experitur, ac tamquam fermentum et veluti anima societatis humanae in Christo renovandae et in familiam Dei transformandae exsistit.” [Thus the Church ... proceeds on its way with the whole of humanity and shares the world’s earthly lot, while also being a leaven and a sort of soul of human society, which is to be renewed in Christ and transformed into God’s family.”] The direct borrowing is a little clumsy; since the prayer is directed to God, that final “Dei” should be “tuam.”.
Ironically, the ICEL translation you cite has more of the concision and sobriety that mark classic Roman orations than does the post-conciliar prayer. On the other hand, it misrepresents the main petition which in the Latin is not that the Church renew and transform us [thus distinguishing between the Church and us, and making us the object of the Church’s action) but that the Church may serve as yeast and soul of society so that it may be renewed and transformed.
Joe, the Latin is a bit tricky, right (okay not for you). As Reggie Foster would drive home,the gerundive is renovandae, not renovanda, so it refers to the societatis humanae not to the anima (which is the Church). If you miss that point, you’d get the translation wrong–and think it was the church –the anima to be renewed in Christ.
veluti anima societatis humanae in Christo renovandae et in familiam Dei transformandae semper exsistat.”
Or do I need another cup of coffee?
Joseph,
thanks: the riches were more hidden than I thought!
It did seem odd to speak of “the Church” “renewing us in Christ.” However, I parsed that in terms of the eucharistic celebration as our being renewed through the eucharist.
Nonetheless, if the Church is to be truly a “leaven” in society, Christians themselves, the people of God, must, of course, be daily renewed and transformed (the point of my concern).
I wonder whether these prayers were translated in the ill-fated ICEL revision and what the translation was. John Page?
I agree, Bob. The Church (that is, we) can only be yeast and soul if we are daily renewed and transformed. I hesitated to send in my remarks because I feared they would distract from your main and very valid point, too often ignored when all the emphasis is on the faults of a “Church” described in third-person terms.
Bob, here’s my question for you. You posted a prayer. Why?
I’m not sure what it is you want us to do with your posts of prayers. Comment on them? That feels sort of strange–other than to say amen. Pray them? I suppose we could. Reform our lives with respect to them? Well, there are lots of prayers I need to reform my life with reference to–I’ll put this one in the queue!
Do you see the blog, qua bog, as a community of prayer? Are you preaching to us here? Or is it something else? Are you making a larger point –about us- with the prayer? And if so, why make the point in this way?
I’m not quite sure what it is you want.
The new missal will have this translation (or something like it):
O God, in the covenant of your Christ
you never cease to gather to yourself from all nations
a people growing together
into unity in the Spirit;
grant that your Church,
faithful to the mission entrusted to her,
may continually go forward with the human family
and always be like the leaven
and the soul of human society,
to renew it in Christ and transform it into the family of God.
Thanks for the beautiful post, Fr. Imbelli.
Thank you for this inspiring post, Father.
Cathy: I’m puzzled by your puzzlement. I’m under the impression that we can initiate threads for many purposes, e.g., to share a thought; to draw attention to a book, article, show, etc. we found interesting; to get a matter aired and discussed; etc., etc. Maybe Bob wants all the possibilities you mention; maybe none of them. Maybe he doesn’t “want” anything from us. Why is it important for you to know what he wants?
And 1998 had:
UNIVERSAL CHURCH B
O God,
in the covenant of your Christ
you continue to gather from all nations
a people made one in the Holy Spirit;
grant that, faithful to its mission,
your Church may go forward with the human family,
to serve as its leaven and life-giving spirit,
renewing it in Christ
and transforming it into the family of God.
The new prayers that were composed for the Missale of 1970 often incorporate quotes from Council documents, as Father Komomchak has said. They tend thereby to be rather wordy.
Deus. qui in Christi tui testamento
ex omnibus gentribus populum tibi congregare non desinis,
in Spiritu ad unitatem coalescentem,
concede, ut Ecclesia tua, missioni sibi creditae fidelis,
cum hominum familia iugiter incedat,
et tamquam fermentum et veluti anima societatis humanae
in Christo renovandae et in familiam Dei transformandae.
More like a preface!
This is a real nice prayer, and might actually bear fruit if individuals and parishes think about how they are the leavening in the world.
My Uncharitable Comment of the Day is that many individuals are simply delighted to know that they’re on the team that’s going to bring the world to Jesus, and hope God appreciates the fact that they took time out of their busy day to bother showing up to hear the good news.
I’m with Cathleen.
Fr. Imbelli has posted two or three prayers or poems that I’ve copied and tucked in my prayer book. But It would be instructive, I’m sure, to get more exegesis on what our priests would have us learn from these prayers. Or, to invite others to comment on some specific aspect of the prayer.
Maybe Fr. Komonchak could let Fr. Imbelli speak for himself instead of going on what looks like the offensive because somebody dared to ask a priest a question.
Sorry, my eye skipped over two words in the typing process. I wonder why!?
The last two lines of the Latin should read:
in Christo renovandae et in familiam Dei transformandae
SEMPER EXSISTAT.
in line two of the Latin — “ex omnibus gentibus”
I still prefer a fountain pen. One-finger typing at the rate of ten words a minute is a bit of an ordeal!
Cathy, as usual, is asking some really good questions. Robert, please correct me if I’m wrong, but I always thought you offered this sort of post as inspirational reading for those who follow this blog, not particularly to draw attention to a controversial subject, but to spark reflection and perhaps adumbration of its contents in more particular terms as they strike the reader.
Forgive me if you just wanted an “amen” (you got a couple, I see) but two streams of thought occured to me when reading the prayer.
One is sparked by the coming Rite of Election on the first Sunday of Lent. As you know, I wrote a book about that rite a long time ago (On the Rite of Election, LTP 1994) in which I discussed the doctrine of election–not a fashionable subject in Catholic theology today, admittedly, but an interesting one, I think. It seems to me that, without using the term, the prayer evokes some of the main features of that doctrine (God’s choice, the ingathering of all the nations, the absolute priority of God’s action, and covenant as defining feature of God’s chosen people). The theme of conversion, or becoming part of God’s family, also strikes a chord with me, as the catechumens who will be elect a little more than a week from today start their final sprint toward the sacraments at Easter. Fidelity to the mission of the Church is central to the whole enterprise, too.
The second is more challenging, I suppose. I think the idea of God’s covenant drawing people of every nation together is either a huge challenge or an empty euphemism. To separate this religious idea from “dreams of empire” of an economic or political or cultural sort, is an important but tricky move.
Even more sorry!. Father Komanchak had already supplied the Latin without typing errors. I’ll go out now and play in the snow.
Wouldn’t it be so much nicer to read a blog consisting only of videos of last night’s late-night monologues?
John Page, thanks again. When I compare this with the text we shall soon be getting (see Paul Ford’s post above), what can I say? Read it and weep!
I am the second in a family of eleven, nine boys and then two girls. Our Mother was tireless. (Our Father too.) But superbly organized as she was, inevitably some days my Mother’s well-made plans would go awry. Then she would say exasperatedly, “I just should have stood [yes, no typo] in bed.” I never knew where the expression came from. But I borrow it today. Father KomOnchak. Now for the snow. A good weekend to all!
Grant, for taking up so much space, I’ll up my contribution to the annual fund.
Joe, communication is an intentional act–it’s done with a purpose. If we don’t understand what someone’s saying in a conversation, or why someone’s saying it –we ask. “What do you mean?” Bob’s post, today, invites such a question, by its very terms. He’s not posting a prayer of the day–there is none. He’s posting a prayer that he himself selected from an entire section of “Prayers for Various Needs and Occasions.”
Why this prayer? What is the need? What is the intention?
The blog is a conversation. “Why did you post that?,” is always, it seems to me, a legitimate question. But perhaps Bob (and you?) think you’re preaching to the lay members of the blog here? In which case, of course, questions don’t have the same role.
Is it appropriate to preach on the blog? This strikes me as an extremely important question to clarify, since Commonweal is a magazine run by lay Catholics, and lay Catholics don’t ordinarily preach. (Nor do I think they should, ordinarily).
Jean, thanks! But since I didn’t go to Catholic school, I’m pretty immune to clerical intimidation of that sort!
Jean Raber: Time for another cup of coffee? Talk about “going on the offensive”!
I didn’t express my puzzlement because I’m a priest or because Bob Imbelli is a priest, and I find it very odd that two comments in reply are suggesting that some sort of clerical defensiveness was at work, or that Bob or I are engaged in “preaching to the lay members of the blog.” I was puzzled because I don’t recall the question ever arising before as to why someone had sent in a particular post. The posts usually speak for themselves, and one either finds them interesting or not, worth commenting on or not, etc. So, as I said, I’m puzzled by the puzzlement, wonder about the wonder, and not because they come from “lay folk”.
Keep the Church faithful to its mission
I always have questions about the whole issue of prayers of petition, and here’s one. Isn’t it a fundamental premise of Catholicism that God will keep the Church faithful to its mission? Why does there need to be a prayer asking for that? Father Komonchak had some interesting things to say about Aquinas on prayer.
Official prayers like this presume a relationship to God that often confuses me.
In a recent discussion, we reached the conclusion (or I did) that God does not interfere to stop things like earthquakes, so we shouldn’t look at them as things that God “allows” that he could have stopped. But we nevertheless pray for the victims as if God could direct the rescuers to individuals buried in the rubble so they can be saved. When I expressed a similar thought on the blog for America magazine, someone said maybe God can’t prevent disasters and is limited to clean-up work.
With all due respect to Kathy’s excellent suggestion about limiting the blog to videos of late-night monologues, I am not sure they would answer this kind of question. But I do recommend watching ABC’s Sunday morning show This Week, since they have “The Sunday Funnies,” which consists of videos from the week’s comedy monologues. It comes right after “In Memoriam,” where they tell you who has died during the week, so first they depress you and then they cheer you back up.
How count possible reasons and responses?
Calling attention to hidden riches in our liturgical books.
“Amens” are fine, if heartfelt.
Resonances struck that may lead to someone copying and inserting into a prayerbook are great.
Further reflections that enrich — like a suggested connection to the Rite of Election.
Indications of mistranslation are helpful.
Supplying better translations is a service.
(I too think that the revised ICEL reads better than the proposed version — but the challenge comes through in both.)
Even hearing about John Page’s mother can take the sting out of mis-communication.
“Qui potest capere, capiat” — and not a gerundive in sight.
John Page: I have the 1975 edition of the “Missale Romanum.” In it, the prayers for particular needs begins with four sets of orations under the title “Pro Ecclesia”; these are followed by one set “Pro Ecclesia locali.” Do I understand that the first group is now listed under the title “Pro Ecclesia universali”. I’d be interested in knowing this, also what the Latin phrase is. If it’s “Pro Ecclesia universali” I think it should be translated: “For the Entire Church” or “For the Whole Church”, as distinct from the particular local Church and its needs which is what the second set is for.
The translations point to an interesting dilemma. We are the Church, and we are the human family. So does praying that we would transform us set up an opposition between the Church and humanity? Obviously, it is good to specify that the Church is the leaven of humanity, but the original ICEL captures another aspect missing from the more recent by making us also the ones transformed. IOW, they answered the prayer to move closer to the human family. hmmm.
Posts like this delight me. A moment’s pause to consider a prayer helps me explain the faith better in the RCIA. In fact, I will spend Lent discussing the Lord’d Prayer, opening it as the setting for our faith and as preparation for fuller communion with some who have prayed that prayer for their whole lives. Looking at even the most familiar prayer can reveal riches.
Since rcia is the process by which God gathers all to himself, at least in one sense, so remembering that mission this morning is good preparation for working on that pert of the fast approaching Lent, something I have been putting off.
Bob-
I personally are very grateful for posts such as these. Sometimes I find that blogs, dotCommonweal included, can get so “inside baseball” in regard to ecclesiastical politics that we can lose the forest for the trees. Reminders of the essence of the Christian faith, occasional or more often than that, I find to be good for my soul. So keep on blogging. And I don’t find this sort of stuff to be particularly preachy (if that term is understood in a negative way). So don’t worry about that.
Anthony
Jim McK: You raise a very good point about the prayer, as also especially about the passage in Gaudium et spes on which it draws. At the time GS was being written and debated, Joseph Ratzinger and Karl Rahner raised the question as to what was meant by the word “Church” in the draft text. At times it seemed to refer to the whole People of God, that is all believers; at times it seemed to refer to something that was apart from, or at least distinct from, them. Ratzinger pressed the problem that it seemed to be distinguishing the Church from humanity, as if the Church were not part of humanity. He thought this still reflected the modern alienation of the Church from “the world,” an alienation concretized in the construction of the narrow, little, distinct world of modern Roman Catholicism.
“The translations point to an interesting dilemma. We are the Church, and we are the human family. So does praying that we would transform us set up an opposition between the Church and humanity? Obviously, it is good to specify that the Church is the leaven of humanity, but the original ICEL captures another aspect missing from the more recent by making us also the ones transformed. IOW, they answered the prayer to move closer to the human family. hmmm”
Jim McK: of the four translations offered, istm that Fr. Komonchak’s does the best of untangling the pronouns and antecedents (i.e. the “it”s and “us”s offered in the official prayers). At least to me it was the most comprehensible on the point I think you’re raising. Here is his translation of the passage in question:
“grant that your Church, faithful to the mission entrusted to her, may always walk with the human family and may always be a yeast and as it were the soul of human society which is to be renewed in Christ and transformed into the family of God.””
So I guess the way I’d read it is that while we are members of the church, and also human beings, the church is not coextensive with the all of humanity. The prayer is to allow the church to be the leaven that transforms the human family into God’s family.
If you’re already with me and ahead of me on this one – never mind :-)
Asking why someone posts a particular type of message seems like a fair and rather un-incendiary question. It seems to me that “what are you saying” and “why is this of interest” are rather frequent questions on this blog.
Fr. Komonchak’s rather quick and sharp response seemed aimed at offense that I don’t think was intended.
I realize Cathleen does not need my poor defense, but I had the same question.
Anyhow, my apologies all around.
I’ll fly the coop and go squawk (to borrow from David Gibson’s metaphor in the post above) elsewhere.
Jean: It was your implication that I had written “because somebody dared to ask a priest a question” that got me clucking, too sharply.
We can ask “why this particular prayer”, but it’s funny to question the propriety of posting a prayer in general. Isn’t prayer interleaved with the daily lives of the readers of this blog?
I am puzzled by the Commencement prayer at Brown university (the “invocation”, as I think it’s called). I am puzzled by prayers in secular contexts; the agnostic or atheist attendees are ignored. I think that they’re expected to pretend to pray along, or something. Or maybe we can pretend they don’t exist – don’t ask, don’t tell! It’s a distinctive American feature of public life. In France those public prayers would never fly, and I don’t understand why people don’t complain more. But, on this blog?
Certainly, it makes more sense to me here than posts about chickens. Chickens!???
For the record, Jean is correct: this is far from the first time “why did you post this?” has come up — even this week. And I’m certain it won’t be the last time. The Spirit does move in mysterious ways, after all.
I think it’s fair to ask for assistance in discerning posters’ motives — and far more constructive (albeit less satisfying) than simply assuming you know what they are. Of course — QED! — asking doesn’t mean you’ll get a straight answer.
Hi all, sorry I’m late but I am fascinated by the Latin here: et tamquam fermentum et veluti anima societatis humanae in Christo renovandae et in familiam Dei transformandae semper exsistat.” Here goes: “and may it [viz. the church] always act as a leaven and as a life giving force for the renewal of human society in Christ and for its transformation into the family of God.” The construction with a passive gerundive modifying a noun in the genitive or dative is common in Latin where the sense would be better expressed to Anglophone ears by an active gerund with object accusative. I suggest that “anima” is best expressed by “life giving force” or “animating force”. And I would say that “exsisto” is more dramatic that “is”. It suggests external action demonstrative of inner character.
Actually I think it is not too much to render “exsistat” “show itself to be”.
Father Komonchak,
A bit of quick research. I too have only the 1975 editio altera of the MR. That was, of course, the edition on which the ICEL revision of 1998 was based. Why then did the subcommittee that handled rubrics, headings, sub-headings, titles decide to expand “Pro Ecclesia” to “Universal Church”? (This was not the same subcommittee that translated the collects, prefaces, solemn blessings, etc,) I just don’t remember now. I am sure there was a discussion, but that was fifteen or more years ago. I neither remember nor have access to the relevant notes/ minutes in the ICEL files. On the face of it, I accept your point. Why not just “The Church” (or “For The Church”) B?
i believe that the proposed Missal, now awaiting the Roman recognitio, does have “For The Church” A,B, C, D.
I did check with someone who has a copy of the editio tertia (promulgated, 2000; published, 2001) of the MR, and he said that “E” in the 1975 Latin text, “Pro Ecclesia locali,” has been changed to “Pro Ecclesia particulari” in the MR of 2001
I hope that’s clear.
Yes, John, thanks for the information and clarification.
Joe Gannon: I like your translation. Mine was rather wooden, and I had been thinking of something like: “and may be [or act] like yeast, like an animating principle, so that human society may be renewed in Christ and transformed into the family of God.” In the conciliar text, a footnote sends us to Lumen gentium 38, where the GS allusion to the Epistle of Diognetus is made explicit: “What the soul is in the body is what Christians should be in the world.” A remarkably bold and ambitious goal for the mid- to late-second-century text to be setting out or claiming, when Christians were still a small minority.
For his persistent questioning of motives, Talleyrand, the subtle French diplomat, defrocked bishop, and political survivor against all odds through several regimes, established the gold standard, at least until recently.
“On hearing of the death of a Turkish ambassador, Talleyrand is supposed to have said: ‘I wonder what he meant by that?’”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Maurice_de_Talleyrand-Perigord
Fr. K
The reviser has certain advantages, since most of the work has already been done.
Patrick
Shall we put you down as an admirer of that remarkable man?
Perhaps we could make Talleyrand out patron?
Here is one of the posts referred to which asks about why posts were written.
Posted by Robert Imbelli
on February 10th, 2010 at 5:03 am
John Page raised a question: “Now we have three active posts that address, more or less, the same topic. Why was it thought necessary to supersede the post of Peter Steinfels?”
A further question occurs to me: who elevated Peter’s post from a comment on Paul’s thread to a free-standing post? and why?
Gregory Wolfe concludes his original post with another question: “And where do we turn to find the theological and spiritual resources to answer these questions?”……………………………………….
Richelieu should also be considered as a patron for this website. As a cardinal in name only he would nicely bridge the clerical / lay divide. He received a Jesuit and therefore not a Catholic education (I kid), so he was hardly intimidated by priests (which apparently is an urgent and grave danger on this website). And best of all, he was diabolically clever.
It’s a difficult choice but in the end I have to go with Talleyrand – a true politique.
I can’t tell you all how bemusing I find all this, except
I think Bill is right about Peter’s original post which continues to be a real Commonweal discssion.
Good choice! I understand that thanks to ministrations of F.A. P. Dupanloup Talleyrand died reconciled to the church. By a happy coincidence Dupanloup, later Bishop of Orleans, was expert at putting the best face on church pronouncements, a useful talent in that period and perhaps in others too.
If it’s “Pro Ecclesia universali” I think it should be translated: “For the Entire Church” or “For the Whole Church”, as distinct from the particular local Church and its needs which is what the second set is for.
Fr Joe,
I feel like I am being too picky. but isn’t each particular Church the whole Church, in the same way that the consecrated bread and wine are each the whole Christ? Each particle contains the whole while the whole contains every particle, and so some greater mystery is pointed out.
What is wrong with local/universal or particular/universal?
As to the world church contrast, you made the point initially. I just picked it up because it does not show through very well in any of the translations, except perhaps the ICEL where it may just be unclear. When the Church transforms humanity, we transform and are transformed. Identifying solely with the Church is triumphalist imo. (of course, this tension prevails through much of the imagery too; yeast is part of the dough that it transforms.)
Joseph Gannon,
Deathbed conversions or reconversions always warm my cynical heart.
Incidentally, as further evidence of his diplomatic skill Talleyrand was friends with both Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, at least for a time.
“During the French Revolution, French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, in need of sanctuary to escape the Terror, stayed in Burr’s home in New York City, but also spent much time at Hamilton’s house. When Burr, after the Hamilton duel and treason trial, traveled Europe in an attempt to recoup his fortunes, Talleyrand-Périgord refused him entrance into France. Talleyrand was an ardent admirer of Alexander Hamilton and had even once written: ‘I consider Napoleon, Fox, and Hamilton, the three greatest men of our epoch, and if I were forced to decide between the three, I would give without hesitation the first place to Hamilton. He had divined Europe.’”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Burr
Hamilton also had a deathbed reconciliation with his Maker, receiving communion from the Episcopal bishop (in a comedy of errors), possibly to please his devout wife from whom he had been estranged after carrying on a long term extra-marital affair. The final scene was a comedy of errors, ably told by Thomas Fleming in his recent “The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers.”
http://www.amazon.com/Intimate-Lives-Founding-Fathers/dp/0061139122
search for Moore and look at pp. 250-1.
I believe Talleyrand’s final days were handled more diplomatically due to a sympathetic Catholic clergyman.
One more argument for selecting Talleyrand as a website patron would highlight his gift for making pithy comments. If only half of the quotations attributed to him are genuinely his he deserves literary immortality.
Sorry for the detour but I heard Fleming speak at Fraunces Tavern and recently had dinner in Burr’s coach house which is now a restaurant. And now back to my prayers.
Jim McK: Every particular, local Church is all that the Church is, but it is not the whole Church because there are other Churches. The Church that sojourns in Bloomingburg is the same Church that sojourns in Port Jervis, but the whole Church consists of both of these Churches and of hundreds, thousands of others also.
I hear something different when people talk about the relation between the entire Church and the local or particular Church then I hear when the quesstion is posed as the relation between the universal Church and the local or particular Church. I’ve noticed that people tend to reify the “universal Church” as if it is a reality that stands over and against particular Churches. The whole or entire Church is more than any single particular Church but it is not, does not exist, and does not act, apart from all the local Churches; in fact, it is the communion among all those Churches.
Bob, here’s my question for you. You posted a prayer. Why?
That this question would be asked — and from one of the most frequent contributors here — is really, really, really sad.
But it, perhaps, explains a lot.
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” Sigmund Freud
Good old Sigmund. He could have fooled us.
You know, I thought I’d seen everything. But some of the comments on this thread leave me absolutely dumfounded. I think Bender is correct: sometimes people reveal so much more than they ever realize.
I’ve found myself looking forward to Fr. Imbelli’s prayerful contributions. They provide a much needed moment of calm and reflection amid all the hubbub. A thousand pardons to anyone who is offended by my allowing myself to be “preached” to—I really didn’t mean anything bad by it.
“sometimes people reveal so much more than they ever realize.”
On that we all agree.
I won’t speak for Cathleen, Mark and Bender, but I simply wanted more exegesis. I would be happy to be preached to, but that’s not really what this post does.
Moreover, making assumptions about what you think a simple question reveals about someone strikes me as working against the spirit of the prayer above. Are these assumptions something that help bring “together in your Spirit, from all the nations, a people to be your own”? Something that works toward “transforming us into your family”?
It seems to me that, at it’s heart, the prayer celebrates the Holy Spirit that gathers people into the family of God. It’s nice that people like the prayer, but how many of us are really that high on gathering a lot of people into the family that rub them the wrong way? Caritas is the hardest part of being a Christian, in my own experience.
Thanks to those above for the Latin discussion. It reminds me that one of the things on my bucket list is to brush up on my college Latin.
Should be “gathering into the family those who rub them the wrong way”? I know Prof. Gannon is reading this thread …
I agree that the thread has become sad (rather than Talleyrand bemusing) because soome who want to ask questions and know more are atacked by (those wioth the answers?)
See how these Christians…
Jean
I am not sure what your point is above. I am flattered to be mentioned, but I can’t answer a question I don’t get. Whatever it is, have a happy Valentine’s day!
“soome who want to ask questions and know more are atacked by (those wioth the answers?)
See how these Christians…”
spell?
Correct – pretty baaad
Fr Joe,
I guess you can count me as one who “reifies the universal Church” though not over and against particular churches. The relationship is more complex than that: “Clearly the relationship between the universal Church and the particular Churches is a mystery, and cannot be compared to that which exists between the whole and the parts in a purely human group or society.” (Communionis notio 9)
Without being argumentative, I feel more comfortable with a consistent imagery, like a geographic local/universal. Part/whole is more of a problem as I see it, since every Eucharist is the one Eucharist celebrated by Christ, and so is an act of the whole Church. When we pray the Sanctus, we are singing with the angels that Isaiah saw in heaven, and with the people of Jerusalem when Jesus entered before his passion. It is a sign we are all with Christ, in heaven and in the upper room in Jerusalem, when we pray the Eucharist. The whole Church, everyone who has ever entered that ‘space’, is present when any local church prays the Eucharist.
I can accept the comfort of relying just on the ‘visible’ church, to use the language of JP2 in EE. But then I think we should use visual terminology, like local/universal, rather than ‘invisible’ conceptual terminology like part/whole.
So I guess I disagree with you on this, something that suggests to me I need think some more on this since you are no doubt better versed on this subject than I will ever be. Thanks for the indication of a new direction, for the inspiration.
Jim McK: I agree wholeheartedly that “the whole Church” includes our communion with Isaiah’s Seraphim and the rest of the heavenly host as well as with all the saints who have gone before us and already are casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea. And I believe, too, that they are all present with us in any particular celebration of the eucharist by which we become what we eat, the Body of Christ. All this mystery is realized in and as each local Church. And there is nothing “reified” about it. The invisibile spiritual communion is the inner reality of the visible community.
So I am a little at a loss as to where we might disagree. Where do you see it?
Mercy me!
Fr Joe,
You objected to contrasting “Universal Church” to the “particular Church” and offered “whole church” as an alternative. I think that is a greater problem, because each ‘particular church’ gathered at the Eucharist IS the whole church joined with Christ in heaven.
Local/universal is at least a contrast on the level of the visible, where part/whole is invisible. I am sure you have a greater knowledge of how these terms are used, which I am probing by defending a preference for “universal” rather than “whole” as a contrast to a “particular” or “local” church. It seemed like an interesting line of thought, to me at least, in light of the recent discussions of papiolatry.
But perhaps I have misunderstood you? It would not be the first time I have misunderstood someone. I sometimes tell people that if anyone can misunderstand something, I can.
Father Imbelli – please continue to share your prayers as you have these many years – even when you write book reviews, I can hear your joy just as much as I did with your recent “opera” blog – you were the same way when you taught at St Joseph Seminary – always brought a sense of beauty to everything including the liturgy- you make people feel like there is something more along the way and so we eagerly proceed – “like the deer that yearns for a running stream, so my soul pines for You, O God” – I am grateful jim
Jim McK: In an earlier post I tried to explain why I didn’t think one could speak of a particular local Church as the whole Church. Rather than repeat that here, let me ask you how can the Church of St. Eucalyptus in Farmingdale be the whole Church when there is another Church, St. Conniptus, fifteen miles away in Brightdale? In ecclesiological math, it has been said, one Church plus one Church equals one Church, and I agree with that but the first two occurrences of “one Church” in that equation refer to particular local Churches and the third occurrence refers to the whole Church that is the communion between those two Churches and among all the others around the world.
I think J. Ratzinger has a more profound grasp of that particular piece of ecclesiastical math (which he probably got from Augustine). The Church is primarily the local church, where 2 or 3 are gathered. That is where the event of churchhood takes place in concreto. Add one local church to another and what you have is the one church of Christ meeting itself.
Wonderful reading by St Ephrem in Evening Prayer I of the 6th Sunday about our search to understand God’s word and perhaps the prayers of Christ’s mystical body, the Church: “A thirsty man is happy when he is drinking, and he is not depressed because he cannot exhaust this spring. So let this spring quench your thirst, and not your thirst the spring. For if you can satisfy your thirst without exhausting the spring, then when you thirst again you can drink from it once more …
Fr Joe,
The church gathered for the Eucharist in Farmingdale on the 6th Ordinary Sunday of 2010 is also the Church gathered with Christ in heaven to eternally praise God, which includes the church gathered at Brightdale on the 1st Lenten Sunday of 2007. At each local gathering, the whole church is present, because each is present with Christ.
Of course, there is a visible level. The group of people physically gathered at one place and time is not the same as that gathered 15 miles away in another year, or 3,000 miles away and a millennium earlier. The conglomeration of those groups of people composes the Universal Church. I can accept the geographical language of local/universal for that.
When we get into metaphysical terms, like ‘whole’ or ‘communion’, we presumably are talking about what is beyond the physical. That speech needs to express the inner dynamic of the Church differently. Each local church is an instance of the whole Church gathered with Christ. The “universal Church’ is reified as the local church. “You bring together in your Spirit, from all the nations, a people to be your own.”
I do not know quite how to explain this. It is an outgrowth of my attempts to explain “Our Father, who art in heaven”, that our prayer is done together, from the people God begot, which is addressed to someone who is somewhere else? right here? not in this place, but close enough to embrace?
I am not trying to make you go the extra 15 miles to pray to St Conniptus for protection; the healing balm of St Eucalyptus should be enough. I am just trying to gain a greater understanding of these things. Perhaps I should not have seen this link to ecclesiology language that I have yet to grasp.
We started this off, I think, by talking about whether it is better, more useful, to speak of “the universal Church” or of “the whole Church”. I prefer the latter because I think it is less likely to lead people to imagine a “universal Church” that exists apart from the particular Churches, when in fact it exists only “in and out of them”, as Lumen gentium says. Perhaps we agree on this?
Fr, there is a fundamental agreement underlying this discussion, or at least I hope there is. A particular church is the way we live in the church. We disagree about how to talk about that, about what better expresses our relationship with the church. I can see something in your objection to ‘universal’, but I really find the same problem with ‘whole’.
My real issue is about prayer. What does it mean to talk to someone who is admittedly someplace else? Usually there has to be some common space, physically in the same room or in a shared cyberspace created by photons or telephone lines or post offices or something. What common space do we have with our father, who is in heaven? And how is that not only an intimate space, but a space that justifies saying ‘our’.
When I think of praying in that space, thinking of a church as a fragment of a whole seems inadequate to me. But that inadequacy is because I agree with you that the particular church, which we know, is part of that space more than a far off “universal” or “whole” church that we do not really know. So there is some dissonance there, which I cannot resolve.
But I appreciate discussing it, since I have been thinking about it, or related matters, for a few weeks, and will be thinking about still for a few weeks more. I want to be able to convey that sense of being in conversation with God, as an ‘us’, without losing the sense of fragmentation into parts that we normally think of. This conversation in cyberspace will be helpful in that effort I hope, and I hope you will pray for me in that space where we pray to God in heaven, and that that will help me. Some way, those who will be received into full communion will have some understanding of what ‘full communion’ means, God willing.
Can we put this in paradoxical terms: that the local Church is a particular presence of the whole? As for prayer: St. Augustine often said that if there is a distance between us and God, it is not spatial and not because God is distant from us, but that we are distant from him, indeed distant from ourselves, living “in regione dissimilitudinis,” a land of unlikeness. And the distance can be eliminated instantaneously by responding to the ever-available grace of God. St. Thomas Aquinas spoke of the presence of God to us as like the presence of the known in the knower, of the beloved in the lover. That can sound coldly inadequate on first hearing, but one can see his point by reflecting on how an absent lover can be present to oneself in one’s love for her, or him.
Looks like you all are smack in the middle of a problem that currently bedevils both the phenomenologists and the philosophers of science — the nature of presence. In phenomenology the question is: just what is it that is present to us in immediate knowledge: a strictly mental object (Berkeley), an extramental object (Aquinas??), or both (Plato)?? In philosophy of science they’re trying to explain how a physical object can be present in two places at once — here on Earth and in the far reaches of the cosmos (see the entanglements theory of John Bell).
HIstorically this has to do with the problem of the presence of spirit/soul both to itself (consciousness of consciousness), presence of a spirit to other spirits (God within a mystical experience, mental telepathy, etc.), and presence within physical realities (God in the world, God in us, and our own spirits in our own bodies).
Jim, are you assuming that there can be only one “common space” (and, I assume, only one common time/duration) ? If there is only one space and only one time, and if a spirit can’t be present in more than one place and one instant, then it seems to me that it is impossible to talk about one whole/universal Church. Such a unity of the Church would be possible only if there are also other spaces and times, even analogous *kinds* of space and time.
The notion that something (e.g., souls) can be in two places at one time went against the grain of classic physics, But then John Bell discovered entanglements, the physical theory for which there is indeed physical evidence. It asserts that certain physical particles can be present in more than one place at one time. It is now a widely accepted theory. However, the physicists haven’t seemed to have caught on yet that to admit the bilocation of some material particals is to open the door to the possibility of *other* realities that can be in two places at once, that is — gasp, awwk!, God have mercy!! — souls might be possible!!!!!
But I can see such a realization by them coming: the highly regarded philosopher John Searle now says that “mind” (soul?) is produced by matter (the brain) but that matter cannot account for all of mind’s properties. (Yay, Searle!) If physics continues in its current trajectory and Searle keeps his mind open, I see some interesting metaphysics emerging and later a possible truce between science and religion.
In the meantime, I suggest that you give up your apparent assumption that the space/time of the cosmos is the only one and that our spiritual part can be present only in it. The medievals (yay, medievals!) thought that spirits can be present in more than one dimension at one time and can be present immediately to each other outside of the material world’s time and space. This, I think, can help solve the problem you are wrestling with.
Fr, I have no problem with “a particular presence of the whole”. I am a bit afraid it does not solve your problem, as a platonist might set an ideal church over against a particular presence of it. Platonic relationships never seem to work our.
This is where I am on my side of this discussion as I prepare to discuss the first line of the Lord’s prayer this Sunday:
“Our Father who art in heaven. Prayer begins oddly. Why are we talking to someone who is in heaven, while we are still on earth? God creates a shared space by fathering us. Created and raised to be an image of God, we find God within us, in a place that is not physical. Within there is an intimacy that exceeds anything that could happen if we were in the same physical space. Even if there are others in the same physical place, even if Satan himself is there to tempt us, God is always with us in our most intimate space.
Physical spaces do help us learn about that interior place. A quiet chair where we pray every day, or forty days in the desert, isolated from all other voices, can help us discover the place where we speak with God. Churches are special for this. There we discover it is OUR Father, not just my Father, and we learn from others about ourselves and our ability to be with God. The movement from busy lives to Church carries us from our solitude to a physical place where we gather to speak with God, sharing the intimacy of our Father with others.
Ann, I believe there is one common ‘space’ where all gather with Christ in the celebration of the Eucharist. It is a belief, not an assumption, though those may be identical in some grammars.
I am using ‘space’ analogously. It is not a physical, 3 dimensional space, but the infinite dimensioned space of God. The relation between time and eternity may be more familiar, and it is just like that. The ‘space’ where we meet God is a nondimensional space that encompasses all dimensional spaces and times.
We, who are limited to dimensional space, can be with God who is. This is the mystery of the Incarnation. Whether there are spaces beyond this cosmos is beyond me; I know that I myself am limited to this cosmos by God’s design. I might like to accept your challenge to believe in other spaces, but I am not sure how they would be relevant.
Jim McKay –
I’m using the word “space” in analogous senses. There is the primary meaning — the sort of physical space which we share and meet in physically. We share it with rocks and trees and cats and all the other material things. But I think there are also other “spaces”, real dimensions (another analogous term) where our spirits exist and can meet. Yes, there is God’s own infinite “space” where He is prese nt to Himself as Father, Son and HOly Spirit. And there are other “dimensions” in the world of spirits where and the angels might meet.
Are there other times? Well, St. Augustine, I think it was, noticed that music is a sequence of tones in our ordinary time, but it has some sort of unity that extends outside of this time. It has a sort lunity of being that transcends this world. Music is, I think, the first indication that we have that there is reality outside ordinary space and time, and I suspect that is one reason it’s so precious to us. There’s a scene in Aldous Huxley’s fine novel “Point Counter-Point” in which the hero-materialist listens to some music and becomes aware that there is indeed a dimension outside of this material temporal dimension. It’s sort of a conversion experience for him, and I can understand that.
So all this stuff is much more complicated than the materialists would have us believe.
I am quite sure they are not the same as the “materialists” you mention, but many modern physicists postulate new dimensions all the time. The consensus number right now, among ‘brane and string theorists, is that we (or the subatomic particles that make up the atoms that make us up) live in 11 dimensions. That is more than enough for a few hundred 3 or 4 dimensional spaces.
They also have no problem asserting other ‘times’; since it is one dimension among others, it is as variable as space. Einstein established the relationship of time and space, but it is not an easy concept to incorporate into non-mathematical thought.
I have only one quibble with what you wrote, and it is probably just an accident of placement. Angels can exist in other spaces different from our own, but not in spaces different from God’s. That is the difference in the way we use the term ‘space’. Angel spaces, spiritual spaces, may be like our own space, but the Church exists in God’s space, which is more than what we and angels have together. God’s infinity ensures the unity of the Church within our particularly finite churches.