Two Clarifications on Good and Bad Liturgy

First on good liturgy, it was some time since I practised and even longer since I followed a Latin missal while doing so.

When I said that the end of the canon implies Creation together with God the Son, I was referring to cum ipso et in ipso et per ipsum ... however, it is about sit tibi honor et gloria, creation as such is not directly mentioned. But in ipso echoes a Bible verses like Romans 11:36 Quoniam ex ipso, et per ipsum, et in ipso sunt omnia: ipsi gloria in saecula. Amen. Or like Colossians 1:16 Quoniam in ipso condita sunt universa in caelis, et in terra, visibilia, et invisibilia, sive throni, sive dominationes, sive principatus, sive potestates: omnia per ipsum et in ipso creata sunt: - where creation is featured.

On the subject of bad liturgy, I must warn that the proposed changed words Holy Spirit, we praise you, who ... spoke to us through the prophets' voices though not of necessity have an ambiguous bytone I feel I identify.

The classic words in the creed are "who has spoken through the prophets". Implied, normally, through the words recorded in Bible and tradition which the prophets spoke or wrote. The words are now the speech of the Holy Spirit to us.

The change here (though not proposed for the creed, at least not yet) would tend to alter that.

They would tend to suggest that the Holy Spirit back then spoke to the people of God back then through the as yet back then living voices of the prophets - and through their voices, what they wanted to convey in context, rather than through the objective words.

In other words, even back then the Holy Spirit would, on this view, not have actually chosen the words, but the word choice was a human affair of the prophets, and is less important in remaining text than the echo of their living voices as resounding through so called living tradition, that is adaptive and changing tradition to the ones who hear their successors, no doubt the most modernist of Jesuits if in sufficient position.

Hence, the choice of words in that bad liturgy are such that modernist Church men are encouraged to feel what the voice of the prophets wanted to convey back then, by emotional empathy or such like, and to convey something "equivalent" (as they would consider it) in terms of what "we can understand nowadays". The actual words of Moses of of Daniel of of Baruch or of St John on Patmos become less important.

This is hideous rot, and it is also a precondition for the state of mind which the beginning of Reese's article stated. Without that, we would be - as in reality we are, it is just that they don't think so - obliged to take from the prophets for instance that the universe has a relatively short span of existence, compared to the newly imagined 13.8 billion years, and that man was created perfect in paradise, and fell through the own guilty choice of sin. They don't want that. Hence this spoke to us through the prophets' voices instead of "I believe in the Holy Spirit ... who has spoken through the prophets" - that is, through their actual words, which are preserved for us.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St Marcel I, Pope and Martyr
16.I.2017