Spucatum tauri Bovine excrement: The National Catholic Reporter

Editor's Note: The NCR editorial to which we're referring here is, in the purest sense of the term, spucatum tauri--bullshit. But we know they prefer neutered English, so in deference to their sensitivities we'll call it bovine excrement today. Let it never be said we're overly harsh or unfair.

As if we needed more reasons to doubt the Catholicity of this publication (note the intentional refrain from using "newspaper"), their 6/30/06 editorial on the US Bishops' vote approving liturgical translations more faithful to the original Latin gives us yet another.

The tactics used to reverse the reforms that had resulted from the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s and more than three decades of subsequent work were secretive and engineered by people incompetent in the discipline and accountable only to a small group who had achieved power. That power was used to accomplish what they could not by persuasion or through the mainstream of liturgical scholarship.

Ah yes, more secret Vatican conspiracies. When did Dan Brown join the NCR's editorial board? Their logic seems to be "Church authorities co-opted our agenda and produced an outcome we and our ilk didn't like, so there must have been trouble afoot." And let's not even talk about "mainstream" scholarship. Religious education in parishes and schools is still recovering from the devastation wreaked by "mainstream" scholarship. Do you like emptying pews, an ill-informed flock, and the vocations crisis? Well, you can thank, among other culprits, "mainstream" scholarship for that.

If wars ever have winners, then the winners in this one comprised a small crowd of powerful actors in the Vatican, in league with others passionately opposed to the direction that translation of documents had taken in the 35 years since Vatican II, who managed to overthrow that process and put in place one of their own. In 1997, as John L. Allen Jr. reported nearly eight years ago, 11 men met in secret in the Vatican "to overhaul the American lectionary, the collection of scripture readings authorized for use in the Mass. Short-circuiting a six-year debate over 'inclusive language' by retaining many of the most controversial uses of masculine vocabulary, and revamping texts approved by the U.S. bishops, this group decided how the Bible will sound in the American church."

More conspiracies. It's starting to sound like a John Birch Society leaflet. If we have to thank a conspiracy for killing the utterly absurd move towards "inclusive" language, that's fine by me. By the way, if you say 'he/she/it' fast enough it sounds like 'horseshit', ironically. But I digress. Or do I? How better to describe the attempt to erase a disinction found in both Tradition and Scripture? God chose to reveal himself in the masculine form. Jesus was not a hermaphrodite. Moreover, when Scripture refers to "man" it's in reference to all of mankind. But that's just plain unacceptable to those who would dumb down the language of worship to makeaccommodatedate a political agenda, I guess.

That was the beginning of the final phase of a coup that upended all of the processes that had been in place since Vatican II, translation principles that had been approved by a previous pope and decades of work by a number of bishops and a host of liturgists and Bible scholars.

Yes, the stars aligned and the right-wing cabal prepared to strike its final blow. Like Pinotchet toppling the Allende government, a select few at the Vatican conspired to overthrow the unsuspecting, innocent, and harmless vox populi. Why not just change Pentecost to the closing day of Vatican II?

Of the group that met in secret, only one man (no women were included) held a graduate degree in scripture studies; two members were not native English speakers; another was from the United Kingdom and had spent no significant time in the United States; and the group included several members who came in with reputations for opposing inclusive language. "Powers in Rome handpicked a small group of men who in two weeks undid work that had taken dozens of years," the NCR report continued.

The junta is revealed. What cretins be they, meeting in secret? Too few Americans, not enough native English speakers, no women, and...this is most terrifying, folks, it's not for children or the squeamish...several were known to oppose inclusive language! They cut a swath far and wide, undoing work that had taken dozens of years. What a bunch of malarkey. The NCR is ticked because Rome stopped people from turning us into Episcopalians.

Life goes on and so will the community, even if we have to wrap our tongues around awkward constructions that treat Latin as if it were the language Jesus himself spoke and even if we have to wait longer for our own official language to acknowledge that more than half the human race is female.

Resting on self-congragulatory smugness, the NCR asserts they know better than the corpus of US Bishops (who, by the way, voted 173-29 to accept the more authentic translation...hardly a nail-biter). The revolution failed and the Church is to blame. They speak as if "community" doesn't have anything to do with "communion," forgetting that the latter is requisite for the former. By the way, here's some translation-- "Life goes on...even if we have to wait longer for our own official language to acknowledge that more than half the human race is female," really means: "Life goes on...even if the Church fails to alter Scripture and the liturgy to appease the radical feminist agenda." No need to check that translation, as it's been approved by our own staff of registered curmudgeons.

Finally, we suspect that the way forward will also include accommodating those who simply refuse to go along and will stand in place and continue to use the same language they've been using for decades. Our suspicion is that God will not be terribly upset by a little show of resistance.

I wonder if the NCR shows such magnanimity towards those who came to Mass one day a few decades ago and noticed the priest facing them, the high altar gone, and the Latin absent from the liturgy. Their world changed suddenly, yet they're browbeaten by the "progressives" and told they need to get with the program.

Finally, the NCR's suspicion that God won't mind a little resistance from them is probably true, but only because He's grown accustomed to it by now.

Off the Record, a feature of Catholic World News, also took a humorously satirical shot at NCR's editorial.