Our Lady of Peace

#1 – The Roman Missal is going through the Third Edition. The Roman Missal is the book of prayers and responses prayed by the celebrant and the people during any given Mass. There re two significant changes, which we will look at for the next two weeks. Today we want to offer a background explanation as to why we’re having a Third Edition. The first English translation of the Roman Missal after Vatican II aimed at easy intelligibility in the vernacular, putting greater value on what is called “functional equivalence” with the original Latin than on word-for-word fidelity. The resulting texts became quite understandable, but often at the expense of the full richness and meaning of the words that the Christians of the early centuries of the Church used to celebrate the Mass. The revised edition of the English Missal seeks to recover the full original meaning, rich in poetry, theology, and biblical allusions. To make the transition more fruitful, it is valuable to give some attention to two of the changes that people have found most confusing.

#2 – “And with your spirit” – The first change concerns the response to the priest’s greeting “The Lord be with you.” The faithful will begin to respond “And with your spirit,” instead of the now—customary “And also with you.” The Lord (be) with you (Dominus vobiscum) is a powerful biblical greeting, used in both Old and New Testaments, especially when a messenger from God, such as an angel or an apostle, meets someone to whom he was sent. Most famously, these are the words with which the angel greets Mary (Lk 1:28). He states the fact that the Lord God is with Mary in a uniquely intimate way– but he also expresses the wish that the Lord may be even more powerfully present in her when she will conceive the child Jesus in her wwomb. The greeting, then, is an acknowledgment of the Lord Jesus’ presence in the congregation and the minister, and a wish that His presence may fill us with His Spirit and transform us unto His image and likeness.

#3 – The second possibly confusing change coming up in the Roman Missal, concern’s the priest’s repetition of Christ’s own words at the consecration of the chalice. In the phrase “this is the cup of my blood… which will be shed for you and “for all,” the last word will be changed from “all” to “many” (in accord with the Latin term “multis” ). When Pope Benedict explicitly requested this change in translation, confusion arose among some Catholics: they were afraid that such wording might create the false impression that the Church believed that Jesus did not die for all human beings. However, the change in translation was not because it is wrong to say Jesus died ?for all, but because saying that he would die “for many” is a more faithful translation of what Jesus actually said. When quoting Jesus at the Last Supper, the Greek Bible and the earliest Greek and Latin Masses, the closest witnesses we have to Jesus’ own words, all clearly choose phrases that mean “for many” and not “for all”. It seems that Jesus choose to say “for many” at the Last Supper to show that He fulfills the role of the Suffering Servant as foretold by Isaiah: the one Servant who would take away the sins of “many”, and will justify “the many” by his vicarious suffering and death (53:11,12). The “many” means here an indefinitely large multitude consisting of both Israel and many other nations.
A final thought to ponder: It would seem that at the Last Supper Christ said “for you and for many” instead of “for you and for all” to remind us that the Eucharist is a Covenant meal, one which must be embraced by both the offerer and the recipient. Entry into the New and Eternal Covenant is truly open to all, but the benefits of the Covenant belong to those who have freely accepted it!