c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) In the same week that Democrats gathered to find a plan that would take them successfully into the future, America’s Catholic bishops revealed their plan to enter the future by returning to the past.

The bishops, meeting in Los Angeles, approved new translations of the Mass prayers that make them sound like the original Latin, which was replaced by more graceful English versions after Vatican II more than 40 years ago.

Although Catholics and Americans in general long for spiritual nourishment and a resolution to the clergy sex abuse scandal, the bishops chose not to address these large needs but to reveal their own small ones by tinkering with the wording of familiar prayers. This is about as artful as hammering a tin ceiling over Michelangelo’s masterpiece in the Sistine Chapel.

Catholics will now respond to “The Lord be with you” with the phrase “And with your spirit” instead of “And also with you.” They will now drop “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you” for “I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof.”

The bishops need a Global Positioning System if they think they are entering the future by returning, as these changes suggest, to the past.

Like museums accused of trying to bolster their image by using questionable means to gather artworks from lost and gone times, the bishops hope to bolster their image by raiding the tombs of lost and gone Catholic devotional life.

The bishops usually get cover for their uninspiring activities from the even less inspiring actions of the American Medical Association, whose summer meeting usually overlaps their own. Both groups are organizational dinosaurs, and both give off the muscular contractions of creatures rendered extinct by the collapse of their hierarchical structures.

Against the background of enormous health care problems, the AMA matched the bishops’ minuscule bid for attention, raising them one by announcing a campaign to reduce Americans’ use of salt. That minor medical overture aims at controlling how Americans eat. The bishops’ slight liturgical move aims at controlling how Catholics pray and believe.

Diminutive as it is, this is but one example of the tomb-raiding on Catholic tradition that the bishops have been quietly but intensely sponsoring for some time.

It includes, on the devotional side, a reinstatement of marathon visits to the Blessed Sacrament, in which people takes shifts in keeping 24-hour vigil on the sentimental and shaky theology that Jesus _ in the form of the consecrated host _ is lonely in the tabernacle.

This comes with a restoration of crucifixes and stations of the cross. With their old-fashioned look and bloody emphasis, they might have been designed by Mel Gibson. It’s nothing compared to the frontal assault on religious education and other pastoral work that has been carried out by theologically sophisticated lay Catholics.

By this blatant and risky strategy, the bishops want to transport Catholics back to 1925 _ that is, to a mood and a period in which Catholics did what they were told and never claimed that they, instead of the buildings, were the Church. The bishops apparently believe that forcing Catholics into a time warp will give them back the control that they think their predecessors enjoyed at that time.

Joseph Claude Harris, the brilliant Seattle-based researcher, uses the Church’s own data to project that the Catholic population will reach 82.7 million by 2025, and that one in five U.S. Catholics will live in California. Harris emphasizes the need for bishops to plan for additional churches and schools to accommodate this increase, a large percentage of which will be Hispanic in origin.

The bishops cannot reach 2025 by turning back to 1925 through their studied effort to reset the clock of Catholic experience by Latinized prayers and old-fashioned devotions. They lost authority by not seeing the sex abuse crisis in time to deal with it effectively.

Now, concentrating on a small, sad plan to travel in reverse, these bishops will lose what authority they still retain if they miss the larger transformations in the Catholic presence in America that are already shaping its future.

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

KRE/PH END KENNEDY

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