Catholic Transcript Online

 The long-awaited introduction of the new translation of the Roman Missal on Nov. 27, the First Sunday of Advent, offers the Church in the Anglosphere an opportunity to reflect on the riches of the liturgy, its biblical vocabulary and its virtually inexhaustible storehouse of images. Much of that vocabulary, and a great many of those images, were lost under the "dynamic equivalence" theory of translation; they have now been restored under the "formal equivalence" method of translating. Over the next years and decades, the Catholic Church will be reminded of just what a treasure-house of wonders the liturgy is.

At the same time, the "changes in the words" offer the Church a golden opportunity to confront, and then break, some bad liturgical habits that have accumulated, like unlovely barnacles on the barque of Peter, over the past several decades.

Two weeks into the NFL season, ESPN ran a Sunday morning special exploring why the third-string quarterback of the Denver Broncos, Tim Tebow, had become the most polarizing figure in American sports – more polarizing than trash-talking NBA behemoths; more polarizing than foul-mouthed Serena Williams; more polarizing than NFL all-stars who father numerous children by numerous women, all out of wedlock. Why does Tebow, and Tebow alone, arouse such passions? Why is Tebow the one whom "comedians" say they would like to shoot?

The death of Osama bin Laden did not end the war against jihadism, a war bin Laden had declared against the United States in a 1996 fatwa that mandated the killing of Americans wherever they could be targeted. But, it did take one key leader of jihadist Islam off the global strategic chessboard.

In the fall of 2007, I spent a week in Spain, giving lectures, meeting with Spanish Catholic leaders, and making a hair-raising climb up several hundred scaffolding stairs to the top of Antoni Gaudi’s Basilica of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona – preceded by Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, John Paul II’s longtime secretary, who was doing the trip in a cassock (after confessing to me, sotto voce, that he wasn’t too fond of heights)! Over the course of numerous conversations in those days, it became clear that the government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, in power since April 2004, was not simply secular in character but aggressively secularist.

That Pope Benedict XVI is Catholicism’s most effective spokesman and navigator through the rocks and shoals of Scandal Time II was demonstrated yet again in May, during a flying papal press conference en route to Portugal. Discussing the enduring meaning of the "message of Fatima," the Pope said the following:

"As for the new things we can find in this message today, there is also the fact that attacks on the Pope and the Church come not only from without, but the sufferings of the Church come precisely from within the Church, from sin existing within the Church. This, too, is something we have always known, but today we are seeing it in a really terrifying way: that the greatest persecution of the Church comes not from her enemies without but arises from sin within the Church, and thus the Church has a deep need to relearn penance, to accept purification, to learn forgiveness on the one hand, but also the need for justice."

About two-thirds of the way through Brad Gooch’s highly acclaimed new book, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, I got the gnawing feeling that something was missing – even as I admired Gooch’s storytelling about a brilliant writer of fiction who had once said, "there won’t be any biographies of me because … lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy." That sense of the real absence hung with me until the end, at which point I looked into the index for The Habit Of Being (the collection of Flannery O’Connor’s letters published in 1979), which contains page after page of her most effective apologetics on behalf of Catholicism. It wasn’t there.

Sometimes, the veil slips.

It certainly did in a recent New York Times Magazine interview with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. There, in the course of relating her surprise at the Court’s 1980 decision upholding the Hyde Amendment (which banned federal funding for abortion), Justice Ginsburg had the following to say about legal history, social policy, and political surprises: "Frankly, I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding of abortion."

Where do things stand, two months after the University of Notre Dame defied the bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend and some 80 of his fellow bishops by awarding an honorary doctorate of laws to the university’s 2009 commencement speaker, the President of the United States?