Commencement 2001
Commencement Address (Abridged)
By Francis Cardinal George
June 9, 2001
"You Are Like A Good Translation"
 Dear
graduates, the education you've received here at Thomas Aquinas
College has begun to set you free and will continue to do
so to pursue the truth in life, to discern good from evil,
to recognize falsehood and destructive ways of living, to
live life at the highest level possible: a life lived in communion
with God and with all those whom God loves. Where do we encounter
and experience this life-giving communion most intensely and
see it in ways that are not available without our celebrating
the liturgy? Of course, we find it in our gathering precisely
to celebrate the Eucharist, to celebrate the mystery of Christ's
saving death and resurrection. And while the Church has made
much progress in liturgical renewal in some ways, to establish
the necessary connection between liturgy and life remains
still the continuing challenge to Catholics everywhere. Without
this connection, the faith that establishes Eucharistic communion
may be, for you and for me, a source of personal motivation.
But it cannot be something that organizes our life, privately
and publicly.
It is nearly 100 years since Pope Saint Pius X instructed
the Catholic people to make the liturgy the primary and indispensable
source from which the faithful derive the Christian spirit.
The changes in the liturgy mandated by the Second Vatican
Council were not intended to be merely external changes in
format and language, but rather, changes in the way the liturgy
was to express the mysteries of faith and was to shape the
lives of the people involved in its celebration.
Romano Guardini, a great German liturgist, in an open letter
to the 1964 German Liturgical Congress at Mainz, just a few
months after the publication of the Council's Constitution
on the Sacred Liturgy suggested that the question facing us
would be whether we would be content simply to revise text
and rubrics and offer better explanations of the meaning of
the rites or whether, as he said, we would relearn a forgotten
way of doing things, recapture lost attitudes. Guardini and
many of the liturgical pioneers - Lambert, Beaudoin, Josef
Jungman, Driedel Hilenbrand from Chicago and others - realized
that the external reform of the liturgical text and rituals
would not at all automatically communicate the spirit of the
liturgy, which in fact, was the spirit that these pioneers
in the liturgical renewal sought to recapture for the Church.
To recover this spirit of the liturgy now, we must not only
reconcile the dynamic of personal and communal prayer such
as we heard a few moments ago. We must also probe deeper into
the relationship of the individual to the community and the
community to the individual. The core and effect of participation
in the liturgy, of establishing through word and symbolic
action, our entry into the mystery of Christ's self-sacrifice
for our salvation is an evermore intense experience of personal
conversion, which leads us into communion, not only with God,
but with others. Full and active participation in the liturgy
leads people to embrace the truth, to take up the cross, and
to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, throughout every dimension
of their lives.
The pastoral problem that the priests and others involved
in the ministry of the Church often meet is the kind of segregation
of the Sunday Eucharist from everything else that follows
the other days of the week. That means, however, if that happens
(and it does happen) that the Eucharist has not been celebrated
as the Church wants us to celebrate it. The liturgy invites
us to a new life and shapes our attitudes towards this life.
The liturgy does not merely express who we are and what we
believe, but helps us to discover who we are and what we can
become in Christ Jesus, Our Lord.
In Jesus' great priestly prayer, in the Gospel according
to St. John, just before He surrendered Himself to His death,
He addressed His Father, Whom He has told us that we may now
dare to call Our Father, and prayed, "I pray not only
for them but also for those who will believe in Me through
their word, so that they may all be one as You, Father, are
in Me and I in You, that they may also be in Us, that the
world may believe that You sent Me." If we are not one,
the world will not believe. Which explains, I think very much,
why after 2000 years only 20% of the world knows who Jesus
Christ truly is from within His body, the Church.
Here there is the emphasis on mission that is bound up in
the celebration of the Eucharist itself. Our unity with God
is not something simply meant to insure our personal salvation
but rather to bring about our being agents of Christ and His
witnesses in the transformation of the world. If this is then,
a new world in Christ, then there is a new language. For a
world - God's world, and the human world - is always a worded
world. The Word that God speaks in His own Trinitarian life,
and Who becomes incarnate in the Virgin Mary for our life
here and hereafter, need be only one Word, for God is infinitely
simple.
We, however, divided as we are in many ways and always finite,
need many words to name this world which God gives us as a
gift. You spent four years here, particularly in seminars,
but also outside of the seminars themselves, listening, reading,
talking. You have learned the importance of words, you have
learned to appreciate that if the words are right, then everything
else has a good chance of following correctly. Our most important
words are always those used in prayer and the in liturgy of
the Church. They are our words, but along with symbols and
actions, given us and being rooted in the ministry and intention
of the Lord, they speak to us of the mysteries we recognize
and enter into and probe through the faith.
The language of the Roman Missal which is used for the celebration
of the Eucharist in the Roman Rite is, of course, Latin. But
now, as a result of the Second Vatican Council's reform, the
Roman Rite is celebrated not only in Latin, and I'm glad that
you preserve that celebration here, but in many other languages
as well, including English, and this, too, according to the
will of the Council. It is necessary to word this liturgical
world well. But battles over translations have occupied too
much of the Church's energy in recent years - so much of our
energy, that we haven't looked at the world around us and
asked what words must we say there. One cannot have full,
active participation in the liturgy unless there is full,
active participation in the Church. And one of the great sadnesses
of the Post-Counciliar world in the Catholic Church is that
we have yet to see the new Pentecost prayed for by Pope John
XXIII. We cannot rejoice in the fact that two-thirds of the
Baptized Catholics of this country do not participate in the
liturgy.
You, who have in your years here struggled to understand
classical texts in their original languages can appreciate
the problems of liturgical translation. The first translations
of the Roman Missal in the late 1960's, the translations still
being used in our celebration of the liturgy in English, were
done far too quickly, probably with good intent. But they
have been heavily criticized, even by the International Commission
on English in the Liturgy itself. Which is why they have redone
the Sacramentary. They did not adequately capture the Latin
original and a new document on authentic liturgy issued just
a few weeks ago from the Holy See presents guidelines for
the second generation of translated liturgical books. These
guidelines recognize the need to be both faithful to the original
and to be understandable in English, but with the first emphasis
on fidelity to the Latin.
That is, in a sense, what I want to tell you today. You are
like a good translation. You are to be faithful to the original,
to the image of Christ that is in you, faithful, and yet understandable
to the world that will read you, to the world for whom you
are to be a word. None of this difficulty of being faithful
and yet understandable in a new language would be as difficult
as it is were it not for the fact that English has become
something of a field for ideological warfare in the past 30
years. Recognizing that the language we speak does shape the
way we think and the world in which we live, advertisers and
politicians work to create phrases and words that influence
people to buy products and to make choices.
As a public language - and this is important - as a public
language, American English has self-censored many references
to God in the past generation or these references to God have
been deleted from public discourse by court order. And you
can see the way in which new immigrants, when they come from
a culture that has been shaped in dialogue with the Catholic
faith, in a while, even when speaking their first language
they begin to censor themselves. When the Mexican people and
others from Latin America come to Chicago and other places,
the first two years they continue to say "Gratias a Dios"
and after a few years, it becomes simply "Gratias."
Languages have developed differently in relationship to historical
and social circumstances. We are much more linguistically
self-conscious now, and that is very good. Yet language is
and must be more than the construct of any one generation
or any single group. We just heard that from your class representative,
quoting Chesterton: "Language puts us in contact with
people long dead.." And therefore, linguistic manipulation
which severs these connections, is a first cousin to human
genetic engineering and just as morally ambiguous.
Therefore, we recognize because of this sophistication in
understanding the way in which words do shape our world, that
language can hide as well as disclose truth. The way in which
a language is structure enables us to see some things more
easily than others and that is indeed the source of much of
the difficulty in the great discussions around liturgical
language. Particularly when, for pastoral reasons, we want
to see that this language is as inclusive as possible. And
yet we cannot do that, and most Bishops, being kind men, are
sensitive to that. We cannot do that by sacrificing the fidelity,
a fidelity which isn't even possible unless you have a linguistic
idiom which is able to make a distinction between individuals
and natures.
You studied the classical thinkers, you studied Catholic
theology and you know how Trinitarian and Christological theory
depends upon an absolute necessity to distinguish between
individuals and natures so that we can predicate natures and
therefore can talk about the mysteries of faith. An idiom
that says that the world is composed not of individuals and
natures and collections of individuals, but only of individuals
and collections of individuals is not an idiom that is capable
of expressing the Catholic faith, nor able to be used for
translating the Roman missal. And that is very often the case,
as we start to discern what is a good translation and what
isn't. It comes down to what is this idiom able to express?
And very often, in the kind of language that now is politically
correct, we have an idiom that is, in itself, intrinsically
incapable of expressing the mysteries of our faith.
Celebrating the liturgy makes us not only more self-conscious
about language, liturgy also moves us to express in action
what it is that unites us to God and therefore to one another,
and what it is in our action that either permits us or prevents
us from living joyfully the mission Christ gives his people
here and living most joyfully with Him forever. The original
liturgical movement of the past century insisted on this relationship
between celebrating the liturgy and creating a new world,
transforming this world in which we live. You are to come
to the altar, to receive the Lord, to listen to the inspired
word of God, not just when you read it by yourself in personal
prayer, important though that is, but to read it as it is
proclaimed in the liturgical assembly, which is where it is
explained in a normative way for all of us.
You should see yourselves, as a result of this experience,
as a priestly people, committed therefore, by that very prayer
to bringing Christ's own healing and reconciliation to all
the world. We are to bring Christ to a world caught up in
all the many things that we can give words to, give names
to, but which in fact, if we don't have a face in front of
us, often we can only be involved in abstractly. Individualism,
racism, secularism, violence. It is when you are acting in
the world, you put faces with all those words, that you can
come to see yourself as God's own instrument, spreading His
peace and justice within the community that God has given
you to love. This, this in its entirety is the spirit of the
liturgy. Liturgy is not about us, except to the extent that
we are in Christ.
Our Holy Father, in speaking so marvelously about the vocation
of Christ's faithful in the world, tells us precisely that
our action in the world follows from our action in the liturgy.
Our words in the world follow from our words in the sacred
liturgy. Our conversation in the world follows from and is
integral to our conversation with God from within Christ's
body, the Church. Only if, like a good liturgical translation,
we are faithful to the original, to the image of God, stamped
in us through Baptism so that we are like Jesus Christ, and
yet understandable to everyone we meet, only if, like a good
celebration of the liturgy, our actions are witnesses to God's
own transcendence and to our own future eschatological banquet,
only then is liturgy good and are our lives holy.
Liturgy cannot be motivation for justice which transforms
the world. Liturgy itself transforms us and the world itself
so that we are truly present and Christ is really present
to the world through us. If you have ever been in a place
where the liturgy has never been celebrated, where the Eucharist
has never been confected by Christ's body the Church, there
is a vast difference. The world is different because Holy
Mass is celebrated. The world is different because we participate
in that celebration. Not just we individually, not just the
Church, but the whole world would be a very different place
were the Holy Eucharist not celebrated.
If the Holy Father has called us to a new evangelization,
it means he has called us to love the world in a new way and
to be apologists once again in the sense of St. Peter tells
us to be able to give reasons for the hope that is in us.
And you can do this very well because of the marvelous education
you have received here. But we must do it, after the Council,
not in a defensive way, but to in a dialogical way where you
have to enter into the world of the other and appreciate the
words spoken there precisely so that you can find the right
words to introduce these people to your friend, your Savior,
your Lord, Jesus Christ. We are to live in this world with
Christ's own love.
In the consistory that the Holy Father called to examine
the Church's mission at the beginning of the third millennium
of Christianity, from all parts of this world, from every
part of the globe, Cardinals stood and said what is important
is that we judge everything that we do, every college that
we run, every grade school and high school, every hospital,
every movement, every religious order, every ministry, every
particular mission - that it all be judged by how it contributes
to the holiness of God's people. That's a rather broad prism
but it is a narrow enough spectrum to enable us to begin to
ask the most basic question we probably can ever ask: How
is what we are doing, in every part of life, consistent with
what we do when we celebrate the liturgy? This means that
we have to give ourselves entirely to its celebration so that
we can enter into God's own life and be prepared to pick up
Christ's mission to transform the world.
Sometimes when we are called to love God we look at what
we have to do to maintain that relationship of love more or
less intact, and then see what kind of energy and space and
words are left over so we can do what we want to do. And only,
if through the liturgy we are brought to participate in Christ's
own self-sacrifice, to see that the liturgy will enable us
to have not only the understanding but the strength of mind
and spirit to surrender everything we do to Jesus Christ,
only then can we be part of the Holy Father's call to a new
evangelization.
And yet in all this it is your faith that will sustain you.
This is the gift that God has given you: to be a lifelong
reflector on the mysteries of faith, the truth that the liturgy
makes visible for us. For we never plumb those mysteries entirely.
They keep drawing us farther and farther along into God's
own life and deepen in us the deep desire to share that life
with everyone whom God loves, which is everyone.
Remain true then, my friends who are now my brothers and
sisters of this family of Thomas Aquinas College, to whom
the liturgy tells you you are, to whom the liturgy makes you
to be, to the vocation that God has called you to, that you
have discerned here and you will discern in the months and
years to come. Remain true to all of that because you know
that on the night before he died, Jesus took bread, said the
blessing, broke it and gave it to his disciples saying, "Take
this, all of you and eat it. This is My Body, which will be
given up for you." And he took the cup and said, "This
is the cup of My Blood, the blood of the new and eternal covenant.
It will be shed for you and for the many so that sins may
be forgiven. Do this (act this way) in memory of Me."
We become one body, one spirit in Christ by doing this, by
bending our will to the will of the Father through His Son,
Christ Jesus who is Our Lord.
The sound teachings you have been given here are a foundation
for that life. I congratulate you on your many achievements
at this unique, this outstanding Catholic college. May the
grace and peace of God Our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ
be with you now and in the days to come. Thank you very much.
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