Showing posts with label bergoglio; lord's prayer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bergoglio; lord's prayer. Show all posts

6 February 2020

Mater Nostra quae es ...

Rumour has it that the Italian churches are soon to have PF's silly revision of the Oratio Dominica imposed upon them.

I doubt whether PF would try to impose this universally. That's not his style. His way of working is to 'make a mess' and, great glorious termite that he is, to attack Catholicism by nibbling away at its foundations. He takes the long view.

England is perhaps not as vulnerable to this sort of nonsense as Italy. That is because such a change in Anglophone liturgy would be unecumenical. In other words, the historically dominant Anglican tradition of the English version of this Prayer may serve to protect Anglophone Catholics from interference, at least until the pontificate of Frances III.

Intermittently, the Church of England has permitted optionally alternative versions of the Our Father, although, interestingly, the particular phrase that the Bergoglianist Ascendancy has such problems with has never featured in these versions. (This may be because Anglicans have tended to be shy of knowing better than the Author of the Prayer.) But, I think overwhelmingly, Anglican clergy have felt that 'changing the Lord's Prayer' would alienate occasional worshippers for whom the older version is just about the only liturgical formula that they do know off by heart.

PF's initiative raises a diverting question: if, without being ultra vires, PF can fiddle around like this, why cannot other Christians (or Pope Frances III) eliminate the 'offensive' Patriarchality of Pater hemon?

Footnotes: (1) the C of E did change the Our Father in 1662, when the doxology ('For thine is ...) was added to some, but (curiously) not all, of the liturgical occasions of the Prayer. I do not know of any record of how this went down in the pews.
(2) Single words have, in the last century, been changed, but this has made little impact because it does not significantly disturb the communal use of the prayer if some people are saying 'which' while others are saying 'who'. It is a disturbing of the order of words and a changing of the structures of phrases that raise problems in the communal use of a formula.