Happy Days Are Here Again

Thanks be to God, Who has brought us, unworthy though we are, to the blessed day that will be the First Sunday of Advent 2024, when the infernal Jerusalem Bible Lectionary will be no more on the soil of Saint Bede the Venerable, Saint Anselm, Saint Thomas of Canterbury, Saint John Fisher, Saint Thomas More, and Saint John Henry Newman. Solemnly process it to Tyburn and burn it, and let every church bell in the land ring out in such jubilation as had not been heard since we had been liberated from the rendition of Credo as "We believe", of Et cum spirito tuo as "And also with you", and of pro multis as the downright heretical "for all" right there in the Words of Consecration.

"Blessed" is the word, for the crowning glory will be the end of the Happytudes. Dare we hope that from All Saints' Day this year, and at Requiem Masses with immediate effect, that atrocity might already be abandoned? There always needed to be an English translation of the Bible de Jérusalem, in order to bring its important, if now dated, footnotes to the appropriate readership. But it should never have had a mass audience, much less a Mass audience. Boom, boom. I'm here all week. Don't stop me missus, I'm on a roll. And I am. I am a happy bunny. Who probably knows a happy Bunny. If you know, you know.

It beggars belief that for the last 50 years, we have been using, not an English translation from Greek and Hebrew, but an English translation of a French translation from Greek and Hebrew, made at some speed and, although his text was heavily edited, with the Book of Jonah translated by JRR Tolkien. Meanwhile, the RSV Catholic Edition, preferred by all sensible people for the low level scholarly purposes of which we were capable, has come to enjoy widespread liturgical use in the Church of England, and it is now in standard use in the Ordinariate, while we who produced it have been more or less forbidden to mention its existence outside the Oratories.

We do not need to assume, because we just know, that the Indian Bishops will have corrected the ESV in the same ways as the RSV has been corrected for Catholic purposes, such as at Luke 1:28. I have checked, though, and there are no Happytudes. In the tradition of the Grail Psalter that is not quite the Jerusalem Bible's Book of Psalms, and of the Book of Common Prayer's Coverdale Psalter that is not the King James Bible's Book of Psalms, we are to use the Abbey Psalms and Canticles. That comes from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which is surrounded by people who would worship Baal if they knew who he was, just so long as they did not have to say that he really existed. The likes of "O God, You are my God" do seem to have survived. But the Bishops who have authorised the ESV Lectionary in this country have also authorised this, so hope springs eternal.

Next on the To Do list are to restore Corpus Christi to its proper day, as kept both by the Pope and by those Anglicans who kept it, and to end the widespread persistence in this country of the practice of effectively ignoring the Solemnity of Christ the King by holding instead something called "Youth Sunday", which has nothing to do with the readings, and which largely consists of making youths do what their Boomer grandparents thought that they should want to do. There is none of this where Christ the King has been adopted ecumenically. Next year, that Solemnity of the Social Reign of Christ is likely to fall either just before or, less probably, just after the second General Election in a row. Yet there is presumably every intention of handing over the Liturgy to, in some cases, small children, for whom there are also special Eucharistic Prayers that need to be banished. The new Lectionary will be the ideal opportunity to put a stop to this nonsense once and for all.

By the way, Baal does really exist, or at least he articulates the human experience of something that does. Outside the uniquely self-existent and the infinitely perfect God of Abrahamic monotheism, this or that generic, dependent, finite and imperfect deity may or may not exist in actual fact. Who knows? Certainly, though, each of them speaks of and to the human experience of something that is absolutely real, namely Saint Paul's elemental spirits, which are Saint John's fallen angels. Even in the House of Israel, there were prophets of Baal as well as prophets of God. There still are. But I digress.

The Irish, meanwhile, are to be stuck with the 2019 Revised New Jerusalem Bible, which is all gender neutral pronouns and what not. If the Bible is that bad, then why bother with it at all? In the twenty-second century, the re-evangelisation of Ireland will be from scratch, as if no Catholic had ever before set eyes on the place. Poland is now well on the way down the same road, as part of the strange disappearance of Saint John Paul II. When he died, then we were supposed to have been dealing with his oeuvre and legacy for the rest of our lives. Whatever happened to that? Again, though, I digress.

There is an older section of the Latin Mass lobby that still holds to the curious fiction that it was "the same everywhere", which would not be a theological argument even if it were not wildly inaccurate as a matter of fact, although the sincere conviction of it is a fascinating insight into how it used to be possible to visit several continents and, at least within the Church, never leave certain ghettos. Nor was it "unchanging". They themselves use an edition of it that is markedly different from that which was in use 10 years before its publication.

The younger contingent is any case interested in the pre-Conciliar diversity of rites, and will often profess that it would happily attend vernacular translations of them for what it posited to be their more complete Eucharistic theology. There is every recognition of the deficiencies of the Editio Typica of 1962 even if it were to be celebrated well, and there is absolutely no nostalgia for 20-minute Low Masses. Against either of those schools of thought, you do not get to invoke Pastor aeturnus if you do not believe that Matthew 16 ever happened, or if you do not subscribe without equivocation to paragraphs 874 to 896 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which in turn compels subscription to the whole of it.

For something more in the spirit of the Book of Common Prayer and of the King James Bible, or of The Garden of the Soul and of the Douay-Rheims Bible, then that kind of thing does go on in the Ordinariate, where it often takes a form very akin to the vernacular translation of the Old Rite that there are those who would wish to attend. Like the Latin Mass revival, let us see how well it flowered. I myself am also steeped in the English literary tradition. In general, though, Catholic and Anglican congregations alike in this country are increasingly made up of people whose English is as it is spoken in many parts of the world, or who speak English as a second language, or who fall into both categories. For that reason, I have a feeling that the adoption of a Lectionary translation that had been made in India will prove to be a masterstroke. And we are never going to hear the Happytudes again.