Collects of the Roman Missals: A Comparative Study of the Sundays in Proper Seasons before and after the Second Vatican Council by Lauren Pristas (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 333 argument. “We have a primary duty to name the disorder within,” the Lutheran in Mattox opines, yet that nobly humble sentiment could shine forth more brightly on certain pages of this book (277). What would a better book look like? Apologias have a long history in the church, back at least to Augustine. They suffer when they come off as a string of noble achievements that others should envy. They soar when they offer the self as a sinner and so refract the glory of a God who could save someone so depraved as that one. A Protestant sentiment? Perhaps, though neither author would suggest that that means it is a false one. Would he? JASON BYASSEE Vancouver School of Theology Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Collects of the Roman Missals: A Comparative Study of the Sundays in Proper Seasons before and after the Second Vatican Council. By LAUREN PRISTAS. New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013. Pp. 272. $50.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-567-03384-0. Well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, the sweeping changes in the Roman Catholic liturgy mandated by the Second Vatican Council have not ceased to provoke reaction. The strong response to the initial overhauling of the liturgy and subsequent revisions has not been restricted to liturgical experts, theologians, and the religious elite. A colleague who is also an avid fan of modern crime novels recently alerted me to a few lines from a 2013 novel by New York Times bestselling author James Patterson. In observing his suspicious neighbor at Sunday Mass, the detective hero notes that “he knelt when he was supposed to and knew all the prayers. He even knew all the annoying changes in the prayers that the church had just dropped on everyone out of the blue” (J. Patterson and Michael Ledwidge, Gone [Little, Brown & Company, 2013]). Lots of ordinary Catholics in the pews have definite opinions in matters liturgical. Whether or not the move to a completely vernacular liturgy was the express intention of the council fathers, clearly there was little awareness among them of the possible seismic shock to the Catholic culture of the time consequent upon a complete revision of the Roman Rite. But as Michael Gauvreau observes, “Changes to the liturgy and sacramental obligations following 1965, designed to make the church more welcoming and inclusive, had disoriented and troubled many faithful” (“Without Making a Noise,” in 334 BOOK REVIEWS The Sixties and Beyond, ed. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau [University of Toronto, 2013]). While perhaps uninformed about the nuances of the conciliar ressourcement/aggiornamento dialectic, historians and social scientists have not unreasonably suggested that, whatever the theological premises, such a massive revision of forms of worship was culturally naïve. For these experts, the impact of a structural overhaul and of the move away from a liturgical language to the vernacular was predictable. The experience of the Mass, auricular confession, and a variety of sacramental rituals and devotions was the bedrock of personal faith and corporate identity for Catholics of North America. The radical reform of Vatican II challenged both faith and identity for many faithful Catholics at a time when a fascination with technology and shifting mores dominated the wider culture. Once the vernacular liturgy was in place, the evaluation of the Vatican II liturgy most often focused on the quality of the English translation. How faithful was the text to the Latin editio typica? The complexities of producing an English text conveying the full theological meaning and nuance of the Latin original were widely acknowledged, but until 2001, with the publication of Liturgiam Authenticam, no comprehensive body of principles and practical guidelines was provided for the translator or editor. The issue of translation, however, was but one aspect of the broader question, namely, the quality and integrity of the editio typica itself. A critique of the collection of Latin prayers in the Missal of Vatican II was notably missing from the ongoing conversation about liturgical texts in the period immediately following the council. The evolution of liturgical texts from the Missal of 1962 to that of 1970 remained largely unexplored. It is precisely here that Professor Lauren Pristas begins to...