From the Editor

From the Editor Rev. Thomas M. Kocik As this issue of Antiphon goes to print, the Reverend Joseph Augustine Di Noia, O.P., has recently been appointed by Pope Benedict XVI to succeed Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith as Secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. A native New Yorker, distinguished theologian, and member of the Society for Catholic Liturgy, Father Di Noia has served as undersecretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith since 2002. Since secretaries of Vatican congregations have the rank of titular archbishop ex officio, Father Di Noia will, by the time you read this, be Archbishop Di Noia; his ordination to the episcopacy is scheduled to take place on 11 July at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington D.C. On behalf of the Society, Antiphon congratulates Archbishop Di Noia and offers him its prayerful best wishes as he prepares to serve the universal Church in this new capacity . In the Current Number The present issue of Antiphon features two papers delivered at the 2009 General Conference of the Society for Catholic Liturgy, the theme of which was the Missale Romanum. The Address by Michael P. Foley proposes an imaginative propaedeutic for allegorical readings of liturgy: a triptych of key “moments” in the history of Christian interpretation of biblical revelation. The modern neglect (until quite recently) of allegory, typology, and figurative exegesis in general stands in stark contrast to the great Tradition of Christian orthodoxy, starting with the New Testament itself. It has deprived the faithful of a rich trove of spiritual insight, resulting in a diminution not only of biblical interpretation and preaching, but of liturgical imagination also. Ritual elements often assumed to be trivial or purely functional could be brought into fuller relief through a rediscovery of what Foley terms the “mystic meaning” of the Roman Rite. Among these ritual elements are the various processions of the Mass, the subject of an illuminative Essay by Fr John Mary Burns. Drawing upon the research of Fr Robert Taft, Burns holds that the 20th-century reformers of the Roman Rite paid inadequate attention to the structural units of the liturgy, focusing instead on the history Antiphon 13.2 (2009): 100-102 101 from the editor of texts and rites. As a result of this, the bond between the theology of the liturgy and its outward expression has been weakened, as evidenced all too often by liturgical minimalism and sterile church architecture. Burns explains how a theologically informed use of the Mass processions could promote equilibrium between the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the liturgy. Without wanting to put words into the mouth of either author, I submit that the neglect of liturgical structures bears some analogy, in terms of cause and effect, to the abandonment of classical modes of biblical interpretation. In both cases a rationalist historicism was at work, desiccating vast stretches of the Tradition whose lexicon is the Bible and whose grammar is the liturgy. As a result, we have difficulty making sense out of a great deal of Scripture and liturgy alike. Absent spiritual interpretation, what relevance could the Song of Songs or Leviticus possibly have for Christians today? What purpose could processions serve, other than getting people from one place to another? The common thread in all of this is the theological importance of forms of worship. No less important than the forms of worship are the words of worship. Language has been at the center of many disputes in Christianity. Words not only reflect reality but also constitute what is taken for reality. The translation of the Latin liturgical text of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, specifically the articles pertaining to God the Son, is the subject of a Commentary by Christopher Comden and an Essay by Lynne Courter Boughton. The latter was submitted to Antiphon prior to the Holy See’s approval in June 2008 of a new English translation of the Roman Ordo Missae of 1969, the fruit of a re-formed International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL); hence, the author’s criticisms of particular renderings of the Latin text of the Creed are now...