The Liturgy and the Three Stages of the Spiritual Life

The Catholic Thing

By Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone Rooted in the conviction that the Sacred Liturgy, as "an exercise of the priestly office of Jesus Christ," is "the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed" and "the font from which all her power flows," the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council asserted the supremacy of liturgical prayer in the life of the Church and called for the entire people of God - clergy, religious and laity alike - to form themselves in a spiritual life centered on the Church's Liturgy. In so doing, they gave voice in an authoritative manner to the Liturgical Movement that had been blossoming in the Church for some 100 years: the central aim of that movement being the reawakening of the Christian faithful to a liturgically-centered spiritual life. Among the contemporary Catholic writers answering this call of Vatican II and the Liturgical Movement, Michael P. Foley has distinguished himself both in a popular key with his best-selling Drinking with the Saints and in the academic world with his well-researched and learned explorations of "liturgical recapitulation" and "Ordinary Time" in the Church's liturgical calendar. Foley has more recently produced a hybrid of the popular and the scholarly in Lost in Translation: Meditating on the Orations of the Traditional Roman Rite, a work of spiritually rich theological reflection in approachable language. The purpose of Lost in Translation is at once simple and profound: to meditate fruitfully on the liturgical prayers - principally, the Collect, Secret, and Postcommunion - of the classical texts of the Roman Rite. He does this by paying careful attention to the various shades of meaning and context in the poetry and rhetoric of the Latin prayers themselves. An expert Latinist as well as a liturgical scholar, Foley demonstrates throughout that the meaning of the liturgical prayers can sometimes be "lost in translation" because of the various subtleties and nuances in the original. To help the reader pray the Liturgy, then, Foley provides accurate English translations of the orations, and shows how the prayers are a sort of "eructation" (literally, a belching!) of the Sacred Scriptures, chewed over diligently by Mother Church, who brings forth her Scriptural treasures in order to form us as her children in her "school of love." Lost in Translation begins with a brief and lucid introduction to the essential elements in the composition of the orations of the Roman Rite, a kind of roadmap for understanding the content of these prayers. This equips the reader with what's needed to meditate on the liturgical prayers of the Church year. Nine sections follow. Seven take the reader through the "temporal cycle" of the liturgical year - the seven traditional liturgical seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Pre-Lent, Lent, Easter, and Time after Pentecost. The eighth part of the book includes the major celebrations of what is known as the "sanctoral cycle" of the liturgical year - the various feast days of Our Lord, Our Lady, and the saints. Finally, the ninth part provides a theological analysis of the structure of the orations themselves, particularly focusing on their "adjuration" or ending. In total, then, Lost in Translation unpacks the theological and spiritual meaning of the orations of 77 distinct liturgical celebrations. Two appendices even provide bonus material on the sequences sung on the feasts of Easter and Pentecost. The brilliance of Foley's achievement is evident in manifold ways, even beyond what he speaks of explicitly. For example, "his work has a beautiful coherence with the liturgical teaching of Dom Prosper Guéranger, the founder of the Abbey of Solesmes and the man who, according to Pope St. Paul VI, inaugurated the Liturgical Movement in the life of the Church. Dom Guéranger taught that the liturgical year is a school of spiritual growth, structured so as to bring the Christian through the three ages of the interior life - the purgative...