Defended by its supporters as "densely theological" and "border[ing] on the poetic," derided by its critics as pastorally insensitive and a "linguistic swamp," the thumbs-down from more than a third of the USCCB's 250 Latin-rite members marks the first failure by an English-speaking episcopal conference to approve to a "Gray Book" proposal of the revised translation of the Roman Missal; the fixed "Order of Mass" was approved by the Anglophone conferences in 2006-7 (and still awaits the recognitio of the Holy See), while the proffered Proper had already been green-lighted by four other national benches before facing the American hierarchy. Rocco Palmo
You'd think they were writing the Articles of Confederation from scratch. If Holy Tradition really truly concrete, substantive, living, and enhypostatic to us Catholics, we wouldn't be wasting so much time pining for recognitios and supermajority votes out of the alphabet soup of committees and conferences that has come to define the Latin Rite Church. Why do we continually act as if we're reinventing the wheel when we have a 2000 year-old Tradition to guide us? "Linguistic swamp"? I wish we could assemble that one-third+ bishops in their lace-negligee choir dress, have them look any group of Orthodox in the eye and tell them that the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom is a "linguistic swamp." I'd pay to see that kind of bloodshed, especially when there are plenty of sees that could use some vacating.
