[DUBLIN] THE NEW missal for use at Mass from next November is ‘sexist, archaic, elitist and obscure’, according to the Association of Catholic Priests, an internal organisation which represents the exclusively male members of an obscure, sexist, archaic institution more commonly known as the Catholic Church. It has called on the Irish Catholic Bishops Conference not to introduce the third edition of The Roman Missal until it has consulted with priests and the laity, half of which are officially deemed unfit and unable to be office holders in the organisations hierarchy.
Down with this sort of thing
Thousands of changes have been recently made to the current missal, the association said at a press conference yesterday. And the language used, a more literal translation of the Latin missal, is not in keeping with the “natural rhythm, cadence and syntax” of English. “Many of these new words and phrases have obscure, antiquated, original meanings over a thousand year old, for fecks sake. They’re by products of a prohibitive, medieval religion, founded on ludicrous superstitions, rituals and behaviours. There’s no place for that sort of thing in the modern world, at all at all”, said the Associations spokesman, Fr. Ivor O’Ronic, who was dressed for the occasion in a ceremonial long black hooded robe tied at the waist with over-sized wooden rosary beads.
Blessed art thou amongst women
“Many women will be rightly enraged at the deliberate use of non-inclusive language. The new translation perpetuated an “exclusivist, sexist language” said the spokesman for the institution which, up until recently, maintained that stillborn infants were consigned to limbo, excluded from consecrated burial ground and whose mothers were deemed impure and unclean until they had been ‘churched’ by a priest.
Its the (c)optics of the thing
“Yes, and we’re here today to express our grave concerns that this new ‘literal’ translation from Latin has produced texts that are archaic, elitist and obscure”, said Fr. Pascal Pullendemick, a fellow member of the association whose institution not only follows the words of the Gospel as ‘literal’ truths passed down from the disciples of a man called Jesus (despite being written a century later in Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic and Coptic and undergoing translation into Latin for the first time nearly three hundred years afterwards), but which was also vehemently against the original idea of translating an archaic, elitist and obscure text known as the Bible into vernacular languages during the Reformation.
Going off-book
“What sort of message is this sending out to the laity?”, he continued. “I’ll tell you what. It’s a total rejection of everything we have been working towards for years. Its a rejection of all the hard work priests have undertaken in attempting to make the church and its teachings a relevant entity in the fast paced world of today”, said the member of the association whose archaic and obscure institutional belief system is responsible for millions of preventable deaths in Africa caused by HIV infection.
Episcopal reservation
Speaking afterwards at a separate press conference, Bishop Felix MacPhuck, spokesman for the bishops’ conference said the wording in the new missal was “set in stone”, but it was premature for any group to be critical of it. “Over the next six months the plan is to inform and advise the priests and the people in a sensitive way so that the changes can be fully understood and integrated into the Mass for Advent”, said the Bishop, whose fellow episcopal colleagues are still recovering from a nasty and infectious bout of ‘mental reservation’ concerning the official reporting of systemic child sexual abuse within their individual dioceses.
Context.
Photo by nklajn, used under a creative commons license.
