On this blog, there have been numerous posts in the last couple of weeks about the new Mass Translations issued last Advent.  As we already know, many Catholics have had difficulty adjusting to the change.

I remember learning that a new translation was coming actually a couple of years ago from college seminarians who talked about the “great Roman Missal Three.” Their excitement puzzled me – I was unsure what the need for a new translation was – my 20 ish years of Mass experience made me think that our current version seemed to work just fine.

I am now in graduate school studying parishes in Chicago. As parishes prepared for the Mass translation, I found my question changing from whether the new translation was necessary to asking how Catholics might be adjusting to the new translation. Thinking in a Durkheimian lens, my primary question is linked to my own sense of timelessness attached to only knowing one translation. This evokes a sense that the Mass is timeless and unchanging, and my experience of the Sacred is wrapped up in this ritual. Yet, certainly, any critical thinking lends us to know that the Mass is not timeless but a social construction. The discussion leading up to the translation led me to wonder how the Mass we knew and experienced emerged over time.

In 1950, Josef Jungmann, SJ, tracked the formation of the Catholic Mass in an enormous 800 page two-volume book entitled The Mass of the Roman Rite: It’s Origins and Development. Though his account does not include the Second Vatican Council, his approach documents historically and theologically what changes occurred in the formation of the Mass as early as first century Christianity. The sheer quantity of pages suggests that this Mass has evolved and changed over time to the present iteration we now experience.

Despite the notion that the Mass is a social construction evolving over time, we as sociologists know that what is externalized, objectivated, and internalized has real consequences in the world (Berger and Luckmann 1967). Thus, Catholics who had never experienced a different Mass before perhaps could conceive of the construction as timeless, and as a ritual, something that linked them to the conceptions of the Sacred.

In our research then, I suggest we study this translation from a cultural sociology approach. In the abstract for Penny Edgell’s upcoming 2012 Annual Review of Sociology piece, she argues that the sociology of religion should look at religion culturally from a) an institutional field perspective, b) a lived religion perspective, and c) a religious cultural tools and symbolic boundaries perspective. I believe these three perspectives are useful for understanding the Mass translation and its impacts on how Catholics are adjusting. Questions emerge for each of these three areas:

Institutional Field: Sociologists have argued that the local congregation or parish as a unit of analysis has become increasingly important (Baggett 2009; Warner 1994). How is the parish as an institution shaping beliefs or influencing responses to the new mass change? Is this influenced by the local Archdiocese?

Lived Religion: This perspective can help us understand my own questions about the Sacred and Profane from a Durkheimian lens. Does the mass lose some component of mysticism for Catholics when it changes? Given the construction of the ritual over time, answering questions such as this can help us further understand how individuals make sense of the Sacred and Profane, especially during a time of conflict and change.

Cultural Tools and Symbolic Boundaries: We know that different “Mass translation cards” have been constructed across the country to help ease the change for Catholics, and we have interacted with these tools ourselves. One church in my current research commissioned new mass songs and others have relied on the bulletin as a tool for communicating information about the translation. How do Catholics interact with these tools provided? Do these tools impact the ways Catholics relate to the Sacred and experience the Mass?

References

Baggett, Jerome. 2009. Sense of the Faithful: How American Catholics Live Their Faith. New York: Oxford University Press.

Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann. 1967. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Anchor Books.

Edgell, Penny. Forthcoming 2012. “A Cultural Sociology of Religion: New Directions.” Annual Review of Sociology 38.

Jungmann, Josef A. 1950. The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development (Missarum Sollemnia). Volume 1. Francis A. Brunner, trans. New York: Benziger Brothers.

Warner, R. Stephen. 1994. “The Place of the Congregation in the Contemporary American Configuration.” Pp 54-99 in American Congregations: Volume 2: New Perspectives in the Study of Congregations. Eds. James P Wind and James W. Lewis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.