Being an Australian living in Asia as I do has some distinct advantages. It makes it possible to see familiar things in a new light provided by unfamiliar contexts. One such is words and their meanings.

A friend of mine who has been a missionary in Japan on and off for 40 years told me a fascinating story recently about how the Japanese bishops changed their minds about something quite critical to Catholic belief.

Japanese is a complex language whose complexity is intensified by the nuances words get from the social context they’re uttered in, especially by where someone sits on the social scale.

When the Catholic liturgy was translated from Latin into all the languages of humanity, including English, the words used in English by a Eucharistic Minister offering Communion are “The Body of Christ,” which is also the title of the feast we celebrate on June 6.

In Japanese, an intensely reverential word that put “body” into remote inaccessibility was used. Then, my missionary friend told me, the Japanese bishops did an unusual thing. They admitted they had made a mistake and got the translation theologically wrong.

Putting Jesus at a remote distance from the nourishment the Eucharist provides and segmenting the Body of Christ away and apart from Christ’s embodiment in the Church sends all the wrong messages.

So they changed the translation away from the hieratic and deliberately remote words to ones closer to the Christ who lives among us, nourishes our journey in faith and is embodied in the living community of faith – the Church.

But nothing human lasts and the Vatican’s current “reform of the reform” of the liturgy is pushing the translation back to the hieratic phrase the Japanese bishops changed decades ago.

The Feast of Corpus Christi provides an opportunity to focus on what Vatican II described as the “source and summit of the Church’s life.” Catholics can become fanatical about one form of the Body of Christ in the bread of the Eucharist as the REAL presence of Christ.

However, it is the unambiguous teaching of the Church that this is only one form of the real presence of Christ. The other real presences of Christ in the celebration of the Eucharist are found in the gathering of the community, in the proclamation and reception of the Word of God and in the hearts and prayers of believers gathered in His Name.

Regrettably, all too frequently, the only Presence focused on is Christ’s presence in the elements of bread and wine.

Inadequately described as the change of the “substance” (not the “accidents”) of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, the mystery of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist carries the intellectual baggage of a physics no one accepts.

Aristotelian physics makes such nice, however implausible and now unintelligible, distinctions. They are meaningless in the post-Newtonian world of quantum physics, which is the scientific context we live in today.

The Church’s teaching has always focused on the mystery of the Eucharist, recognizing that its explanation will limp. Words can never exhaust or fully account for a mystery. Just think about why you love someone: you can never do justice to the experience in the words you might use to “explain” it.

What does this mean in the present context of liturgical reform? It comes down to a simple question. Will the “reform of the reform” which has been legislated and promulgated from the Vatican for implementation next year be as energetic in securing the full range of Vatican II’s reforms as it aims to be about language?

Or will it simply head the liturgy where the Japanese have had to follow – into a world of words that makes the mystery of Christ in the Eucharist not a celebration of the one in whom we “live and move and have our being” but rather consigns our public prayer to reaches that are remote and inaccessible to all but Latin-educated clerics?

Source: A word to say about liturgy (UCAN)

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