Liturgy and Inculturation Since Vatican II: Where Are We? What Have We Learned?

7/25/2019 Liturgy and Inculturation Since Vatican II: Where Are We? What Have We Learned?

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51STINTERNATIONALEUCHARISTCONGRESS

Theological Symposium. Thursday, January 21, 2016

Liturgy and Inculturation since Vatican II:Where are We? What Have We Learned?

Mark R. Francis, CSV,SL.D., Catholic Theological Union, Chicago

Introduction

It should come as no surprise to students of history that more than 50 years after the

reform of the liturgy set in motion by the Second Vatican Council we are still in the process of

implementing much of what this great council gave to the Church. It is important to remember

that the reforms set in motion by church councils sometimes take a while to filter down to the

local level. After the Council of Trent, for example, it took over a hundred years for its decrees

to be implemented in parts of Europe and the Americas. But it is also clear that the participants at

Vatican II left the council changed by their experience. They had gained a new vision of the

Church and its relationship to the world. This new vision is reflected in the council documents.

These documents announced the end of the Catholic Churchs retreat and isolation from the

world and a new engagement that would enable a real dialogue between the Church and human

cultures. As thePastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et spes) so

eloquently affirmed, the Church desires to share the joys and hopes, the griefs and anguish1of

not only Catholics but of the whole global human family. This announcement was prophetic,

exciting, and yet also extremely ambitious for an institution that had long identified itself,

consciously and unconsciously, with Europe and European culture.

1Gaudium et spes, 1. All quotations from the documents of Vatican II will be taken from Austin Flannery,

Vatican Council II: Constitutions, Decrees, Declarations (New York: Costello Publishing Co., 1995).


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ThePastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World also made a statement in

1965 whose repercussions are still not sufficiently appreciated. The church has been sent to all

ages and nations and, therefore, is not tied exclusively and indissolubly to any race or nation, to

any one particular way of life, or to any set of customs, ancient or modern.2 Fifty years have

passed, but the consequences of this affirmation have yet to be realized by everyone in the

church. This is understandable since it dramatically altered the self-understanding of the Catholic

Church as a uniquely Western European institution. To appreciate just how marked a shift this

represented, think about how traumatized a traditional Catholic apologist of the early twentieth

century such as Hilaire Belloc would be by this shift. Writing in the period just before Vatican

II, he resolutely declared that Europe is the faith, and the faith is Europe. 3The documents of

Vatican II roundly contradict that statement.

As Karl Rahner pointed out, the discovery that the Catholic Church is truly a world

church is perhaps one of the most important insights of the Council.4It was a prophetic insight.

Since the Council, the center of gravity of Catholicism has moved from both Europe and North

America. According to statistics released by Georgetowns Center for Advanced Research in the

Apostolate (CARA) in 2014 only about 300 million of the worlds 1.2 billion Catholics were

European or North American. This accounts for less than 30 percent of the total. The

overwhelming majority, 950 million Catholics, live in Asia, Africa and Latin America.5If

present trends continue, by the year 2023, only one Catholic in five will be non-Hispanic

2Ibid., 583Hilaire Belloc,Europe and the Faith (New York: Paulist Press, 1920) 261.

4K. Rahner, Towards a Fundamental Theological Interpretation of Vatican II, Theological Studies40

(1979) 716-27.

5Cf. Fewer priests for more laity but Africa is thriving, The Tablet (6 June, 2015) 28.


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European, or Euro-American. This shift in a century is the most rapid and sweeping demographic

transformation ever to occur in the long history of the Roman Catholic Church.6

In light of this movement of the majority of the Catholic population to the global south

there is an urgent need to continue to reflect on the impact of Vatican IIs teaching on the

churchs relationship to human cultures. One of the most obvious places where this relationship

is experienced is in the liturgy.

The organization of my reflections on liturgy and inculturation will be simple. I will

begin with a brief review of the dramatic change wrought by the Second Vatican Councils

teaching on cultureespecially as it was applied to the liturgy and to the organization of the

Church. Ill also speak of both the resistance to this teaching and the turns taken by magisterial

teaching on liturgical inculturation in the years following the Council. I will then briefly describe

attempts at implementing inculturation in three different nations: Zaire (Republic of the Congo),

India, and the Philippines. Finally, I will try to sum up what we have learned and offer some

suggestions for moving forward that are consonant with the teachings of Vatican II.

Sacrosanctum Concilium and the Magna Carta of Inculturation

Any discussion about liturgical inculturation naturally needs to turn to the Constitution on

the Sacred Liturgy (Sacrosanctum concilium) the first document of Vatican II. Articles 37-40 of

the Constitution constitute what has been called the Magna Carta of liturgical inculturation.

The title given to this section of the Constitution is: Norms for Adapting the Liturgy to the

Cultures and Traditions of Peoples. In 1963, the neologism inculturation had not yet fully

entered the liturgical lexicon. The two Latin words usually translated in English as adaptation

6On these amazing demographic changes see Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of

Global Christianity(Oxford University Press: New York, NY, 2003).


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accommodatio and aptatiooccur in this section of the Constitution and would later be largely

interpreted by the term inculturation. They would also be employed in the subsequent

praenotandato the various rites in order to describe possible changes in the celebration of the

liturgy in light of specific pastoral and cultural contexts. As Fr. Anscar Chupungco has pointed

out, adaptation as it is used in the conciliar documents could be considered a synonym for

aggiornamentoor updating. This is illustrated by the very first article of the Constitution that

announces one of the primary aims of the entire Council is to adapt (accommodare) more

suitably to the needs of our own time those institutions that are subject to change (SC 1).

Inculturation, when viewed as aggiornamento, could be considered to be at the very heart, not

only of the liturgical reform, but of the entire program of Church renewal proposed by the

Council.

How, then, do the documents of Vatican II, and specifically the Constitution on the

Liturgy understand this process of updating, adapting, or inculturating Catholic worship? First,

there is a formal recognition that human culture needs to be taken into account in both

understanding and celebrating the liturgy. Culture, in the Liturgy Constitution, is understood not

in a strictly classicist, Eurocentric way, but in the anthropological sense that would be more fully

explained later in subsequent documents of the Council, especiallyLumen Gentium, AdGentes,

and Gaudiumet Spes.

It is important to keep in mind that this understanding of the relationship between culture

and liturgy did not drop from the sky during the Second Vatican Council. SC 37, the first article

of the Magna Carta paraphrases a statement found in Pope Pius XIIs 1951 encyclical


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Evangelii praecones missionary work.7 The Constitution of the Liturgy takes up his assertion

that Whatever there is in the native customs that is not inseparably bound up with superstition

and error will always receive kindly consideration and, when possible, will be preserved intact

(59). Article 37 of SC weaves this general comment of the Pope into a pointed application to the

liturgy.

Even in the liturgy the Church has no wish to impose a rigid uniformity onmatters that do not affect the faith or the good of the whole community; rather the

Church respects and fosters the genius and talents of the various races andpeoples. The Church considers with sympathy and, if possible, preserves intact

the elements in these peoples way of life that are not indissolubly bound up withsuperstition and error. Sometimes the Church admits such elements into the

liturgy itself, provided they are in keeping with the true and authentic spirit of theliturgy (SC 37).

Between Pope Pius XII and Vatican II, then, there was a move from a general statement

about the need for the Church to be open to non-European cultures to a specific reference to the

liturgy as a place where local culture may find room for expression. Given the insistence in

magisterial teaching over the previous four hundred years on liturgical uniformity as necessary

for the unity of the one true Church, the Councils application of Pope Pius words specifically to

the liturgy was nothing short of revolutionary.

In a parallel fashion we can also see the Councils development of Pius thought on

participation in worship enunciated in in his 1947 encyclical on the liturgyMediator Dei. While

Mediator Deipromoted lay participation in the celebration of the liturgy, it is taken for granted

that the language of the Mass would remain in Latin with the people following the liturgy with

the translations in their hand missals. For those without the necessary education incapable of

7The document is found at the Vatican web site:http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_02061951_evangelii-

praecones_en.html


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engaging in the rite even with a translated text, They can adopt some other method which

proves easier for certain people; for instance, they can lovingly meditate on the mysteries of

Jesus Christ or perform other exercises of piety or recite prayers which, though they differ from

the sacred rites, are still essentially in harmony with them (MD 108).8This concession for those

lacking the erudition to fully participate in the liturgy is roundly rejected by SC. In fact, it makes

active participation (participatio actuosa) more than just a nice extra. Rather, after years of

clerical monopoly of doing the liturgy, the Council affirms that participation of all the baptized

is of its very essence by proclaiming in article 14 that: The Church earnestly desires that all the

faithful be led to that full, conscious and active participation in liturgical celebrations called for

by the very nature of the liturgy. All the baptized are supposed to be able to actively engage in

the rites. Logically, then, the rites themselves need to be adapted or inculturated to allow this

to happen.

Both of these examples help to show how the council was not only inspired by previous

magisterial teaching but also went beyond it by announcing a new relationship between liturgy

and culture. The insistence on full, conscious and active participation of the assembly (SC 14) is

the underlying objective that was to guide the reform of the liturgy and is the reason for the

necessity of adapting or inculturating the rites. For this reason, the section in the

Constitution preceding articles 37-40 entitled, Norms based on the Teaching and Pastoral

Character of the Liturgy asserts that in the liturgy God is speaking to his people and Christ is

still proclaiming his Gospel (SC 33), hence the importance that this proclamation be

understood. Therefore, the Constitution insists that The rites should be marked with a noble

simplicity; they should be short, clear and unencumbered by useless repetitions; they should be

8http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_20111947_mediator-

dei_en.html


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within the peoples powers of comprehension and as a rule not require much explanation (SC

34). The issue of communication and intelligibility, then, was at the forefront of the concerns of

the Constitution in the reform of the liturgy. From this flows the call for the wider use of the

vernacular in SC 36. It is also here that a sharing and decentralization of authority over liturgical

matters takes the form of remanding to the competent territorial ecclesiastical authority (these

would later be the national bishops conferences) the responsibility of providing vernacular

translations from the Latin liturgical texts (SC 22, 2).

The one proviso on this call for renewal and revision was found in article 38: provided

that the substantial unity of the Roman rite is preserved.9 This substantial unity is not

specifically defined, although it is reasonably interpreted in article 39 as being within the limits

set by the standard editions (editionestypicae) of the liturgical books. Inspired by the

concessions for adaptation/inculturation given in numbers 37-40 of the Liturgy Constitution, the

General Instruction on the Roman Missal and thepraenotandaof the other sacramental rites

allow both the priest/celebrant and the national bishops conferences leeway for adapting the

liturgy without threatening the substantial unity of the Roman Rite. Departing from a hallmark of

the post-Tridentine liturgical norms that equated unity with uniformity, the Constitution on the

Liturgy opens the possibility of enriching Roman Rite Catholic liturgy with non-European

cultural expressions. Article 40 provides for the possibility of experimentation that would take

place over a designated period of time and then evaluated. It also stipulates that consent for any

major changes in the rites proposed by Bishops Conferences that went beyond the adaptation

allowed by the standard editions of the liturgical books was to be obtained from the Holy See.

9On a more focused study of the meaning of substantial unity see my Another look at the Constitution

on the Sacred Liturgy and the Substantial unity of the Roman Rite Worship 88:3 (May, 2014) 217-239.


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Resistance to both Decentralization and Cultural Diversity in the Liturgy

Almost immediately after the promulgation of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy,

however, there was resistance to this new understanding of the relationship between liturgy and

culture. This challenge to an explicitly stated desire of the council is well documented in

Archbishop Piero Marinis book The Challenging Reform.10

It concerned the question of who

had the authority for the translation of the liturgical books into the vernacular. Sacrosanctum

Conciliumhas clearly placed the responsibility for such translations in the hands of the national

bishops conferences (SC 22, 36, 39, 40). The Roman Congregation for Divine Worship,

however, by editing Pope Paul VIs motu proprio,Sacram Liturgiam, placed translations under

its own authority. This controversy illustrated how difficult it was for some to accept the

Councils teaching on cultural pluralism and on decentralizing and sharing the responsibility for

the liturgical life of the Church. Fifty years after the Council this is far from a resolved issue. A

recurrent theme of Pope Francis in his apostolic exhortationEvangelii gaudium, for example, is

his call for decentralization within the church.11

In the area of liturgy, this decentralization

proposed by Pope Francis would, in effect, return to the responsibility for translation and

inculturation back to the Bishops Conferences as the Council intended.

Although a centralizing tendency is present in the Congregations 1994 Fourth

Instruction for the Right Application of the Conciliar Constitution on the Liturgy called

Varietates Legitimae, or Inculturation and the Roman Liturgy written to interpret articles 37-

40 of SacrosanctumConcilium, this document presents a rather balanced understanding of the

10Piero Marini,A Challenging Reform: Realizing the Vision of the Liturgical Renewal (Collegeville: The

Liturgical Press, 2007) 19-39.

11Pope Francis Excessive centralization, rather than proving helpful, complicates the Churchs life and

her missionary outreach.Evangelii Gaudium, 32.


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relationship between culture and liturgy. It embraced the neologism inculturation reflecting

papal teaching, especially Pope John Paul IIsRedemptoris Missio. A notable development in

Varietates legitimaeis the presentation of inculturation as dialogue; a dialogue between the

Roman liturgical tradition and local culture. The term inculturation is a better expression to

designate a double movement: by inculturation, the Church makes the Gospel incarnate in

different cultures, and at the same time introduces peoples, together with their cultures, into her

own community. (VL 4).12

Inculturation, then, involves a double movement that enriches both the liturgical

tradition of the church and local cultures. It goes beyond a superficial adaptation of the liturgy

to culture and is described as a dialogical process. One of the principal historic precedents for

this kind of a dialogue was the Franco-Germanic peoples reception of the classic Roman Rite in

the 9thCentury under Charlemagne. While Roman liturgical usage was introduced to his Franco-

Germanic subjects, it was not received without change. From the Franco Germanic point of view

the liturgy imported from Rome was incomplete. For this reason liturgists at the imperial court

enriched the Gregorian Sacramentary sent by Pope Hadrian to Charlemagne with prayers and

rites that included local saints and reflected the more dramatic and fulsome liturgical style

popular north of the Alps.13

This was the kind of dialogue between the Roman Rite and local culture that was

presupposed by both the framers of Constitution on the Liturgy and the subsequent magisterial

documents. This dialogue respects both the liturgical tradition of the church and local culture

12The Liturgy Documents: Volume Two, Inculturation and the Roman Liturgy (Chicago: Liturgy Training

Publications, 1999) 118.

13Anscar Chupungco,Liturgies of the Future(Mahwah NJ: Paulist Press, 1989) 7.


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and necessarily changes both. This double movement was anticipated in the 1969 Roman

document that guided the first generation of translations of the liturgy known by its French title

Comme le prvoit(Instruction on the Translation of Liturgical Texts for Celebration with a

Congregation). Not only were the translators directed to faithfully convey the message of the

liturgical text, but there was an acknowledgement that

The prayer of the Church is always the prayer of some actual community,assembled here and now. It is not sufficient that a formula handed down from

some other time or region be translated verbatim, even if accurately, for liturgicaluse. The formula translated must become the genuine prayer of the congregation

and in it each member should be able to find and express himself or herself (CP20).

14

The final paragraph of this document was crucial for appreciating the understanding of

those charged with the translation of the liturgy before 2001. It speaks of creativity by evoking

the principal of organic progression announced in article 23 of the Constitution of the Sacred

Liturgy.

Texts translated from another language are clearly not sufficient for the

celebration of a fully renewed liturgy. The creation of new texts will be necessary.But translation of texts transmitted through the tradition of the Church is the bestschool and discipline for the creation of new texts so that any new forms adopted

should in some way grow organically from forms already in existence(CP 43).15

The call for the composition of new texts in vernacular languages, guided by the tradition

of the Roman Rite, is another example of inculturation as a double movement spoken about in

Papal teaching on inculturation and explained in Varietates legitimae. It was clearly the intent of

the initial period of liturgical reform to locate both the translation of the editio typicaas well as

the creation of new liturgical texts and ritual elements that corresponded to the genius of the

14Ibid., On the Translation of Liturgical Texts, 238.

15Ibid., 242.


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various peoples within the purview of the national bishops conferences, subject to the

confirmation of the Holy See. Lets briefly look at three examples of these attempts.

Zaire (Democratic Republic of the Congo)

One of the most notable efforts at liturgical inculturation since the Council was the

adaptation of the Roman Rite of the Eucharist for the dioceses of Zaire, todays Democratic

Republic of the Congo. This particular version of the Roman Rite was proposed to the Holy See

after extensive study and experimentation that began in 1969 and finally approved in 1988.16

Cardinal Joseph Malula of Kinshasa, who long enjoyed a reputation for wanting to make the

Catholic Church both truly African and truly Catholic was a key supporter of inculturation. His

reaction to the pomp and splendor of the Papal liturgy that accompanied the election and

enthronement of John Paul II gives an indication of his conviction that inculturation was an

urgent necessity in Africa.

All that imperialparaphernalia. All that isolation of the Pope. All that medievalremoteness and inheritance that makes Europeans think that the Church is only

Western. All that tightness that makes them fail to understand that youngcountries like mine want something different. They want simplicity. They want

Jesus Christ. All that, all that must change.17

This comment by Cardinal Malula expresses the dis-ease that many Africans and other

non-Western Catholics experience with the Roman Rite. Without adaptation to local cultural

values it is perceived as a foreign expression of the faith that has little to do with the African

experience. The Episcopal Conference of Zaire in its introduction to the new liturgical book

described the goal of framing a new form of the Roman Rite.

16Congregatio Pro Culto Divino, "Le Missel Romain pour les diocses du Zare," Notitiae 24 (1988):454-

47217Time MagazineA Foreign Pope, 30 October 1978


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The liturgy described here represents a way proper to the particular church ofZaire, in the African-Zairian context, to celebrate the Christian Eucharist in a

triple faithfulness: faithfulness to the apostolic tradition, faithfulness to the basicnature of the Catholic liturgy itself, and faithfulness to the genius of the African

and Zairian cultural patrimony.18

What, then, distinguishes this Zairian or Congolese Rite of Mass from the order of the

Mass presented in the editio typica?19

It needs to be emphasized that despite some structural

differences and the use of African symbols, it is still patterned on the Roman Rite as the official

title makes clear: The Roman Missal for the Dioceses of Zaire. Nevertheless, there are parts

both prayers and ritual elementsthat flow directly from African sensibility, spirituality, and

cultural values: the invocation of saints and ancestors at the beginning of the celebration, the

placement of the penitential rite as a preparation for the exchange of peace and the preparation of

the gifts, the use of dance and African images and metaphors in prayer texts that are not derived

directly from the editio typica. The introduction of the new liturgical role of the anonciateuror

announcer calling the assembly to worship is also a particularly African addition to the

Eucharistic liturgy that evokes the role of a servant announcing the arrival of a chief before an

important meeting.

The Roman Rite for the Dioceses of Zaire is one of the first official attempts at

inculturating the Roman liturgy in Africa. Its focus on the community of believers, attention to

modes of African expressionespecially the use of local proverbsrespect for ancestors and for

movement and dance in worship, are all aspects of this rite that, as the only officially approved

African variation on the Roman Rite, has been very influential in the liturgical inculturation

18Confrence piscopal du Zare.Missel romain pour les dioceses du Zare. Prsentation gnrale de la

liturgie de la Messe pour les diocses du Zare, n. 2. (Kinshasa, 1988).

19See Jean Evenou Le Rite Zairois de la Messe,LAdattamento Culturale della Liturgia, Metodi e

Modelli, Analecta Liturgica19(Rome: Studia Anselmiana 113, 1993) 223-234.


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proposed in other areas of the continent.20

This celebration has enriched the entire church by

helping Christians around the world see that a deep, holistic spirituality nourished by a

conviction that all of creation conveys the presence of God cannot be easily divided between

sacred and secular.

The publication of the Zaire Rite was a milestone in the process of inculturation of the

liturgy in Africa but unfortunately it seems that official encouragement for continuing the needed

dialogue between culture and the faith has all but stopped. Due to the dramatic changes in both

Zaire (the Congo) as well as the rest of Africa, what was proposed in the 1980s may no longer

be answering the needs of African Christians whose society has changed and who are today

strongly influence by urbanization and globalization.21

The Catholic liturgy needs to take into

account the fast-growing charismatic renewal in Africa that is naturally attractive to many

Africans because of its conviction that the power of the Spirit of God is at work in the world and

reaches out to the faithful in the form of healings and prophesying. Unfortunately, in Africa as

well as in other areas of the world, because of the centralization that we have already noted, there

seems to be a lack of enthusiasm to continue exploring ways for the liturgy to speak more

effectively to the African soul. As Spiritan Fr. Elochukwu Uzukwu noted almost twenty years

ago: Three decades after the convocation of Vatican II, the score sheet on inculturation or the

localization of the Church in Africa remains unimpressive. Apart from the official Roman

20See Nwaka Chris Egbulem, The Power of Africentric Celebrations: Inspirations from the Zairean

Liturgy (New York: Crossroads, 1996).

21See Floriberte Mavungo Ngoma, O Praem,Missel Romain pour les dioceses de Zare: Description

analytico-critique pour une perspective de propagation formative(Rome: Thesis ad Laureum SantAnselmo, 2005).


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approval of the Roman Missal for the Dioceses of Zaire official interest in the practical

application of inculturation has been very limited.22

Liturgical Experimentation in India

23

In some ways, the experience of inculturating the liturgy in India was similar to that of

Africa. There was a flurry of experiments in the 1960s and 1970s and then relative inaction on

an official level after the first initiatives. The Indian experience, though, is more complex than

that of Africa given the long history of Indian Christianity. This complexity is due to the

presence on the subcontinent of several families of rites (Syro-Malabar, Syro-Malankar and

Latin) and the complex multicultural context of India. For that reason I will limit my remarks to

the Latin Rite Church which is itself divided by geography, caste, and tribe.24

The call for cultural adaptation of the liturgy enunciated by Vatican II was

enthusiastically embraced in India soon after the end of the Council. In 1966 and 1967 the

Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) set the liturgical reform in motion by establishing

the National Biblical, Catechetical and Liturgical Centre (NBCLC). This centre produced a

proposal for areas of liturgical inculturation, endorsed by the Indian bishops (CBCI) who then

sent the document that was then approved of the Consilium. This document became known the

Twelve Points of Liturgical Adaptation,25

and opened the door to particularly Indian liturgical

22Elochukwu Usukwu, Worship as Body Language: Introduction to Christian Worship: An African

Orientation (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1997) 30.23See Jonathan Tan Beyond Sacrosanctum Concilium: The Future of Liturgical Renewal in the Asian

Catholic Church, Studia Liturgica44 (2014) 286-294; for a more ecumenical perspective, Paul Collins, ChristianInculturation in India(Padstone, Cornwall UK: Ashgate, 2007) 137-166.

24SeeJose Matthew Kakkallil, Liturgical Inculturation in India, Questions Liturgiques 77 (1996) 109-116.

25Consilium, Rescript on liturgical adaptations to Indian culture, 25 April, 1969.Documents on the

Liturgy (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1982) 489.


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gestures and other symbols. Among the Indian cultural practices permitted in the Eucharist were

semi-prostration instead of genuflection, an Indian style of incensing, offerings of flowers and

fruits, and the use of Indian musical instruments.

This initial burst of enthusiasm for inculturation in India, though, offers a cautionary tale.

The reception of the 12 points document was very uneven. As well-known Indian theologian and

liturgist Jesuit Fr. Michael Amaladoss pointed out, the lack of a general reception and application

of these points was due to the way they were developed. The twelve points were not arrived at

from the bottom up, but from the top down. They were a product of a committee of experts

who had designed the process of adaptation from above.26Further experiments with an Indian

order of Mass and readings from Indian spiritual classics from the high Vedic culture of India

during the liturgy were well intentioned, but they represented to tribal peoples and Dalits a

spiritual tradition that was both alien and oppressive. The Congregation for Divine Worship

called a halt to these experiments in 1975 at the urging of those in both India and Rome who

were nervous about syncretism and opposed to the Sanscritization of the Latin Rite Catholic

liturgy.27

Still, at least for many in India, Catholicism and the liturgy need to undergo a version of

what Fr. Aloysius Pieris has called inreligionization since most cultures in Asia are inspired

and shaped by one or more world religions.28

In this case, Hinduism is part of a common Indian

spiritual heritage that needs to be taken into account in order for the liturgy to form intellectual

and spiritual points of reference. Amaladoss has said, For me Hinduism is not another religion.

26Michael Amaladoss, The Liturgy: Twenty Years After Vatican II, Vidyajyoti(1983) 238.

27See Virginia Kennerley, The Use of Indigenous Sacred Literature and theological Concept in Christian

Eucharistic Liturgy in India, Studia Liturgica 19:2 (1989)152

28Aloysius Pieris,Fire and Water: Basic Issues in Asian Buddhism and Christianity (Maryknoll, NY:

Orbis, 1996) 67-69.


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It is part of my own heritage. It is the religion of my ancestors So I do not look at its

scriptures, symbols, and methods as something foreign to me.29

Work must continue to see

how the Catholic liturgy, in the context of the extraordinarily rich religious traditions of India,

can faithfully proclaim Jesus Christ and his Gospel using a variety of authentic Indian voices.

This is not only a liturgical issue, but one that is crucial to any effective efforts at making the

Latin Rite a credible Indian expression of the Church.

The Philippines

Much work in liturgical inculturation has already been done in the Philippines. The most

important leader in this fieldboth internationally and in the Philippines--was Dom Anscar

Chupungco, OSB who suddenly died in January 2013 leaving a void in the liturgical community

that will be difficult to fill. Formerpresideof the Pontifical Liturgical Institute in Rome and

long-time secretary of the Bishops Committee on the Liturgy of the Philippines, Fr. Anscar was a

chief architect of theMisa ng Bayang Pilipino(Mass of the Filipino People). This proposed

Filipino Mass arose out of class project that began in the 1970s at the Maryhill School of

Theology in Manila that he describes as

an attempt to inculturate the 1975 Roman Order of Mass in the context of theculture and traditions of Filipino Catholics. Its chief aim is to communicate more

fully to the Filipino faithful the spiritual and doctrinal wealth of the Roman Orderof Mass by re-expressing, through dynamic equivalence, its theological

content.30

After several years of work on this project that involved liturgists, theologians, pastors,

sociologists, cultural anthropologists and experts in linguistics, theMisa ng Bayang Pilipino was

29Michael Amaladoss, Inculturation and Liturgy, Vidyajvoti68 (2004) 654.

30Anscar Chupungco, Shaping the Filipino Order of Mass, in Worship: Progress and Tradition

(Washington DC: The Pastoral Press, 1994) 129.


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reviewed by an ad-hoc committee of bishops, and in 1976 was unanimously approved by the

Conference of Catholic Bishops of the Philippines and submitted for confirmation to the

Congregation for Divine Worship. While still awaiting confirmation, in 1991 the project was

reviewed, emended and again, unanimously approved by the Bishops Conference and then sent

to the CDW for approval. To date, no response from Rome has been received.

They key to understanding this project was the method of dynamic equivalence in

translating both the prayer texts and the ritual. For example the way the epiclesis of the

Eucharistic prayer is expressed is through the use of the word lukuban that signifies the

blessing, care, and protection through the action of overshadowing, like the action of a bird

brooding its eggs. Used for the epiclesis on both the Eucharistic elements and the assembly,

lukuban expresses the transforming action of the Holy Spirit.31

Ritually, a change in the order of

receiving communion is proposed. In the Roman Rite it is prescribed that the priest receive

communion first, before the communion of the servers or the assembly. Given the importance of

hospitality in Philippine culture, the usual practice of a good host of the meal is to wait until his

guests have eaten before taking food. For this reason the priest receives communion last, after

members of the assembly.

As Fr. Anscar has pointed out, this dynamic equivalent approach to inculturation is far

from radical. It does not create liturgical forms and texts out of whole cloth but seeks express

the basic content of the Roman Rite respecting components of culture that allow the content of

the rite to be more clearly communicated. While elements from popular religious culture inspire

31Ibid., 135.


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ritual elements in the celebration, the substantial unity of the Roman Rite is not in danger of

being compromised.

While we cannot discount the need for more radical liturgical creativity along the lines of

what is proposed in SC 40, given the conservative nature of this approach, it is disappointing

that there has not been a responseeither positive or negativeto theMisa ng Byang Pilipino

from the Roman Congregation of Worship. This seems to illustrate the special reluctance

displayed by the Congregation in approving proposals for inculturation of the Order of Mass.

The Tagalog Wedding Rite--Ang Pagdiriwang ng Pag-iisang Dibdib, employs much the same

dynamic equivalent approach to Rite of Marriage and was approved by Rome in 1983.

Conclusion: Liturgical Inculturation. Where are We? What Have We Learned?

The experience of the last fifty years has provided some very valuable lessons for the

whole Church in regard to liturgy and inculturation. It seems, though, that despite the call for

inculturation at the various continental synods of bishops (Africa, Asia, America, Oceania) the

urgency present at the beginning of the liturgical reform to inculturate the liturgy seems to have

dissipated. To what do we owe this apparent lack of movement in an area that was obviously an

important part of the program of liturgical renewal of Vatican II? As we saw even at the

beginning of the liturgical renewal, the main cause of this lack of enthusiasm for inculturation

comes from the Congregation of Worship.

A good example of an intervention from Rome that both expresses these reservations and

inhibits local churches from pursuing liturgical inculturation more vigorously is found in the

Fifth Instruction on the Right Implementation of Sacrosanctum Concilium,known asLiturgiam

Authenticam. This document is wholly focused on transmitting the doctrinal riches of the Roman


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Rite embedded in its Latin vocabulary and syntax. This method of translation, called formal

correspondence, is centered on the Latin text and necessarily pays less attention to the demands

of the target language. The method employed by the previous instruction, Comme le Prvoit

dynamic equivalencesought to respect both the content of the liturgical texts that were to be

translated as well as the ways in which this content could be understood and celebrated by local

cultures. As Anscar Chupungco pointed out,Liturgiam authenticam is one of those rare Vatican

documents that entirely ignore their predecessor.32

There is no time to dwell on the many limitations ofLiturgiam Authenticam since both

distinguishd scholars from many fields and bishops concerned about the ability of our liturgy to

speak to men and women today have offered their own devastating critiques of this document.33

I would just like to point out two erroneous presuppositions advocated by LA that present

insurmountable difficulties for liturgical inculturation: the notion that the Roman Rite is not itself

a cultural product and is somehow automatically universal and that the unitary expression or

ordinary formal style of the Rite needs to be conserved across cultures.

LA 5 affirms that the Roman Rite is itself a precious example and an instrument of true

inculturation because it is marked by a signal capacity for assimilating into itself spoken and

sung texts, gestures and rites derived from the customs and the genius of diverse nations and

particular Churches both Eastern and Western into a harmonious unity that transcends the

boundaries of any single region. While it is true that there is evidence of multiple cultural

influences in the Roman Rite, LA gives the impression that the same process that assimilated

32Anscar Chupungco, What, Then, Is Liturgy: Musings and Memoire(Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2010)

204

33See the devastating commentary onLAby Peter Jeffrey, Professor of Music History at Princeton

University, Translating Tradition: A Chant Historian reads Liturgiam Authenticam (Collegeville: Liturgical Press,

2006). Also Bishop Donald Trautman, The Quest for Authentic Liturgy, America (October 22, 2001).


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these cultural influences into the ritethe late classical Roman, Byzantine Greek, Syrian,

Franco-Germanic, Medieval Western Europeannow render the Rite so universal that it no

longer needs to engage the other cultures in which it is celebrated; that the double movement

called for in Varietates Legitmaein no longer needed. We have seen that in Africa, India, and the

Philippines local bishops and theologians have regarded this universal rite as far from

automatically universal and therefore in need of inculturation. Clearly, the process of cultural

dialogue that historically characterized the Roman Rite needs to continue especially with those

cultures into which the demographic center of Catholicism itself has shiftedthose cultures of

Asia, Latin America,m and Africa.

In speaking about possible liturgical creativity, LA is also adamant that anything new

from other cultures introduced into the Roman Rite resemble its formal structure and theological

content. New texts composed in a vernacular language, just as the other adaptations legitimately

introduced, are to contain nothing that is inconsistent with the function, meaning, structure, style,

theological content, traditional vocabulary or other important qualities of the texts found in the

editiones typicae(LA 107). In other words, original prayer compositions must sound like they

have been translated from the Latin. This simply does not show much respect for the genius of

local cultures and their languages. Given these strictures, real liturgical inculturation is

impossible and the ability of the liturgy to evangelize is compromised.

What else have we learned from the last fifty years? The complicated experience of

inculturation in India teaches us that direct and respectful contact with what the Roman Canon

calls the plebs sancta Dei the holy common people of God is an absolute necessity for any

attempt at inculturation to bear fruit. In fact, this may be the better place to start and not in a

committee composed of various experts, no matter how well intentioned they may be. In many


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places, this democratization of the inculturation process needs to start with an evaluation of

and respect for popular religious practices that have grown up alongside the official liturgy of the

church.34

Attention, then, needs to be paid to the actual experience of people at prayer and how

they relate to the sacred. The growing charismatic movement in many parts of the world, with its

emphasis on taking the Bible seriously in invoking the action of the Spirit in healing and ecstatic

prayer is ignored at our peril.35

Finally, the experience of liturgical inculturation in the Congo has also taught us that

even if we arrive at the point of having satisfactorily inculturated our liturgy that the need for

inculturation never ceases. The profound changes that are taking place in society because of

globalization and urbanization, new discoveries in science and technology, growing

commercialization and secularization, all point to the perhaps uncomfortable fact that

inculturation cannot be a one time project, but must be an on-going endeavor promoted by the

Church because we must continue to read the signs of the times.

Just as the previous incarnations of the Roman Rite adopted aspects of local culture to

better express the truth of Christ, attention to culture and social change needs to be a continuing

concern when we gather to pray. We ignore the dynamic nature of both our local and global

context at the risk of worsening the disconnect between the way we worship and the way we

live our Christian livesprecisely the gulf that the liturgical reforms of Vatican II atempted to

bridge.36As Catholics of the Roman Rite we cannot afford ourselves the luxury of thinking that

34For both a history and evaluation of the relationship of popular religion and the liturgy see my Local

Worship, Global Church: Popular Religion and the Liturgy (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2014).

35See for example, Edward L. Cleary The Rise of Charismatic Catholicism in Latin America (Gainesville:

University Press of Florida, 2011) and Philip Jenkins, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the

Global South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

36See Paul De Clercks insightful article on the need for such flexibility in Les prires liturgiques.Difficults, dfis et ressources,Nouvelle Revue Thologique132 (2010) 67-85.


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now that we have made some minor changes in the standard editions of the liturgical books,

ritually and textually, that we do not need to continue to help our worship become a true

expression of the people with whom we celebrate Christs paschal mystery.

The Church has been sent to all ages and nations and, therefore, is not tied exclusively

and indissolubly to any race or nation, to any one particular way of life, or to any set of customs,

ancient or modern.37

This affirmation of the Second Vatican Council still needs to be received

and implemented through liturgical inculturation. I can think of no better way of ending this

presentation than to give the last word to Fr. Anscar Chupungco. In a talk he gave just a year

before his death in Bacalod City he said:

the Church, after the example of Christ, has the duty to incarnate itself in theculture of its people; our local [Filipino] culture possesses beauty, dignity, and

nobility worthy of divine worship. We ought to revere our ancient Christiantraditions, but that does not mean that we should live in the past and ignore the

present reality of the Church in the modern world.38

37Gaudium et Spes58

38Anscar Chupungco, The Constitution on the Liturgy: History and Highlights, in Josefina Manabat

(ed.)Liturgy for the Filipino Church: A Legacy of Life and Teaching Anscar J. Chupungco (Manila: San Beda

Graduate School of Liturgy, 2014) 397.

Liturgy and Inculturation Since Vatican II: Where Are We? What Have We Learned?

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