In any great forward movement, it’s easy to spot minor irritants and call them typical of the whole. The American Revolution had its Benedict Arnold and the Civil Rights’ Movement has its beatniks.

The liturgical renewal has its fringe of faddists, way-outers and Mass commentators with a secret yen to sound like drill-sergeants. But these neither carry nor delay what is going on. The renewal is so powerful, so expressive of the pope and the Council in Rome and the people in the pews, that it is moving forward with a mighty thrust.

There are stubborn islands in the great wave of spirited cooperation here in the United States. Some are unhappy about the reply to “Go, the Mass is ended.” True, “Thanks be to God” may ring out with too much enthusiasm after a long, hot sermon. Many feared that the series of “You Who’s” in the Gloria sounds more like a Swiss yodeling than an American praising his God. But it looks worse on paper than it sounds to the ear.

A recent magazine had a column and a half on the theme, “whether it might not have been simpler to leave everything in Latin.” Some Frenchmen think it’s undignified to address God with the familiar Tu instead of the formal Vous. Clerics in Tuscany complain that “Go in peace” is the local way to shoo panhandlers away. A Japanese priest translates “Dominus Vobiscum” with the obscure phrase that in English would be: The Lord be together with everyone. In the South Pacific, the natives use pidgin to translate God as “Big fellow master too much who bosses heaven and ground.” And we have the magazine writer’s word that the best way to say “Hail Mary” there is “Mary, you stay right here.”

Did anyone think that the grave task of changing from sonorous, majestic and largely non-understandable Latin into the hundreds of dynamic, living, intelligible languages and dialects would be easy? The Church in the Liturgy Constitution didn’t. The bishops with hundreds of lingual choices before them didn’t.

The International Committee for Vernacular English (dubbed the “Common Market”) estimates that it will take five years to produce such a text. But the group, of which I am a member, is confident that the Englishman who reads John F. Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson with pleasure, and the American who reads Winston Churchill and T.S. Eliot with equal joy can meet on a vernacular that will have dignity without dullness, familiarity without foolish talk.

A fine squelch was delivered to the antiquarian view of noted English Catholic writer who lamented that he and his wife could no longer tour the French, German, Slavic and Spanish churches of the continent and hear the ancient Latin in each. A practical woman of middle-class English spoke up for the millions who stay at home:

“I suppose it’s nice to hear Latin when you travel. Me, I’ve only been out of Liverpool once when the family went to London, and it all sounded foreign to me, even the sermon. I like to know what I’m saying to God, -- right here in Liverpool.”

Quote and Re-Quote

The Georgia Bulletin and its editor get quoted regularly in newspapers all over the country. The Southern Colorado Register recently put Mr. Sherry’s words between those of Cardinal Bea and Cardinal Spellman: “Whatever gulf there is between the laity, the clergy and the hierarchy is of our own making. It is because of mutual distrust and a failure to recognize the structure of collaboration among the people of God.”

The column was headed, “Great Sayings.” The trouble was that exactly the same paragraph appeared on the same page of the same issue of the same paper, only two columns away. This time it was headlined in a minor key, “Notes and Quotes.”

Paul J. Hallinan

Archbishop of Atlanta