A place is being readied within Catholicism for the new “liturgical man” and his new local church because of reforms in the liturgy, Archbishop Paul J. Hallinan told a Ministers’ Week audience at Emory University Thursday.

“Liturgical liberty can grow from flexibility, simplicity, local initiative, the mother tongue and the continued exercise of adaptation.

“We hope for improved liturgies for the university chapel, the home in the neighborhood, the inner city, for children and those who suffer,” he said.

Archbishop Hallinan, chairman of the U.S. bishops liturgical commission, said there are four ways to insure a living liturgy.

One is a noble simplicity, he said, in which rites are short, clear and unencumbered by useless repetitions and are within the people’s power of comprehension.

“Obviously, we have a long way to go,” he said. “The disrobing and robing of bishops at the throne are passe, and the great plumed fans that shaded many a pope have presumably been returned to the ‘Anthony and Cleopatra’ movie set where they can serve a clearer purpose.

“But wisdom and experience, with some blood, sweat, tears and sociology will be needed before the ‘noble simplicity’ of Our Lord’s last meal is discernible in all of our churches.”

The archbishop said a decentralizing tendency has been set in motion. “Besides the authority of the apostolic see—the Pope and the Consilium—real control exists at the level of national conferences of bishops, and, in some cases, of individual, local bishops.

“In addition, the Consilium is thoroughly internationalized, both in bishops and periti; every continent is represented, scores of nations both emerging and established, both free and totalitarian. The Synod of Bishops, to meet this fall from all over the Catholic world, may well have some liturgical matters on its agenda.”

Discussing the vernacular, the archbishop said, “The logic of the vernacular tongue put to sacred use, so apparent in the early centuries of Christianity, was obscured by the retention of Latin in the Germanic and Frankish liturgies.”

However, he said, the Constitution on the Liturgy states briefly, “Since the use of the mother tongue in the mass and other sacraments may frequently be of great advantage to the people, the limits of its employment may be extended. National conferences are to determine its extend and prepare the translations.”

The archbishop quoted articles of the constitution in discussing adaptation. The articles said the Church, even in the liturgy, has no wish to impose a rigid uniformity; the revision of rites and rubrics should allow for legitimate variations and adaptations to different groups, regions and peoples provided that the substantial unity of the roman rite is maintained; within certain limits, the national conference of bishops may specify such adaptations; where a more radical adaptation is needed, the conference must submit such proposals to the Apostolic See and then direct controlled experimentation.

The archbishop said, “Our present liturgical situations seems to be one of tentative timeliness, a blend of hope and hesitation, something between ‘Let us pray,’ and ‘Amen.’

Underneath the press conferences and polls a real scrutiny of things religious has seized modern thinking man.

Often the scrutiny ends in true despair; we calls it alienation. Sometimes it ends in conviction and faith; we call it commitment. And more often it is digging into the deeper levels of that mystery that Christ referred to when He said, ‘That you all may be one.’ Then we call it ecumenism. Man’s worship of his God does not escape this scrutiny.”

Archbishop Hallinan said reformed liturgy also must recognize the fact of anthropology. According to Dr. Margaret Mead, the Balinese people are delighted with the new Catholic reforms in worship.

With a language that sounds like a bell, an imagination enough to ‘produce a miracle play at a moment’s notice,’…the people of Bali are ready to take the Christian tradition, and give its ritual a new and delightful form, rich in their own symbols. What they could do with our own funeral rite, with equal parts of Latin and medieval gloom, staggers the imagination of very car-carrying reforming liturgist. He said.

In the past the liturgy failed, Archbishop Hallinan said, because the laity and clergy were separated by wealth, privilege and the rood screens in the churches.

“There were multiple feats but they celebrated disjointed events in the lives of Our Lord, His mother and His saints—not the unitive paschal mystery of the Redemption. Latin poorly understood, and stipends painfully offered simply highlighted the image of the mechanized sacrament, the excessive application of the ex opere operator.”

Looking at the future, the archbishop said it will take humility and courage to reform the liturgy.

It will take time—but we must start. It will take counsel and piety but these are free gifts of the Holy spirit. As we failed in the 16^th Century, so we can fail again in the 20^th.

But God does not fail, and in the crooked lines of our rubrics and our bad translations, He will continue to write the narrative of our kinship with him and our worship of Him through Christ His son who is also our brother.