Stop… Just Stop. It’s “And with your spirit.”
Remember when it was “The Lord Be With you”… “And Also With You?” Yes. We do. It was a dark time. A time of Clown Masses, liturgical dance and non-stop innovation at St. Subarbaness of the Ever-Devolving Liturgy constantly watering down the liturgy and destroying tradition and faithfulness. Thankfully, Pope Benedict XVI crushed this modernism in 2011 in one swift stroke of “doing it right.” So, cue the Felt Banner Brigades to try again. Now, time for us laity to pick up our liturgical mallets and play whack-a-mole with this innovation wherever its modernist head tries to pop up…
The National Catholic Reporter, waving the same faded felt banners from 1974, is demanding a “better” English translation of the Mass. Let’s be honest—by “better” they mean dumber, flatter, and more Protestant. You can practically hear their tambourines rattling in the background as they chant: Down with Latin! Up with folk Masses! Bring in the clowns!
Let’s decode this. When they say “terrible”, what they really mean is: “We miss the 1973 ICEL translation that flattened two thousand years of theology into a therapeutic group hug.” They pine for the days when Et cum spiritu tuo got dumbed down into “And also with you,” because acknowledging the priest’s ontological change through Holy Orders is just too mystical for the St. Clappyhands Glory and Praise Brigade.
And God forbid we have Latin precision. The Creed says consubstantialem Patri. The 2011 Missal gave us “consubstantial with the Father.” Good. That’s what the Church has always taught—that Christ shares the very substance (ousia) of the Father. But the felt-banner generation can’t handle that. They preferred “one in being,” which sounds less like Trinitarian theology and more like a corporate merger.
Or take the consecration: pro multis. The universal Church—French, Spanish, German, you name it—translates this correctly as “for many.” But English-speaking Catholics were force-fed “for all” for forty years, because the Glory and Praise crowd wanted to sneak in universalism while strumming their guitars. Rome finally fixed it in 2011. And now NCR is whining like someone took away their tambourines.
And let’s be brutally honest: this isn’t about English at all. It’s about control. The same folks who brought us clown Masses, rainbow stoles, pottery chalices, and “On Eagle’s Wings” want the liturgy to reflect their theology—horizontal, self-congratulatory, Protestantized. If the Mass sounds like sacred worship of Almighty God, it ruins their illusion that we’re just one big happy ecumenical coffee klatsch.
That’s why they hate “And with your spirit.” Because it forces them to remember the priest isn’t just “presiding” like the chairman of a parish committee. He is acting in persona Christi. The spiritus invoked is the Spirit given to him in ordination, sealing him to Christ the Eternal High Priest (see CCC 1548). And if you can’t stomach that, maybe the Methodist hymnal down the street is more your speed.
Meanwhile, the NCR crowd would love to go back to their bad Protestant music days—slap a guitar, bang a drum, sing “Here I Am, Lord” while everyone claps along. This is the St. Clappyhands Brigade’s liturgical utopia: Mass as a summer camp sing-along, with a priest reduced to a “friendly presider” in a polyester poncho. No wonder they call the current Missal “terrible.” It dares to remind them of Catholicism.
But here’s the problem for the Felt Banner Brigade: the Church is not yours to reinvent every 20 years. The liturgy belongs to the Bride of Christ. And when the Church corrected the 1970s flattening with the 2011 translation, she was restoring the sacred, not oppressing you. If you think “consubstantial” is too hard, maybe that’s because you’ve been catechized by felt banners instead of the Fathers of the Church.
So, to the St. Clappyhands Glory and Praise Brigade: no, you don’t get your tote-bag translation back. No, you don’t get to replace Et cum spiritu tuo with a hug. No, you don’t get to swap pro multis for your universalist fever dream. The Missal stands, the theology stands, the Latin stands. The only thing that should be defenestrated is your box of old Marty Haugen cassettes.
Sourcing
Et cum spiritu tuo → “And with your spirit,” universally preserved in the Latin Rite; see CCC §1548.
Consubstantialem Patri restored in the 2011 Missal, aligning with the Nicene Creed; cf. Liturgiam authenticam (2001), §20.
Pro multis corrected to “for many” as directed by Pope Benedict XVI, Letter to German Bishops (2012).
Liturgiam authenticam (2001), §56: translations must preserve precision, avoiding paraphrase.
Compare 1973 ICEL Missal to 2011 Roman Missal: USCCB, The Roman Missal: English Translation According to the Third Typical Edition (2011).