We are very honored to share this review by His Excellency Salvatore Cordileone, the Archbishop of San Francisco, of our contributor Dr Michael Foley’s book Lost in Translation; the essays which form the largest part of the book were originally published here on NLM. A shorter version of this review was published on Sunday at The Catholic Thing.
Rooted in the conviction that the Sacred Liturgy, as “an exercise of the priestly office of Jesus Christ,” is “the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed” and “the font from which all her power flows,” the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council asserted the supremacy of liturgical prayer in the life of the Church and called for the entire people of God – clergy, religious and laity alike – to form themselves in a spiritual life centered on the Church’s Liturgy. In so doing, they gave voice in authoritative manner to the Liturgical Movement that had been blossoming in the Church for some 100 years, the central aim of that Liturgical Movement being the reawakening of the Christian faithful to a liturgically-centered spiritual life.
Among the contemporary Catholic writers answering this call of Vatican II and the Liturgical Movement, Michael P. Foley has distinguished himself both in a popular key with his best-selling Drinking with the Saints (and related volumes) and in the academic world with his well-researched and learned explorations of “liturgical recapitulation” and of “Ordinary Time” in the Church’s liturgical calendar. Now, however, Foley has produced a hybrid of the popular and the scholarly in Lost in Translation: Meditating on the Orations of the Traditional Roman Rite (Angelico Press, 2023), a work of spiritually rich theological reflection composed in approachable prose.
The purpose of Lost in Translation is at once simple and profound: to meditate fruitfully on the liturgical prayers – principally, the Collect, Secret and Postcommunion – of the classical texts of the Roman Rite by paying careful attention to the various shades of meaning and context in the poetry and rhetoric of the Latin prayers themselves. An expert Latinist as well as a liturgical scholar, Foley demonstrates throughout his work that the meaning of the liturgical prayers can sometimes be “lost in translation” because of the various subtleties and nuances in the original text of the prayers. To help the reader pray the Liturgy, then, Foley provides accurate English translations of the orations, and in so doing, he shows how the prayers of the Roman Liturgy are a sort of “eructation” (literally, a belching!) of the Sacred Scriptures, chewed over diligently by Mother Church, who brings forth her Scriptural treasures in order to form us as her children in her “school of love.”
Lost in Translation begins with a brief and lucid introduction to the essential elements in the composition of the orations of the Roman Rite, with the author providing a kind of roadmap for understanding the content of these prayers of the Roman Church. Armed with this initiation, the reader is equipped with adequate understanding to meditate on the liturgical prayers of the Church year. The rest of Foley’s volume is divided into nine parts, the first seven of which take the reader through the “temporal cycle” of the liturgical year – the commemoration of the mysteries of Christ, renewed in the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, through the seven traditional liturgical seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Pre-Lent, Lent, Easter, and Time after Pentecost. The eighth part of the book includes the major celebrations of what is known as the “sanctoral cycle” of the liturgical year – the various feast days of Our Lord, Our Lady, and the saints, assigned to certain dates and days on the calendar. Finally, the ninth part provides a theological analysis of the structure of the orations themselves, particularly focusing on their “adjuration” or ending. In total, then, Lost in Translation unpacks the theological and spiritual meaning of the orations of 77 distinct liturgical celebrations. Two appendices even provide bonus material, analyzing the sequences sung on the feasts of Easter and Pentecost.
The brilliance of Foley’s achievement is evident in manifold ways throughout his work, even beyond that of which he speaks explicitly. For example, one can read into his writing a certain beautiful coherence with the liturgical teaching of Dom Prosper Guéranger, the founder of the Abbey of Solesmes and the man who, according to Pope St. Paul VI, inaugurated the Liturgical Movement in the life of the Church. Dom Guéranger taught that the liturgical year, as a true school of spiritual growth, was structured in such a way as to bring the Christian through the three ages of the interior life – the purgative, illuminative and unitive. I would like to reflect on that coherence here.
Advent, for Guéranger, is the season of the purgative life, and Foley’s meditations for Advent help us understand how the Christian is always in need of deeper purgation even as he lives the liturgical year fruitfully again and again. Indeed, the often-vexing question of the shape of the liturgical year itself is elucidated brilliantly in Foley’s analysis of the Collects for the First, Second and Fourth Sundays of Advent, all of which ask God to “stir up” His People or His power. Foley notes that the Collect for the Last Sunday after Pentecost also contains this “stir up” petition to God, and Foley takes this as a linguistic cue that the Roman Church intends us to understand that the end and beginning of the liturgical year overlap, especially when one considers that the gospel readings for the last and first Sundays both focus on the Second Coming of the Lord. Thus, these “stir up” Sundays, occurring at the year’s end and beginning, function, in Foley’s words, “as two interlocking clasps that connect the dazzling necklace of the year’s feasts and seasons.” Such an insight provides a satisfying sense of unity and wholeness to the liturgical year itself. It also allows us to see that the circularity of the liturgical year functions more like a spiral, pushing us ever higher towards Heaven. Thus, the purgative life of Advent, renewed each year, is not redundant but “stirs up” in us an ever-greater detachment from affection for sin and the things of this world.
The illuminative life commences, says Dom Guéranger, at the feast of Christmas, and Foley’s analysis of the Collect for the Vigil Mass of Christmas Eve deepens our understanding of this illumination afforded by the Sacred Liturgy. On Christmas Eve, the Roman Church prays in her Collect that “we who now joyfully receive” Jesus “as our Redeemer, may also confidently behold Him coming as our judge.” Here is, as Foley explains by connecting the traditional “three Comings” of Christ for which Advent prepares us, the key to Christmas peace and joy: to be in such a state of union with Christ in His Coming to us by the grace He pours into our souls (the “intermediate” or “middle” Coming, corresponding to the illuminative life) that we will receive His Final Coming at the end of time with the same gladness with which we greet His First Coming in the stable of Bethlehem. Such an interpretation of the liturgical year harmonizes beautifully with Dom Guéranger’s connection of the progress of the liturgical year with the progress of the soul in the spiritual life: the peace of the Christ Child’s illumination of our souls – casting away from us all serious sin, which is what, practically speaking, it means to be in the illuminative way; indeed, it brings us the ability to expect His Last Day with tranquil hearts.
For Dom Guéranger, the seasons of Pre-Lent and Lent are invitations to deeper purgation within the illuminative life of Christ’s mysteries, moving us from the joyful sweetness of Christmas and Epiphany to the awesome glory of Christ’s Resurrection and Ascension. Thus, Foley notes that the Collect for Ash Wednesday (which inaugurates our Lenten fast of forty days) speaks of our Lenten penance as the “solemnities of fasting which should be venerated.” In this way, far from grumpiness over the deprivations that come with a strict diet, the Liturgy forms in us an illuminated love for the precious sobriety of Christ’s Fasting, Passion and Death, to which we are conformed in the commemoration of Christ’s sorrowful mysteries.
Our more deeply purifying conformation to Christ’s mysteries leads us then, according to Dom Guéranger, to the fullest brightness of the illuminative life, with the arrival of Easter Sunday and Ascension Thursday. In harmony with this movement of the liturgical year, Foley notes that the Collect for Easter Sunday forms our hearts to relish that Christ “has conquered death and opened for us the gate of eternity.” Perfecting our paschal joy, the Collect for Ascension Thursday, Foley teaches us, elevates us even now through that gate of eternity, as the Church prays that we the faithful “may ourselves dwell in mind amidst heavenly things.”
Noting that the mysteries of Easter time bring us to the climax of the illuminative life, Dom Guéranger connects the Easter-consummating feast of Pentecost and the Time after Pentecost with the “unitive way” of spiritual progress, and Foley’s meditation on the Collect for the feast of Pentecost highlights the mystery of this unitive life even as it reveals the need for a book like Lost in Translation. Indeed, precious gems can very much get lost in translation if we are not careful to appreciate the Latin of the orations, and our author explains that the “recta sapere” of the Collect for Pentecost can be translated in no fewer than five different ways! Foley rightly privileges the intellectual meaning of sapere, and so renders the phrase as “to understand what is right,” but he explains that the verb can also mean “to taste”, “to savor”, “to resemble”, or “to be well acquainted with the value of.” All of these alternate renderings shed light on the dynamism of the unitive life of the Christian who lives predominantly under the influence of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit: here the Christian experiences a practical connaturality with the Spirit, even in the sense of a kind of tasting and experiencing of the Spirit Himself.
Foley’s linguistic work here, then, unpacks for the reader multiple levels of rich material for meditation, bringing the light and heat of the fire of Pentecost down into the everyday life of the reader in the pursuit of real progress in the spiritual life.
The unitive life enjoyed by the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit during the Time after Pentecost comes to its fruition in the context of the Feast of All Saints on November 1. Foley points out that the Collect for that feast boldly claims that “God…hast given” us the celebration of the whole heavenly court. This insistence on the primary causality of God in the giving of the feast day highlights the divine mode of Christian life in the unitive way, as the soul lives primarily under the direct action of God, according to the Gifts of the Holy Spirit. Doubling down on the soul’s rejoicing in the Celestial City, the Heavenward focus of the unitive life in the Time after Pentecost is reinforced also in the Collect for the Last Sunday after Pentecost (always reserved for the last Sunday of the liturgical year), in which the Church states as a matter of fact that, as Foley highlights, God has given her “to rejoice in divine participation,” an apt description of the unitive life. Thus, in Lost in Translation, we witness the achievement of a truly liturgical spirituality.
In addition to providing these (and many more) multi-faceted insights fit for Liturgy- centered personal prayer, Foley’s analysis of the content of the orations of the traditional Roman Missal allows him to provide the reader with an initiation into the spirit of the liturgical year, an endeavor valuable in itself. Foley manages then to capture the joy of liturgical living, even as he provides serious content for the reader’s meditation. In so doing, he continues the legacy of Dom Guéranger, and many others after him, who have re-introduced the Catholic faithful to the transforming power of the Sacred Liturgy. In terms of how the book should be used, Foley’s reflections are versatile in that they provide what could be a ten-minute period of spiritual reading in preparation for Holy Mass or a more extended time of mental prayer centered on the liturgical texts. Beneath the erudite analysis of the Latin, however, what is offered in this work is quite remarkable: the reader, week after week, feast after feast, whether using the text for spiritual reading or mental prayer, will learn to pray with the actual text of the Sacred Liturgy. The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council envisioned exactly such a spiritual exercise as the soul of the Catholic spiritual life.
