Language and Culture

The first topic the Council took up was the liturgy. In a press conference, Willem van Bekkum, Bishop of Ruteng in Indonesia, spoke in favor of using local languages in the Mass. He was an elected member of the council’s Commission on the Sacred Liturgy.

He said there is a need “to speak more spontaneously” but that “spontaneity disappears when the faithful are faced with a foreign tongue.” He expressed his hope that the language of his country as well as those of other Asian and African nations will become “sacramental languages.” If this were accomplished — through their introduction into the liturgy in general and the Mass in particular — he said, “a much more vital and rich liturgy will be achieved.”

Bishop van Bekkum was one of the main speakers at the international liturgical congress at Assisi, in September 1956. In his talk at that time he appealed for use of the vernacular in the Mass. He also urged the adoption of local customs and traditions into the liturgy wherever possible, and called for “restoration of the order of the diaconate to the laity.”

He told newsmen here that since 1956 his See has had a 24-man diocesan liturgical commission composed of four priests and 20 laymen.

“I considered my people much wiser than myself, especially the aged ones among them,” he said, “and so like a pupil I was always ready to learn whatever I could from them, especially whatever in their culture had possibilities of adaptation in the field of liturgy.”

Indonesians along with other Asians and Africans are concerned with the functions and meaning of their worship, he said. “Their celebration of a feast consists not only in hymns and prayers but rather in functions, that is, in all that the people do during the day or days of celebration. All these functions of the people make up the one structure of a people in worship.”

Bishop van Bekkum confessed that on arriving in Rome for the council he felt proposals for incorporating native customs into the liturgy would get little hearing. Now, he said, he is highly optimistic.

“I have learned that the experience we had in Ruteng has been multiplied hundreds of times over throughout Asia and Africa. And I have found a warm sympathy for these ideas among liturgical experts from the West.”

I had the good fortune of meeting Bishop van Bekkum at the Liturgical Week in Seattle in 1962, just prior to the opening of the Second Vatican Council. He described his efforts at enculturation of the liturgy in his rural. (I remember his saying that he could get anywhere in the world more quickly than he could get to the airport) diocese.

He would arrive at a village for Mass and met the villagers in the cemetery where he would bless the graves. Then they would process to the village well which he would bless. Mass would be celebrated in the village square and people would bring up the bread and wine. He commented that he found it problematic that “at every Eucharist, Jesus was imported” since there was no wheat bread or grape wine in his part of Indonesia.

He would later serve on the Bishops Committee of the Consilium for Implementing the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy which oversaw the reform of the rites of the Mass and Sacraments.

He died in 1998 at the age of 88.