But the ordinariate in Tyendinaga shows people that they can be fully Mohawk and fully Catholic with the Anglican traditions of their ancestors. The community sings Mohawk hymns and prays some of the Mass prayers, such as the Our Father, in Mohawk. While both the Book of Common Prayer and much of the pre-Vatican II (extraordinary form) Catholic Mass was translated into Kanienʼkehá, Maracle said the language is still being relearned and other challenges would have to be met first before translating Divine Worship: The Missal.A paragraph above it also caught my attention:
Charles Maracle, warden for Keristos Ne Korah:Kowah (Christ the King) parish in the Tyendinaga Mohawk territory, told the Register that the community joined the ordinariate because it guaranteed they could be Catholic and keep the Anglican traditions of their ancestors.A "warden" is a canonically and legally defined function for lay people in Anglican denominations. There is no direct Catholic equivalent. Mr Maracle seems to be serving a function equivalent to pastoral life coordinator in the position he's occupied in a Catholic context, but he calls himself a "warden", and the Register doesn't seem to have asked him anything about that.
The version of the ordinariate worship in the first quote above says it mixes translations from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and the EF Latin mass into Mohawk, but any translation of the Divine Worship Missal is only a very distant possibility.
Well, OK, but this sent me searching the web for what form of worship Catholic Mohawks not in the ordinariate use. This story outlines the diocesan Catholic Mohawk liturgy in another Mohawk reserve in Ontario. My regular correspondent added more context on the Tyendinaga group:
The original ACCC group might have had issues with the ordination of women or other changes in the ACC. Certainly nothing specific to Indigenous heritage. The Anglican church has long and close ties with indigenous Canadians and is currently moving towards some kind of First Nations diocese within the ACC. The ACCC clergyman, Mr Trinque, was not indigenous, as far as I know—but I could be wrong.So the question comes up, why did Msgr Steenson and then-Fr Hurd see the need for a specifically Anglican-Mohawk brand of Catholicism, when there's a thriving Catholic Mohawk tradition in North America? The appeal for Anglican Catholic Mohawks seems never to have involved more than roughly a dozen people, but it would appear that once the priest who celebrated their monthly mass retired, the group was discontinued, as has happened in several other cases in the ordinariate.Fr Whalen, who received them and celebrated mass once a month is 70 or 71 now. That is why I speculated that he might be stepping away from ministering to the Tyendinaga group.
Mr O’Coin, however, is a local Mohawk man and a convert to Catholicism from, apparently, an evangelical background. Not sure what Anglican Patrimony he brings to the table, or why he got involved with the Ordinariate group rather than a local diocesan parish. Early ads for the group under his leadership called it an “Open Catholic Church” that welcomed “absolutely anybody.” In any event, he has been very ill and his ordination to the permanent diaconate on hold since 2018.
What problem were Msgr Steenson and then-Fr Hurd trying to solve? Given the limited resources available, including the limited time of a diocesan priest to celebrate mass for them, why did they go out of their way to create a project of such limited appeal -- including raising at least the possibility of translating the Divine Worship Missal into Mohawk? (Now, there would be a task for a Viennese professor.)
I think this is yet another example of the incoherence in the Anglicanorum coetibus project.
