My first wedding of 2012

Myself with Kristin & Petr following their wedding service © Sybille Yates

On Saturday 3rd March, I conducted my first wedding of 2012 when Petr, a Czech, married Kristin, an American. The wedding took place at St. Clement’s Church with a congregation made up of Petr’s Czech relatives, a small number of Kristin’s American relatives, together with numerous mutual friends.

This wedding presented all the usual problems that arise when I conduct a Czech to English-speaker marriage. Petr’s parents and older relatives do not understand or speak English. None of Kristin’s family speaks Czech except for Kristin herself who has lived in Prague for twenty years and has her own business here. How was I to conduct a service that would be understood and appreciated by everyone present?

As with previous Czech to English-speaker weddings, I got Petr and Kristin to produce a completely bilingual order of service to allow everyone present to follow the liturgy and Bible Readings, even when they were not being spoken in their own native language. But I also got my good friend Kvetoslav, Lay Vice President of the Czech Old Catholic Church, to help me with saying parts of the liturgy in Czech, as well as translating my words of welcome and explanation at the beginning of the service.

Petr & Kristin outside St. Clement's Church following their wedding © Ricky Yates

Therefore, Kvetoslav helped Petr make his vows to Kristin in Czech whilst I helped Kristin make her vows to Petr in English. And the couple chose two Bible Readings, one read in English by Kristin’s mother, and the other read in Czech by Petr’s niece.

We even managed to sing one hymn, admittedly only in English. We sang ‘Joyful, joyful, we adore thee’ which is an American hymn that appears in the ‘The Hymnal’ of the American Episcopal Church. Both Kristin and her parents are from the Episcopalian tradition in the USA. Fortunately, the hymn is set to Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, the official anthem of the European Union, so it did seem quite appropriate for a transatlantic marriage!

The wedding reception took place in the cupola on the top of a wonderful cubist style building located half-way up Václavské námestí/Wenceslas Square, which currently belongs to the Landesbank Baden-Württemberg. From the cupola, there are amazing views right across Prague as well as looking down on Václavské námestí/Wenceslas Square.

Together with some excellent food and wine, the guests were also entertained by a splendid jazz trio. And throughout the afternoon, both Sybille and I constantly received compliments as to how much everybody had enjoyed the service in Church, especially the way it had enabled both Czech and English speakers to participate and fully understand all that was being said and done.

Particularly from young Czechs, I got expressions of both appreciation, but also of surprise, in that they found the way I led the service both warm and welcoming and in total contrast to their past experience of attending occasional Czech Church services. Whilst it is always nice to be appreciated, it does sadden me that the experience of so many Czechs, is that the Christian Church is both cold and unwelcoming.

It is not the primary purpose of my being here in the Czech Republic, to minister to the spiritual needs of Czech people, but rather to the spiritual needs of native English-speakers. But I increasingly feel that the main reason that the Czech Republic is as atheistic or agnostic as it appears to be, is not because of a deliberate rejection of Christian faith by its population, but rather as a result of the failure of the Czech Christian Churches to be an attractive advert for the Christian faith.

Petr & Kristin at their wedding reception © Ricky Yates

Václavské námestí/Wenceslas Square from the cupola © Ricky Yates

Czenglish corrected!

Dreams are comming soon????? © Ricky Yates

Spelling corrected! © Ricky Yates

Last Wednesday, 29th February, I was walking past a newly renovated building at the western end of Klimentská, the street in which St. Clement’s Church is located, when I spotted the graphic design work illustrated in the photograph on the left above, with the blatant misspelling of the word ‘coming’. Later that evening, I posted the photo on Facebook, asking what it cost to create the artwork and why those who commissioned it were not willing to spend a few more Czech crowns by asking a native English-speaker to check their text.

My posting on Facebook has since attracted 14 comments, many of them humorous. But one of the most telling was that of Karen who remarked, ‘When a luxury place can’t spell, they look cheap!’ That was my immediate reaction too, as soon as I saw it.

What I didn’t say when I posted the photo on Facebook was that, as I stared incredulously at this absurd error, two young ladies came out of the building and saw me with a look of amazement on my face. So I said to them in English, “Do you realise how stupid that looks?” To be fair, once I pointed the mistake out to them, they both immediately acknowledged that there was a serious spelling error.

My past experience when I have pointed out examples of Czenglish, is that the perpetrators rarely see any reason to correct what they have previously written or printed. Therefore I was most surprised that when, 48 hours later, I once more walked past the building, the spelling error had been corrected as can be seen in the right-hand photograph.

On close inspection, I realised that, rather than going to the expense of completely re-doing the artwork, instead a sticker had been made with ‘coming’ correctly spelt, and placed over the previous error. But I have to say that, of all the examples of Czenglish that I have previously highlighted, this is the first one I have ever seen corrected. I just hope it isn’t the last!

 

Celebrating my 60th birthday

Standing on the end of the Baba ridge on my 60th birthday © Sybille Yates

As many readers of my blog will already know, today Sunday 26th February 2012, I celebrated my 60th birthday. As I wrote in a previous post, just like Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, in 2012, I am also celebrating my Diamond Jubilee.

Overall, I have quite positive feelings regarding reaching this landmark. As I wrote previously on this blog, in October 2011, I passed the age my father was when he died. Over the past year, I’ve shed around 10 kg in weight and feel fitter now than I have for a number of years. I can still keep wicket in a forty overs-a-side cricket match and just over half a year ago, I successfully climbed the highest mountain in the Czech Republic.

The one thing I have become aware of during the past year is how much greyer my hair has become. But whilst the hairline does continue to recede and the hair becomes increasingly thinner on top, I still have more hair than I can ever remember my father having.

I firmly believe that God has a great sense of humour. This was very clearly brought home to me when I sat down on Saturday 25th February, the day before my birthday, to say Morning Prayer. The Psalm set was Psalm 71. In particular, two verses brought a smile to my face as I read them. In verse 9, the Psalmist pleads,

‘Do not cast me away in the time of my old age;

Forsake me not when my strength fails.’

And further on in verse 18 he cries,

‘Forsake me not, O God, when I am old and grey-headed,

till I make known your deeds to the next generation and your power to all that are to come.’

The ‘old and grey-headed’ bit did somewhat ring true. But I also liked the challenge of the second half of the verse – my responsibility to make God’s deeds and power known to the next generation. It is a reminder to me that I still have at least a further five years of full time ministry ahead of me before I can consider retiring. And even when I am retired, so long as my health permits, I intend to apply for ‘Permission to officiate,’ to whichever Anglican bishop’s jurisdiction I am then living under.

So how did I celebrate my birthday today? Well, I had known for quite some time that my 60th birthday would fall on a Sunday – a working day. Of course, as all clergy have heard ad infinitum, it is the only day we work! But any proposed celebrations became much further curtailed when two days beforehand on her own birthday, Sybille went down with a hacking cough and cold.

Then this morning started off even more inauspiciously, when the first sound I heard as a woke up at around 06.45, was our elderly black and white cat Oscar, being sick somewhere. Fortunately, it was only on the floor of our bedroom and therefore fairly easy to clean up. A little while later, as Sybille awoke, I was greeted with ‘Alles Gute zum Geburtstag’. But not wanting to pass on her infection, Sybille decided that her best course of action was to stay home, rather than accompany me to Church.

However, it was at Church this morning that the highlight of my day occurred, not least because it caught me completely unawares. In the absence of our regular organist, Professor Michal Novenko, the organ was being played by Larry Leifeste, a Texan who moved to Prague with wife Celieta, in August last year and have both joined the St. Clement’s congregation. Since then, Larry has very happily deputised on the organ, whenever Michal has been ill or away.

I duly announced the first hymn from the back of Church as Hymn 190, ‘Forty days and forty nights’. But instead of striking up the tune ‘Auf der Tiefe’, to which the hymn, so appropriate for the First Sunday of Lent, is set, Larry instead started playing ‘Happy Birthday to you’. The congregation soon twigged, (several of them already knew it was my birthday), and they duly joined together and sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to me as I walked up the aisle.

Early this afternoon, after I got back to the Chaplaincy Flat, Sybille said she felt well enough to walk up the hill through woods behind the Podbaba complex, to Restaurace na Staré Fare where we ate a late Sunday lunch. By the time we had finished eating, there was sunshine and bright blue sky, in contrast to the mixture of rain and snow of the morning. So before returning home, we walked out to the end of the Baba ridge where there is a wonderful view across Prague and where my 60th birthday photo at the top of this post was taken.

 

A example of Czech Czenglish

Czenglish in a Czech menu © Ricky Yates

This evening, we went to eat at one of our favourite local bar-restaurants – U Topolu. The name means, ‘to the poplars’, hence the logo at the bottom of the menu in this photo. On each of the tables, there was this laminated card advertising various new additions to their main menu.

The penultimate item yet again had us in stitches. For those who cannot read or understand Czech, it is seeking to describe what, in English, would be called an ‘Australian rump steak’ or a ‘Rump steak from Australian beef’.

There was no supposedly English version of these additions to the menu. What you have here is Czech Czenglish – a menu in Czech, trying to appear sophisticated, by using English to describe a certain item. But in describing the steak as, ‘Eye of round’, they have used Czenglish.

U Topolu is one of several places where we have offered our help, as native speakers of English or German, to translate their menus so that they make sense, rather than being the source of amusement. As ever, our offers have been spurned, leaving the bar-restaurant owners looking totally stupid in the eyes of every non-Czech speaker who enters their premises. But do they care?

 

The Austrian Pfarrer Initiative/Priests’ Initiative – a call for honesty

Bechyne Church © Ricky Yates

At the end of my recent post about the Ecumenical Service for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, I mentioned the Pfarrer Initiative in Austria, that calls for radical reform within the Roman Catholic Church. I did promise a future blog post about it. So here it is!

The Pfarrer Initiative is an open call to disobedience by nearly 400 Roman Catholic priests and deacons in Austria. As such, they constitute roughly 10% of the Austrian Roman Catholic clergy. You can read their original ‘Appeal to Disobedience’ in English, by following this link. However inevitably, most other online material about this radical reform movement is only available in German.

This initiative arises out of two major issues that increasingly face Roman Catholic priests across Europe and North America. How to offer the sacraments and pastoral care, to the ever increasing number of people whose lives do not conform exactly to official Roman Catholic doctrine. And how to overcome the ever increasing shortage of priests. What the Pfarrer Initiative calls for is radical change. But it is also a call for honesty rather than the hypocrisy that exists at present

The official position of the Roman Catholic Church is that anyone who has been married in Church and later divorced and remarried in a civil ceremony, cannot be admitted to receive the sacrament of Holy Communion. Likewise, it is only paid-up members of the Roman Catholic Church that can be admitted, not members of any other Christian Church.

With the ever increasing number of Roman Catholics who are divorced and remarried, the official position creates major pastoral problems for Roman Catholic priests. Many overcome the problem by simply ignoring official RC teaching and allow those who are divorced and remarried to receive the sacraments. Alternatively, these individuals take themselves off to a Church two or three parishes removed from where they live, where their past marital affairs are unknown.

Likewise, I have received the sacrament of Holy Communion from a Roman Catholic priest, with his permission, on numerous occasions. The most memorable occasion was in Spain where the priest was a paid-up member of Opus Dei. When administering Holy Communion, he gave the consecrated host/communion wafer to each individual and invited them to take the consecrated wine by intinction. But when he came to me, he insisted that I should take the chalice in my own hands and drink the consecrated wine, ‘because I was a priest’. Of course, the official Roman Catholic position is that all Anglican orders are invalid!

In Austria, the problem of the shortage of priests is currently being dealt with in one of two ways, both of which are causing increasing anger and frustration from clergy and laity alike. Parishes are being amalgamated and priests are being forced to run around between Churches, celebrating mass one time after another, with little time for pastoral conversations following worship. Or African clergy are being imported who cannot speak German properly, let alone Österreichisch, and who inevitably have little understanding of the people or their culture.

The Pfarrer Initiative calls for ‘the admission of women and married people to the priesthood’ as a very practical way of addressing this problem. But even if the official Roman Catholic position on this matter were to change overnight, and under the current Pope that most certainly will NOT happen, it would still take many years for such people to undertake theological training and then be ordained.

It is what then follows this call that I find most interesting. ‘We express solidarity with colleagues no longer permitted to exercise their ministry because they have married, and also with those in ministry who live in a permanent relationship’.

By implication, those behind the Pfarrer Initiative are saying that, if those priests forced to cease their ministry because they have fallen in love with a woman and have chosen to marry her, were allowed to resume their ministry, the number of available, already theologically trained priests, would promptly increase. They are also acknowledging what many people already know, including many in the RC hierarchy – that many supposedly celibate Roman Catholic priests, actually live, ‘in a permanent relationship’. Once more, what we have here is a clear call for honesty and an end to hypocrisy.

It is those Roman Catholic priests who openly admit that they have fallen in love with a woman and do the right and proper thing and marry the lady, who are being honest. Yet as things currently stand, such individuals are promptly deprived of their right to minister. Yet those priests who have a girlfriend three parishes down the road, or a live-in lover whom they declare to be their housekeeper – they are allowed to continue in ministry.

I found a news report on the BBC News website three years ago, absolutely fascinating as it bears out everything I’ve written in the previous paragraph. It relates the results of a survey of Roman Catholic priests in Poland, carried out by a sociologist. Responding to a questionnaire, aided by the cloak of anonymity, more than 30% admitted to having had sexual relations with a woman and 12% said they were living in stable relationships with a woman.

I am very aware that all of us, myself very much included, can be guilty of hypocrisy – of saying one thing and then doing another. The liturgy of Ash Wednesday in two days time, spells it out clearly. ‘We confess to you, Lord…. all our past unfaithfulness: the pride, hypocrisy and impatience of our lives’. In response we ask, ‘Lord, have mercy’.  I for one, welcome all that the Pfarrer Initiative calls for. It is a clear call for honesty, in place of hypocrisy. However, whether the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church will ever take heed of it, is a very open question.