Bishop Donald Trautman explains in this 2005 interview some of the changes in the liturgy that we're seeing now, along with the reasons behind them.

As a young priest, Bishop Donald Trautman attended the second Vatican Council from beginning to end, passing out ballots and seeing to the needs of a group of bishops during all four sessions.

"I sat in the front row of St. Peter's and heard every Latin speech. I even voted," he jokes, referring to a retired Italian bishop who fell asleep during speeches and asked Trautman how he should vote.

Being at the council gave Trautman great confidence in its reforms. "Look at the vote on the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. All the world's bishops voted in favor, with only four voting against. Is that not the will of the Holy Spirit?" Bishop Trautman has spent much of his career promoting that reform, as the chairman of the U.S. bishops' Committee on the Liturgy, a post he held in the 1990s and in 2005, when this interview was conducted.

Donald Trautman was ordained a priest in 1962 and earned a doctorate in m sacred theology in 1966. He has served as a scripture professor, diocesan official, and pastor, and has led the Diocese of Erie, Pennsylvania since 1990.

It seems like there's a lot of controversy around the liturgy these days. Why do you think liturgical issues elicit such strong feelings among Catholics?

I think we all become very passionate when we celebrate the Eucharist. That's where we show our identity as Catholics, when we come together around the Lord's table to be formed and transformed. We all have a very important stake because we all offer the Eucharist to the Father.

The people who are fighting to go back to Latin, for example, had a wonderful experience when Mass was in that language. They're saying they met the Lord that way, and they're trying to keep that form, not understanding that the form and language of the liturgy is never an absolute. Only God is absolute, and there are different ways we express our love and our prayer.

Many arguments over the liturgy are about rules-who does what and how-but is there a deeper issue?

In Roman Catholic liturgy, we have rubrics-the liturgical laws that define how a priest is to celebrate Eucharist, how a congregation is to respond. But do we want to be rubricists, legalists? No, it's the spirit of the law that we want to live.

For example, many communities hold hands across the aisles at the time of the Our Father. Do we want to be rubricists and say that's not in the rule book, the General Instruction of the Roman Missal? If you have a worshiping community for whom holding hands is part of their culture, common sense would tell me not to touch it.

You want to have balance, and here we get into a deeper issue. There is transcendence and there is immanence. Transcendence means understanding God as almighty or understanding Jesus as a miracle worker. But there is also immanence: Jesus washing the disciples' feet, Jesus having dinner with tax collectors.

Both qualities are in scripture, applied to Jesus and to the Father and to the Spirit as well. We can't separate them. We need both.

Where is this balance for you?

Rules are important because we've all encountered examples of the Eucharist not being celebrated properly. We want to correct that, but again, with balance. You want to preserve the traditions of people.

I believe that in the United States we have a very healthy understanding of liturgy. When you look at the church universal, which countries have the most worshipers at Sunday Mass? Poland, Malta, the Philippines, and the United States. We know something about liturgy, and I think we're doing it rather well.

Is it hard to advocate for balance when it seems that those on the extremes are getting more attention?

It's difficult to be in the middle. To be in the mainstream today can be lonely. But I think that's where the gospel calls us to be, and we pay the price for that. But we have to be people of balance and prudence. Often that is interpreted as not following the Holy Father. That's not true. The best form of loyalty is to be candid, to be obedient at all times. Let me give you an example.

When I was studying scripture in Rome many years ago, one of my professors, Father Stanislaus Lyonnet, a famous Pauline scholar, was forbidden by what is now called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to teach biblical interpretation; he could only teach biblical languages.

I was in the classroom the day the prohibition was lifted. In Europe students knock on their desks when we in the U.S. would applaud; we knocked for five or six minutes.

I expected him to say something about the prohibition, but he didn't; he just began to teach St. Paul. It was a moving experience. Here was a man who had been hurt by the church-it seems we always hurt our best and brightest-but he did not retaliate. He just began, humbly, to teach.

I've always remembered that lesson. He was in the middle, and he paid the price. I think that's where grace is, and that's where the Lord wants us to be, too. I apply that lesson to liturgy and to the struggle to be in the mainstream.

How do you take that sense of balance to your work as chairman of the U.S. bishops' Committee on the Liturgy?

First let me tell you about the committee. I think it's perhaps the most important committee in the bishops' conference because liturgy touches everyone.

Eighty-five percent of the Catholic English-speaking world is in the U.S. Because of our numbers and our wealth, the translations we do also affect poorer English-speaking countries that don't have the staff, the research scholars, or the dollars to publish their own liturgical books. So I really feel an obligation to do our work well.