SummaryMass-going Catholics are in for a rude shock in 2010-2011.
For it is then that the new translations of the English of the Mass and sacraments are going to be introduced into parishes and communities.
Without consultation and without ever 'road-testing' the new translations or seeking the opinion, let alone the consent of the faithful, a Vatican-imposed version of Latinized English is going to be foisted on Catholics in countries like Australia, the UK, the US, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and other places where English is widely used.
While the present translation is not perfect it has the strength of following the rhythms and idioms of normal English speech and has gained a widespread acceptance among English-speakers.
It has become part of the prayer of the community and is a genuine expression of the faith of the largest Catholic language-group in the world.
But, as And Also With You argues, it is more than this. For Catholics it is the basic symbol of their acceptance of Vatican II.
Reactionaries have argued for decades that acceptance of the Council's renewed liturgy represents approval of all of the other reforms that Vatican II introduced.
Back-tracking on the liturgy connotes an abandonment of the other good things that the Council stood for like consulting the laity, the collegiality of bishops in governing the church, our reaching out to other churches, and religious freedom.
This pamphlet outlines the whole picture. It takes us back to Vatican II and explains how up until the mid-1980s the English-speaking bishops' conferences were primarily responsible for the English we used in the liturgy. It shows how this has been subverted by the Vatican since 1985.
The English we are now using in the liturgy is not an absolutely literal translation of the Latin.
What it tries to do is what all sensible translations try to do: find the nearest English idiom that communicates the ideas expressed in the original, rather than literally rendering the meaning of each individual word.
This is known as dynamic equivalence. The translation to be imposed in 2010-11 retreats to a literal rendering of the Latin. It aims to capture the precise meaning of the original text with no regard for the English equivalent.
The result is a mish-mash, a pseudo-sacred English that reeks of Latinisms. It reads like a kind of over-the-top, mid-Victorian rhetoric that is hard to say aloud. Much of it is incomprehensible and convoluted.
The tragedy is that this will alienate more Catholics right at the time when we are struggling to involve people from Generations X and Y.
So at a time when millions of Catholics are alienated from the church because of hierarchical hypocrisy and seeming irrelevance, the Vatican is irresponsibly determined to introduce an even more alienating form of language.
The faithful were never consulted. So it remains to be seen if this imposed text will be ever fully 'received'.
FULL TEXT OF THE PAMPHLET
As far as the ordinary Catholic is concerned, the first and the greatest achievement of Vatican Council II was the vernacular liturgy. Nothing that the Council did impacted on parishes, communities, laity and priests to the extent that the translation of the Mass and sacraments into English did. While there was a difficult period of transition in the late-1960s, the new liturgy has been widely accepted by Catholics across the English-speaking world.
The liturgical changes, however, were even more significant: in historical terms Vatican II brought about the most radical reshaping of worship that had ever been attempted in the history of Catholicism. And the Council's re-structuring of worship has been astonishingly successful.
The vast majority of ordinary Catholics embraced the changes with genuine enthusiasm, and they are now part of the essential fabric of what it means to be Catholic. Part of the reason why Catholics have been so accepting of the changes is because the prayers and words of the liturgy make sense to them: they are using an English idiom that gives expression to their innermost convictions and spirituality.
The text has become their prayer and while it is not perfect, it is in tune with the culture and the mentality of the people for whom it was intended. To take it from them would be to deprive them of a core element of their faith.
Those who rejected the liturgical reforms constituted a tiny minority. This was shown up at the Council itself: in the final vote 2,147 bishops voted for Sacrosanctum Concilium, Vatican II's document on worship and only four bishops voted against it. For dissenters the renewal of worship became the most potent symbol of what they saw as Vatican II's compromise with the modern world.
They saw it as an abandonment of the sacred and mysterious elements of worship, a loss of the so-called 'vertical' aspect of the liturgy. They perceived the English translations to be banal, untrue to the original, insufficiently sacred and commonplace, and they were constantly critical of what they saw as liturgical excesses.
Certainly mistakes were sometimes made and the occasional baby was thrown out with the bath water. But this was the biggest change ever attempted in the history of Catholic worship, and what is extraordinary is how quickly the Catholic community integrated the changes and, in retrospect, how few mistakes were really made.
The model for the tiny reactionary rump was the so-called 'Tridentine Mass', more accurately the 'Mass of Pius V' because it comes from the missal this pope issued in 1570; the Council of Trent had already concluded in 1563. While the schismatic Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and his followers were the most extreme of these reactionaries, others who remained within mainstream Catholicism fought tooth and nail to retain the Latin liturgy and to oppose the English translation.
They claimed that they were trying to preserve the sacred character of worship: they were horrified at what they described as at best an uninspired and dull English text, and at worst as heretical and a betrayal of the tradition.
Many saw the changes as surrendering to Protestantism and some reactionaries went in for the most outrageous character assassination, attacking those they considered to be responsible for all that had happened as vandals and barbarians. In other words reactionary Catholics turned the liturgy in a battleground, a symbol of everything that horrified them most about contemporary Catholicism.
They knew that if they could persuade the Vatican to roll back the liturgical reforms they would have won a symbolic victory over the other 'excesses' of Vatican II. They are now very close to succeeding in their aim.
In the next year or so a new, a more literal translation of the English used in worship and especially in the Mass is going to be imposed on priests and Mass-going Catholics in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the US and the UK. In fact, there has been a rather arcane process going on since 1998 and even from the close of Vatican II in 1965. This activity has understandably tended to slip under the radar of most Catholics, but it will certainly impact on all who still go to Mass.
However, we need to be absolutely clear: this is not just about tweaking the English translation to introduce a more 'sacred' feel to liturgical rhetoric. It is really about the acceptance or rejection of Vatican II. No matter how apologists for new translation try to present it, this is essentially about the meaning of Catholicism in contemporary culture, about the nature of the church and about where you stand on the role of the Council.
Essentially those pushing the new English translation say that what they are doing is 'reforming the reform'. The phrase actually comes from the Sri Lankan Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith Patabendige Don, previously secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship (CDW) in the Vatican, now the Archbishop of Colombo. He argues that what happened after Vatican II often veered away from the intention of the bishops at the Council.
Speaking about the liturgy specifically Ranjith says: 'Some practices which Sacrosanctum Concilium had never even contemplated were allowed into the Liturgy, like Mass versus populum (towards the people), Holy Communion in the hand, altogether giving up on the Latin and Gregorian Chant in favor of the vernacular and songs and hymns without much space for God, and extension beyond any reasonable limits of the faculty to concelebrate at Holy Mass. There was also the gross misinterpretation of the principle of "active participation".'
Ranjith offers no evidence for his claims that the liturgical vision of Vatican II has become distorted, but this view is now the dominant one in Rome, especially since the advent of Benedict XVI who expressed views like this long before Ranjith. To get some perspective on all this we need to backtrack a bit.
On 4 December 1963, at the end of the second session of the Council the bishops finally passed the Constitution on the Liturgy. It was necessary to have the Latin texts translated quickly. The English-speaking bishops immediately set up a commission to carry out the work of translation, the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL), representing eleven national bishops' conferences: Australia, Canada, England and Wales, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Scotland, South Africa and the United States.
While based in Washington, DC, it is important to emphasize that ICEL's line of responsibility was explicitly to the bishops' conferences of the whole English-speaking world, not to Rome and the Vatican's CDW. The role of Rome was simply to approve the work carried out under the guidance of the English-speaking bishops.
This was later to become a real bone of contention.
As the General Instruction on the Roman Missal (issued by the Post-Conciliar Commission on the Liturgy on 3 April 1969) emphasized the translator's task was to find a 'faithful but not literal' English equivalent of the Latin and that 'the unit of meaning [was] not the individual word, but the whole passage.'
Further 'the prayer of the Church is always the prayer of some actual community assembling here and now. It is not sufficient that a formula handed down from some other time or region should be translated verbatim, even if accurately, for liturgical use. The formula must become the genuine prayer of the congregation and in it each of its members should be able to find and express themselves.'
This is called the 'principle of equivalence' and no doubt Ranjith would say that it was something 'never contemplated' by the Council.
What Ranjith forgets is that this principle was articulated by the Commission actually set up by the bishops themselves at Vatican II to do the practical work in the process of renewing the liturgy after the Council concluded. He also ignores the fact that the present vernacular liturgy is not so much a 'modernization' as it is an attempted return to the ancient and traditional way in which the liturgy was celebrated in the early church.
It is also an unequivocal expression of the kind of collegiality mandated by the Council because it involved the English-speaking bishops in developing the language that was to be used in countries where the most widely used language on earth is spoken. That is why I want to emphasize that this is not just about tampering with a translation but is essentially about the acceptance of rejection of the all the Council represents.
The translation work was done quickly and introduced in stages so that by the beginning of the 1970s the whole of the Mass and sacraments had been translated into English and an English lectionary had been prepared. Working on the principle of dynamic equivalence the ICEL translators' didn't translate the Latin literally.
While remaining faithful to the sense of the original Latin, they tried to find the nearest genuine contemporary English equivalent that both sounded elegant, could be spoken with ease, and above all that prayerfully raised the mind and heart to God. This was a difficult process. Much of the work of ICEL was extraordinarily successful, but there were some problems: repetitions, at times a lack of elegance when texts descended into prosaic English and a lack of sensitivity to inclusive language.
Nevertheless the translation was widely and even enthusiastically accepted by the vast majority of mainstream Catholics throughout the English-speaking world. The great strength of the translation was its accessibility. Yet it still retains a prayerful, respectful approach to God. And it is the only text known to all Catholics under middle-age; it has been the language of worship since the late 1960s.
It was always envisaged that the English translation needed to be revised, and in 1981 the English-speaking bishops and ICEL began a careful revision of the whole process which aimed at improving the translation by giving it a more poetic, elevated, sacred feel. At the same time there was a realization that inclusive language also needed to be introduced. Work progressed throughout the 1980s and 1990s and by the late 1990s a Revised English Missal was ready.
Meanwhile the political ground in the Vatican had already shifted dramatically. Up until the mid-1980s the CDW didn't oppose the work of ICEL and recognized that it was the responsibility of the English-speaking bishops' conferences.
But from 1984 with the advent of the John Paul II papacy (1978-2005) the senior personnel at the CDW changed.
A series of Cardinals Prefect of the CDW (the German Paul Augustin Mayer, OSB (1984-88) and the Spaniards, Eduardo Martinez Somalo (1988-92) and Antonio Javierre Ortas, SDB (1992-96)) showed little sympathy for the Vatican II vision of the church, let alone tolerance for a vernacular liturgy under the control of local bishops' conferences. Mayer said publicly that ICEL needed to be restructured and redirected.
But the real crunch came when the Chilean Cardinal Jorge Medina Estevez, a friend of the military dictator, Augusto Pinochet, who presided at the general's funeral Mass, was appointed cardinal prefect of the CDW in 1996 by Pope Wojtyla. He came to the CDW right at the time when ICEL was ready to submit the revised English liturgy to Rome for a recognitio, an approval for use throughout the English-speaking world.
Also at this time the centralizing process that had come with John Paul II was well under-way and Romanita, the Roman-Vatican view of the world, was re-asserting itself with a vengeance. It was intolerable to the bureaucrats of the Vatican, and particularly to people like Medina, that English-speaking bishops' conferences were making decisions about the English used in the liturgy.
Bishops were there to do what Rome wanted. What is also significant is that at this point not one of these cardinal-critics of ICEL was a natural English-speaker, not is there any evidence that any of them spoke English with any facility.
I've already mentioned the tiny rump of Catholics who continued to reject the new liturgy.
Nevertheless they have had an influence that far transcends their numbers. As older reactionaries died, they have been replaced by younger people, particularly young men, who are attracted to 'bells and smells' and an extravagant, dressing-up style of worship. Many of these are technologically literate and have elaborate web-pages that reflect their point of view. They are also politically savvy in that they know how to influence Rome. This is because they have worked out how to make their views known to sympathetic and influential decision-making prelates in the Vatican, including in the CDW.
For decades they have been bombarding Rome with complaints about the new liturgy and in Mayer, Martinez Somalo, Javierre Ortas and above all in Medina they found allies and supporters. Austen Ivereigh has correctly pointed out that 'To traditionalists, ICEL had become the symbol of the Church's sell-out to fallen modernity, the target of wealthy American traditionalists who had the ear of Rome' (The Tablet, 17 January 2004).
But Medina didn't need convincing. As soon as he got to the CDW he set about systematically dismantling the whole liturgical renewal. His strategy was clear: if he could bring the English-speaking bishops to heel, the largest linguistic group in the Catholic world, he would have no trouble bringing other the other language groups under Roman control, including his own Spanish-speaking world.
A key element in achieving this was the need to replace the basic techniques of translation as set out in The General Instruction on the Roman Missal, such as dynamic equivalence, with other principles that fitted in with Medina's own priorities.
So on 20 March 2001 his Congregation issued Liturgiam authenticam ('Authentic Liturgy' (LA)). For a copy see http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccdds/documents. This is an instruction on the principles of liturgical translation and celebration which was meant to replace The General Instruction on the Roman Missal.
Medina claimed that John Paul II had asked the CDW to prepare LA, but these were the declining years of Pope Wojtyla and the Curia was doing pretty much what it wanted to do. LA actually reflects Medina's views - and those of the liturgical reactionaries - rather than the views of mainstream liturgical scholars and ordinary Catholics.
The former editor of The Tablet, John Wilkins, in an important and detailed article in Commonweal on the liturgy wars says that LA 'did not recommend, it commanded. It insisted that translations follow an extreme literalism, extending even to syntax and rhythm, punctuation, and capital letters.
The clear implication was that in this way it would be possible to achieve a sort of “timeless” English above the change of fashion, a claim reminiscent of that made for the Ronald Knox translation of the Bible, which today is so dated that it is not read except as a period piece' (Commonweal, 2 December 2005).
Medina was supported by the then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger who had made it clear for many years before his election to the papacy that he thought that vernacular Masses were to blame for the drop in church attendance and vocations to the priesthood. He offers no empirical evidence to support this contention. He has also often expressed concern about the loss of a 'vertical' dimension to the liturgy.
Ratzinger says that much contemporary liturgy has lost a sense of reverence and a deep consciousness of the presence of God. He feels that nowadays we are far too concerned with the community and human relationships.
As he said at the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday, 2005 just before he was elected pope 'How often do we celebrate only ourselves without even realizing that Jesus is there.' What he is doing here - as he so often does when arguing - is overstating the case. That is while there is some truth in what he says he goes to the other extreme and dichotomises the situation as though we were faced with an either-or choice. So given this tendency it is perfectly understandable that, when he became pope, Ratzinger had the CDW push ahead with the revision of the English liturgy.
LA aimed at replacing all previous post-conciliar texts which set out the principles of liturgical translation. A kind of 'overview' put out by the CDW itself describes Medina's time at the Congregation as 'a new era in translation of liturgical texts.' LA shifts the emphasis from making sense in English to a focus on a literal rendering of the Latin.
In other words, it constitutes a shift from emphasis on the prayer of the congregation to a focus on the centrality of the Latin text. It says that translation 'is not so much a work of creative inventiveness as one of fidelity and exactness in rendering the Latin texts into a vernacular language.'
No care or sensitivity is shown for the people praying or their needs. It's as though the Latin text had a priority call on God's attention, and unless the English followed that text literally the prayer of the priest and people goes nowhere.
LA is especially critical of any attempt to integrate inclusive language into the translation: 'The abandonment of these terms [i.e. pronouns that refer to both male and female] under pressure of criticism on ideological or other grounds, is not always wise or necessary.' You can't even get around it by using 'men and women' for the Latin homo.
'The expression of such inclusivity may not be achieved by a quasi-mechanical change in grammatical number, or by the creation of pairs of masculine and feminine terms.' LA also maintains that 'Translations must be freed from exaggerated dependence on modern modes of expression and in general from psychologizing language. Even forms of speech deemed slightly archaic may on occasion be appropriate.' No clarification is offered as to what 'psychologizing language' might mean in this context.
All this certainly sounds more like 'ideology' than a care for the prayerful expression of worship by the community gathered at Mass. It assumes that there is such a thing as timeless English, a moment when the language was somehow perfectly adapted to the sacred.
In the process of trying to discover this, the proposed new translations actually fall into the trap of using a kind of pseudo-mid-Victorian English rather than more modern modes of speech. It is the kind of English that a minor nineteenth century romantic novelist might have used on a bad day.
The language that results from LA is not so much sacred as pompous and affected. Since hardly anyone now prays in Latin, is it really appropriate to make that the norm for prayer in a living language like English? Only someone besotted with ideology could think that.
The English-speaking bishops' conferences and ICEL fought very hard against the CDW's putsch but this led to long-term and experienced ICEL personnel, particularly Dr John Page, the executive secretary, being increasingly marginalized by the Congregation in the late-1980s and 1990s. The final result was that Medina refused a recognitio to the revised English Missal in 2002.
Page resigned that same year after 22 years as head of ICEL and thirty years as a translator of liturgical texts, as did ICEL chairman, Bishop Maurice Taylor of Galloway, Scotland.
After they left, the subversion of ICEL began. Taylor was replaced by Bishop Arthur Roach of Leeds and a new executive secretary was appointed, Father (now Monsignor) Bruce Harbert, a priest of Birmingham archdiocese and a convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism.
Previously he had been highly critical of the work of the old ICEL and was associated with pressure groups in the UK who wanted a restoration of the Latin Mass. Former staff left. ICEL now became increasingly secretive.
Previously, proposed translations were publicly available, but in 2002 a complete revision of all ICEL's translation work began in secret. 'ICEL was no longer to seek the advice of poets and other writers, but only of patristic scholars. The language is to be distinctively Catholic, sacral, Roman; as the mind and heart are raised to God, they should be sure to stop off in Saint Peter's (Austen Ivereigh, The Tablet, 17 January 2004).
ICEL was to be assisted and guided by Vox Clara ('Clear Voice'), a committee appointed by the CDW of generally conservative-minded English-speaking cardinals and bishops with a couple of moderates like Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor of Westminster thrown in to give the appearance of balance. Vox Clara was chaired by Cardinal George Pell of Sydney, another outspoken opponent of the old ICEL approach; it was public knowledge that Pell was unhappy with ICEL's work under John Page and his colleagues and that he favored the insertion of a more 'vertical', sacred tone in the English liturgy.
Vox Clara's precise function was never really clarified, but it seems to have been a kind of reference group who could assess the translation work of the reconstituted ICEL.
As the new ICEL worked their way through the ordinary of the Mass they sent out their work to bishops' conferences for comment. Many bishops were very unhappy with the suggested changes. The bishops sent in many corrections, amendments, criticisms and suggestions. They could foresee what was ahead in terms of pastoral acceptance by priests and people. But no one in Rome was listening and their advice was ignored. Rome apparently couldn't care less what happened pastorally.
As the new translation went through its various phases and the bishops sent in their comments and criticisms, the whole process was meant to be kept secret and ordinary Catholics were excluded from the loop, although in an almost comic 'investigative piece' in the London Catholic Herald (14 October 2005) the paper reported that a copy of the supposedly secret Mass translation was being offered for sale on EBay with the Herald claiming: 'Finger of suspicion points to Australian ex-priest with liberal sympathies.' The liberal ex-priest's identity still remains unknown.
Medina retired from the CDW in October 2002 and was replaced by the Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze. Arinze was joined as Secretary of the CDW in 2005 by the Sri Lankan Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith, the former Bishop of Ratnapura and, for a year and a half, papal nuncio to Indonesia, and since June 2009 Archbishop of Colombo. He was the bishop who was behind the brief excommunication in 1997 of Father Tissa Balasuriya, the Sri Lankan theologian. Ranjith quickly emerged as the real power-broker in the CDW.
From the perspective of ICEL, at least both Arinze and Ranjith were English speakers, but they continued to follow the policies of their predecessors, particularly Medina. As we saw Ranjith believed that there needed to be 'a reform of the reform', that is the reforms of Vatican II had gone too far and they need to be further reformed along more conservative lines. For Ranjith the liturgy is the natural staring point in this process.
And just when it seemed to professional liturgists that it couldn't get any worse at the CDW, in December 2008 after the retirement of Arinze, Benedict XVI appointed Cardinal Antonio Canizares Llovera, the former archbishop of Toledo as Prefect of the Congregation. Llovera is close to Pope Ratzinger; in fact his nickname is 'Little Ratzinger', a reference to his height and rigid orthodoxy. He is a former head of the Spanish Bishops' Office of Doctrine, a former member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) and a fierce opponent of 'relativism'.
In July 2009 Ranjith was replaced as secretary of the CDW by the American Archbishop Augustine di Noia, OP, also a former official of the CDF.
Di Noia has obviously been appointed by the Pope to drive through the changes to the English translations. He might also have been appointed to assist in the process of receiving so-called Traditional Anglicans back into union with Rome, but it should be noted that he, along with Ranjith and Llovera, have no specialist background or training in liturgy.
The new English text of the Ordinary of the Mass was gradually and often unenthusiastically approved by the English-speaking bishops' conferences, with the US conference being the last to pass it. Following this on 23 June 2008 the CDW gave the new text an immediate recognitio.
The text only includes the Ordinary of the Mass: the penitential rite, the Gloria, creed, offertory, Eucharistic prayers, acclamations and other prayers and responses used in the daily and Sunday celebration of Mass.
The rest of the missal remains to be translated and approved.
This process has begun and Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Canberra-Goulburn is the Chairman of the Roman Missal Editorial Committee for ICEL as well Chairman of the International Commission for the Preparation of an English-Language Lectionary.
The CDW wants bishops' conferences to begin a 'pastoral preparation' for an introduction of the new translation of the Mass in 2011. (A copy of the translated text of the Ordinary of the Mass is available on the web page of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).
A foretaste of what might happen pastorally was provided when, in a misunderstanding, some South African parishes started using the new text in late-November 2008. It was met with widespread rejection by Mass-going Catholics.
The South African Catholic newspaper, The Southern Cross reported in an editorial that 'the anger of the people in the pews and many priests (and some bishops) seems to be rooted not so much in what they feel are anachronistic and clumsy translations - vexing though they appear to be to many - but in what they see as an arbitrary imposition of liturgical values that are foreign to them by faceless bureaucrats in Rome.'
In an 18 January 2009 letter to The Southern Cross, Bishop Kevin Dowling, C.SS.R., of Rustenburg in the north-west of South Africa, said that his first reaction to the new texts 'was that it was a purely arbitrary decision to demand that the English text had to faithfully represent the Latin in the first place, that many of the changes made no sense, and that some of the formulations were simply bad English.'
One of the major shocks experienced by the South Africans was the shift from a more normal, conversational style of English to a sacral, more formal form of address.
Let us now look at some of the major changes that will involve both priests and the congregation. There are many annoying word changes that affect the celebrant rather than the people, but firstly I will only highlight the major ones that impinge on the whole congregation as we work through each part of the Mass.
Catholics will be pulled up short right at the commencement of Mass if the priest uses the greeting 'The Lord be with you', because the new response is 'And with your spirit' replacing 'And also with you'.
Of course this is a literal translation of Et cum spiritu tuo but it is meaningless in modern English. What precisely is 'your spirit' in this context? It sounds almost 'new age' or like the psychobabble condemned in LA. Since this response recurs several times throughout the Mass people are going to be constantly struggling with 'And with your spirit'.
The Mass begins with the Penitential Rite which ICEL now calls the 'Penitential Act' because the Latin uses the word actus. The text of the 'I confess' will change with the insertion of the word 'greatly' for it to read 'I confess to almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned …'. Does the word 'greatly' indicate that everyone present is guilty of mortal sin? And in case that was not enough emphasis on sinfulness, ICEL have added 'through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault' to the text of the 'I confess'.
This kind of overly dramatic repetition is inappropriate, even embarrassing in contemporary English. It may work in an operatic, romance kind of language; it doesn't work in more phlegmatic, matter-of-fact forms of speech used by English speakers. So far there seems to be only one other option for the penitential rite. Previously there were eight different options.
The Gloria has undergone a considerable rewrite, but again the emphasis seems to be on a literal translation of the Latin.
Present Form of Gloria
Glory to God in the highest and peace to his people on earth.
Lord God, heavenly King, almighty God and Father, we worship you, we give you thanks, we praise you for your glory.
Lord Jesus Christ, only Son of the Father, Lord God, Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world: have mercy on us; you are seated at the right hand of the Father: receive our prayer.
For you alone are the Holy One, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit in the glory of God the Father. Amen
Proposed New Form of Gloria
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to people of good will.
We praise you, we bless you, we adore you, we glorify you, we give you thanks for your great glory, Lord God, heavenly King. O God, almighty Father.
Lord Jesus Christ, Only Begotten Son, Lord God, Lamb of God, son of the Father, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us; you take away the sins of the world, receive our prayer; you are seated at the right hand of the Father, have mercy on us.
For you alone are the Holy One, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit in the glory of God the Father. Amen.
There is a kind of modesty and lack of pretentiousness about the Gloria we use at present. It is characterized by directness and an economy of words. While it is hardly high poetry, it follows the rhythms of contemporary English without awkward verbal juxtapositions.
In the new Gloria the kinds of problems we are going to have with the rest of the new text become apparent. You have the feeling that the word order has been changed just for the sake of following the Latin literally. For instance 'Peace to his people on earth' becomes 'and on earth peace to people of good will'.
There is no apparent reason why this has been changed except to follow exactly the order of the words in Latin (et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis). 'God' is no longer simply 'God' but becomes 'O God'; 'only son of the Father' becomes 'only begotten son', a meaningless theological gloss for most Catholics. Repetitions are introduced: 'you take away the sins of the world' (twice).
The same kinds of problems are even more apparent and exaggerated in the Creed.
Here are the two forms:
Present Form of the Creed
maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,
begotten not made, of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one, holy Catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.
Amen
Proposed New Form
I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried, and rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.
He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end.
And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets.
And one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church.
I confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
Amen
Many commentators have pointed out already that in the proposed new text we no longer believe as a community, but as individuals. Sure, credo means 'I believe', but we are not at the Eucharist as individuals. Some argue that the 'I' represents not the individual worshipper but the whole community as the one Body of Christ at prayer.
While there is some plausibility to this argument, the danger is that people do not think or speak that way nowadays. 'I' is individualistic in modern English and 'we' clearly conveys the sense of community. so the problem is that for the sake of a p[edantic translation of the Latin we run the risk of loosing consciousness of the essentially communal nature of worship and belief.
In the new creed Jesus is no longer just 'only Son of God' but 'only begotten Son', an arcane and archaic way of speaking in English. And just in case you missed it, a couple of lines later Jesus is 'begottern not made, consubstantial with the Fathee'.
These are theological niceities, but they have no meaning for contemporary worshippers. The clear aim is to express a kind of 'high Christology', but to what purpose?
These philosophical terms only make sense within the context of the cosmology and theology of the late-Greco-Roman world. They have little or no impact on modern Catholics who are trying to pray the creed. The words are there to assist prayer. All that the new text does is to create rhetorical obstacles in raising minds and hearts to God, a difficult enough process even in the present formulation of the creed.
Again Jesus is no longer simply 'incarnate from the Virgin Mary', but now 'by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary'. Again this is a pedantic precision, meaningful only to theologians.
The English is contorted simply to fit into a theology which has little significance to most Catholics who live within the context of a modern, scientific cosmology.
The CDW's answer to this difficulty - which it acknowledges - is that the purpose is to get people to go and ask the priest what the theological terms mean. It is more likely that they will simple see this as arcane language of no significance to them or their lives.
People may have anathematized and even killed each other over these terms in the fourth and fifth centuries. In the twenty-first they will simple shrug their shoulders, and might even walk away.
This is not because they are indifferent; it is because while the language is meaningful to theologians, it is not the way that contemporary Catholics think about God, Christ and the Holy Spirit.
We think in inter-personal terms, we talk the language of love and affection and, as the heirs of Freud, Jung and modern psychology it is difficult if not impossible for us to embrace the fourth century philosophical categories that created the creeds.
When we come to the Eucharistic Prayer, again there are changes made simply for the sake of change.
At the beginning of the Preface when the celebrant says 'Let us give thanks to the Lord our God' the congregation now replies 'It is right and just', when in the old formula we said something that actually made sense in a conversational dialogue: 'It is right to give him thanks and praise'.
In the Sanctus the Lord is no longer 'God of power and might', but 'Lord God of hosts', whatever 'hosts' might mean for those not trained in the rhetoric of biblical warfare.
In the actual Eucharistic Prayers there are a whole series of changes with which priests are going to have to deal.
However, the most contentious change with implications for all Catholics is in the actual words of the consecration of the wine.
The old formula was: 'This is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and ever-lasting covenant; it will be shed for you and for all'. This expresses the clear, constant and unequivocal teaching of the Catholic Church that Christ died for all, that his death has a universal impact without exclusion.
But this has been changed in the new translation to 'For this is the chalice of my blood, the blood of the new and eternal covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many'. Why the 'cup' becomes the arcane word 'chalice' is anybody's guess, but what is most worrying is the change from saying that Christ died for all, to saying that he died for many.
The reason given is that this is the accurate translation of the Latin pro multis. While that is correct linguistically, it is totally incorrect theologically and probably heretical. This is about a central plank of contemporary Catholic belief - the universal salvation won by Christ.
Bishop Donald Trautman of Erie, Pennsylvania discusses this in some detail in an article in The Tablet (3 February 2007). Trautman refers to a commissioned piece in the periodical of the CDW itself, Notitiae (May 1970, pp 138-140), by the exegete and linguist, Max Zerwick, SJ, where the Jesuit clearly states: 'According to exegetes the Aramaic word which in Latin is translated pro multis [for many] means pro omnibus [for all]. The multitude for whom Christ died is unbounded, which is the same as saying Christ died for us all.'
Zerwick concedes that the Aramaic, the original language of the bible, uses the phrase 'for many' but he argues that in the Semitic understanding this actually and unequvically means 'for all'.
However, Zerwick continues, this particular interpretation is not clear to people today so it is entirely appropriate and accurate to translate pro multis as 'for all'. This leads Bishop Trautman to challenge the CDW and Benedict XVI to explain why they have insisted on the translation 'for many'.
His concern is the danger that a central tenet of Catholic belief - that Christ's salvation is universal - is distorted by a misplaced emphasis on the literal translation of the Latin. As he says '"Many" does not mean everyone. On a pastoral level we must have from the Vatican a better rationale for this major change ... We need a pastoral approach. How many people in the pews will hear a universal inclusive meaning in "for many"?'
In other words this is a vivid example of the result of the literalism adopted by the CDW: essentially they end up with a translation that is at best misleading, at worst, heretical.
It has been claimed by apologists for the new translation that 'many' means 'all' in this context.
That immediately suggests that if that is the case why introduce the word 'many' when it means 'all', the word you already had in the text in the first place! According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary the word 'many' actually means 'a great number' whereas 'all' means 'the whole amount', 'without exception', the lot.
It has even been suggested that the Vox Clara committee took this issue of translation to Benedict XVI and he assured them that the English word 'many' really meant 'all' in this context.
While his theological acumen is undoubted, Pope Ratzinger's mastery of the English language surely has serious limitations, especially when compared to the authority of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
When we get to the Our Father the simple, straight-forward words 'Let us pray with confidence to the Father in the words our Savior gave us' becomes the pompous 'At the Savior's command and formed by divine teaching, we dare to say'. At the Communion it is no longer sufficient to say 'Lord I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed'.
In the new version the congregation will be expected to say: 'Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed'. Again one is faced with the question of the purpose of this. Sure, it refers back to the centurion who asks Jesus in the gospel to cure his servant, but why is this complexity introduced which obscures the meaning?
Bishop Trautman gives voice to the kinds of questions that occur to anyone who has read the new ICEL translation:. He says 'In evaluating the translations we need to consider whether the texts are both understandable and proclaimable, and whether they use a word order, vocabulary and idiom of the mainstream of English-speaking people.
If these texts are to be the prayers of the people, are they owned by them and expressed in their language? The texts include new words … such as "consubstantial to the Father" and "incarnate of the Virgin Mary", while words in the various new Collects include "sullied", "unfeigned", "ineffable", "gibbet", "wrought", "thwart".
Do these texts communicate in the living language of the worshipping assembly?
These are the real pastoral questions that the proponents of these changes have to answer.
Priests, of course, are faced with many other changes.
Some of the changes in the Eucharistic Prayers (EPs) are worth examining - although it is clear that EPs one and four are not used very often in parishes, even on Sundays. There is a real sense that they have not been 'received'. The reason seems to be their length and complexity.
In my view there are some improvements in the translation of EP1 (the Roman Canon). But if the old translation errs on the side of being prosaic, the new translation often-times seems a little over-the-top.
For instance in the prayer just before the consecration:
Proposed New Form of Prayer
Be pleased, O God, we pray, to bless, acknowledge and approve this offering in every respect; make it spiritual and acceptable, so that it may become for us the body and blood of your most beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ
In the link prayer between the consecration of the bread and the wine the simple and straight-forward present form 'When supper was ended he took the cup. Again he gave you thanks and praise, gave the cup to his disciples and said … ' (with the formula of the consecration of the wine following) is replaced with the more verbose 'In a similar way, when supper was ended, he took this precious chalice in his holy and venerable hands, and once more giving thanks, he said the blessing and gave the cup to his disciples saying…'. (This formula is more simply expressed in the other EPs).
Later in EP1 the simple phrase addressed to God 'Look with favor on these offerings…' becomes 'Be pleased to look upon them with serene and kindly countenance…'. In an attempt to be reverential the proposed text sactually becomes slightly groveling.
In the preface of EP2 you again see the replacement of words in common use with others that are more arcane. For instance the straight-forward 'He [Christ] took flesh and was born of the Virgin Mary' becomes 'our Savior and Redeemer, incarnate by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin', and the succinct and clear 'For our sake he opened his arms on the cross; he put an end to death and revealed the resurrection' becomes 'He stretched out his hands as he endured his Passion, so as to break the bonds of death and manifest the resurrection.'
In EP3 words like 'offering' become 'oblation', 'saints' become 'elect', 'peace' becomes 'reconciliation' and 'all the bishops' becomes 'the Order of bishops' which could suggest to the uninitiated that the bishops constituted a religious order!
Essentially, most of the responsibility for the implementation of these changes will fall on the priests.
Responses to this challenge will differ, of course, between priests.
The large majority of Australian priests clearly support the changes introduced by Vatican II and they certainly don't want to see these reforms dismantled. Most are also aware that these linguistic changes to the liturgy symbolize a shift away from a commitment to the kind of Catholicism that has emerged from Vatican II.
This will immediately put some priests on the defensive against the changes. A minority are already quite hostile to them and have no intention of implementing them. As one priest put it, 'I'll never use the Gloria again'.
Others, both rural and urban, have become very congregational in their approach; that is their primary commitment is to their parish communities and if they feel that the changes are too much to ask of the laity they will either not implement them or only implement them in part.
Some also don't like the pseudo-sacred, neo-Victorian style, and will continue to use the kind of language that people understand. Their view is that words in liturgical books have no priority claim on God's attention, but that it is the prayer of the community that counts.
But most Australian priests will want to play this in a very low key way; they are not looking for confrontation, especially with the 'temple police' and 'heresy hunters'.
Perhaps the majority of Vatican II priests will go along with the changes to some extent, but without enthusiasm.
Many of them are worn out and couldn't care less about reforms of the reform they never asked for, nor wanted.
My own view is that this exercise will be a disaster pastorally. It will simply put people off and be perceived as a meaningless change with no credible rationale. The history outlined above shows that this whole process has been ideologically driven by a tiny, unrepresentative minority who are insensitive to the real needs of the Catholic community and who, at heart, reject the Second Vatican Council.
Worse, they are ideologues who don't care about what happens, they are not interested in how many more people are driven out of the Church by the pomposity of what is essentially a failed attempt to create a kind of perennial, 'sacred' language by aping pseudo-mid-Victorian English.
Other commentators such as Austen Ivereigh concede that the new ICEL translation may work, but he warns that 'it is also conceivable that the new missal will prove a disaster, stuffed with archaisms and artificiality, reeking of a restorationist putsch, reflecting a fundamentalist response to modernity.'
I return to where I started.
Essentially this whole exercise is rooted in a rejection of Vatican II and all that it achieved for Catholicism.
At its core it is driven by those who want to 'reform the reform' out of existence.
Perhaps the time has come for those of us who are still actively committed to Catholicism to make a stand and reject outright this exercise in nostalgia which will make it even more difficult to hand on the faith to coming generations.
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SIC: Paul Collins Contribution