Dutch
Catholics are raising alarm bells after the bishops of the Netherlands
and Belgium changed the words to the Our Father in a way that they
believe amounts to an "ideological reinterpretation of the text."
Dutch Catholics who still attend weekly Mass heard a newly-worded
Our Father last Sunday that no longer asked God the Father, as Jesus
taught, “to lead us not into temptation” but, instead, “not into trial.”
Vox Populi, an orthodox Catholic lay group, is organizing a
petition advocating the traditional translation. “Why would this
‘reform’ be necessary now? There is not a single pastoral need to come
up with a ‘new common Dutch-Flemish translation’ of the ‘Our Father.’”
Recent Dutch Catholic history is so marked by destructive
innovation that in 1996 one faithful scholar declared the situation had
long passed the “crisis” phase and achieved “ruin.”
The former translation of the Latin “temptationem” was
“bekoring,” or “temptation.” The new version replaces that with
“beproeving,” which means in English, “test,” “ordeal,” or
“tribulation.”
Dutch
pro-life leader Hugo Bos said the switch is “a bad thing," but is
“consistent with a tendency of the bishops to ignore sin and the
temptation to sin.”
Indeed, it is the latest in a trend established by the 1965
“Dutch Catechism,” which systematically stripped the supernatural from
Church teachings in “the spirit of Vatican II.”
No church embraced this
“spirit,” and its desire to bring the Church into a positive encounter
(“aggiornamento”) with popular culture more than the Dutch.
Vox Populi warns, however, that this latest “initiative of
the Belgian and Dutch bishops will only add to the confusion within the
Church and thereby increase the crisis of faith.” Going back to the
Greek version of the Our Father, which uses “peirasmos,” the critics of
the translation admit that theoretically it “can be translated as either
‘trial’ or ‘temptation.’
However, within the context of the 'Our
Father,' ‘peirasmos’ cannot be translated as ‘trial.’”
Vox Populi points out that the Catechism of the Catholic
Church makes it crystal clear that the phrase is intended by Jesus
Christ as a plea for help in resisting the temptation to sin, not a
request for God to avert pain and material suffering.
Sections 2846,
2847 and 2848 of the Catechism focus on moral temptation. Vox Populi
illustrates the difference with a picture of a comely woman labeled
“temptatio” and of a forlorn and wasted Job-like male figure captioned
“probatio.”
The mistranslation will surprise no one who has observed the steady liberalization of the Dutch church. As reported
in a 1996 presentation by J.P.M. van der Ploeg, a professor of Old
Testament Studies at the Catholic University at Nijmegen, its first
outward manifestation came with the Dutch Catechism, which, he said,
simply removed the supernatural element from the Church. God was
manifest not in sacraments, not in the Eucharist, but simply in good
deeds.
The Holy Mass became “the service,” the “priest” became
“the one who presides at the service,” and Baptism was simply the
signifier of membership rather than the sacrament where God filled the
child with supernatural grace.
Rome ordered a revision that the Dutch bishops defied. In
the spirit of disobedience that followed, “priests, influenced by
Modernism, began to teach the faithful that many things which they had
hitherto been taught were not true. The stories of Adam and Eve in
Paradise, of Original Sin, the Flood, Noah and his animals in the ark,
the passing of Israel through the Red Sea, were said to have no
historical foundation.”
A new Biblical translation followed in colloquial language
that was necessitated, said its translators, by recent and rapid changes
in the Dutch language. These were bogus, said Fr. van der Ploeg. The
new translation’s introduction flatly denied the historicity of the
first three books of the Old Testament.
“The moral teaching of the Church was said to be antiquated
and not relevant to the needs of modern man. The bombardment was
continuous. For many people, it had always been difficult to be chaste
in all the circumstances of life; now it was claimed that God did not
require chastity.” Concluded Fr. van der Ploeg: “All these things taken
together contributed to the development of the present situation — no
longer one of crisis, but of ruin.”
That ruin was manifested by 2013 in the systematic closure of churches. As reported
three years ago by LifeSiteNews, “600-700 Catholic churches in the
Netherlands will be decommissioned by 2018.”
In the same story, Dutch
Cardinal Willem Jacobus Eijk recalled that 90 percent of Catholics
attended Sunday Mass before Vatican II. But now, it was just 6 percent.
Enough is enough, says Vox Populi.
“The truth is that we
are not dealing with a newer or better ‘translation’ here, but rather an
ideological reinterpretation of the text. Therefore, Vox Populi calls
upon the Episcopal Conferences of Belgium and the Netherlands to abandon
this experiment doomed to failure with the ‘Our Father’ and to maintain
the existing situation.”