I want to say that our new English translation of the Mass, while having some clunkers in terms of word phrasing (and these clunkers can easily be refined in the next edition of the English Missal that will also have the "Prayers at the Foot of the Altar" restored and the EF's Offertory Prayers recovered) is so far superior, much more eloquent and truly worthy of the Lamb. It has our Catholic theology, piety and spirituality in it which was stripped from the sham of a translation for which we had to suffer for 40 years in that arid spiritual desert beginning in 1970 or so.
I absolutely love our new translation!
For example, just read the Collect for this Sunday's Mass (19th Sunday in Ordinary time):
This is "equivalency translation of the 1970 Latin text" that we heard last year on the same Sunday and at face value is seems like a prayer anyone could say but it simply misses the mark of what Catholic theology, piety and spirituality are all about in our relationship to God which is captured in the correct English translation which follows:
Almighty and ever-living God,
your Spirit made us your children,
confident to call you Father.
Increase your Spirit within us
and bring us to our promised inheritance.
Now what we will hear for the first time ever, an accurate translation of the Latin text of the 2002 Latin Missal:
Almighty ever-living God,
whom, taught by the Holy Spirit,
we dare to call our Father,
bring, we pray, to perfection in our hearts
the spirit of adoption as your sons and daughters,
that we may merit to enter into the inheritance
which you have promised.
Forgetting the literal translation of the Latin, can you see the explicit "Latin Rite" theology, spirituality and piety in the corrected translation that the wrong translation of the Latin took from us as Catholics? The equivalency translation of the Latin gives us the gist of the text, the literal (accurate) translation goes beyond that to give us the "piety, spirituality and doctrinal message of the Catholic Church." Can you see and hear that? The Law of Prayer is the Law of Belief!
3 comments:
I incorporate study of the OF propers--carefully comparing the Latin and new English--into my daily devotion and prayer, and simply do not see the "clunkers" you keep mentioning. So I wonder, Fr. McDonald...Does this reflexive defensiveness betray your spending too much time among the apostates at a certain heretical far-left blog?
I also follow similarly the EF propers in Latin and English, and am willing to pay the new OF translations to compliment that they're generally more accurate and eloquent, and certainly more smoothly flowing, than those in a typical EF Latin-English hand missal.
I would also hope the Roman Canon is restored in a future edition of the Missal with its very meaningful "repetitive" signs of the cross:
http://catholicchampion.blogspot.com/2010/01/aquinas-repetitive-sign-of-cross-in.html
The universal use of the vernacular as applied today is a complete abuse.
I cannot say that I find the translation to be anything other than a banal response to a widespread abuse, and the justifiable continuation of the abuse.
In reading the Conciliar documents, there is no justification for the complete abandonment of Latin and there is no justification for the complete application of the vernacular. I am quick to say that the language of the Mass means nothing to the faithful who worship. That is true. BUT the language of the Mass is of critical import to the priest who offers it. Latin is precise, the vernacular is not. Latin is universal, the vernacular is not. Latin is timeless and unifying, the vernacular is not.
I will not support the further use of the vernacular in the Novus Ordo. I tolerate it as a problem of our time, but I assist at the Nouvs Ordo so infrequently that it rarely means anything to me.
Post a Comment