APART FROM THOSE WHO OBSESS ON CURRENT CHURCH POLITICS AND POLARIZATION, HOW MANY RANK AND FILE PARISHIONERS REALLY OBSESS ON LITURGICAL TRANSLATIONS OF THE MASS?

Pope Francis has ordered a review of Pope Benedict's document "Liturgiam Authenticum" which guided the re-translation of the official Latin text of the Mass into a literal vernacular translation often  doing violence to the vernacular language.

While our new and glorious English translation is a vast, vast, vast improvement over the 1970 English Missal, it is far from perfect in many of the priestly prayers.

Fr. Bruce Harbert uses the Solemnity of the Baptism of the Lord to point out the deficiency of the current translation in the Collect and there are similar deficiencies in other prayers and prefaces of the otherwise new and glorious English translation of the Mass:

The Feast of the Baptism of the Lord

This feast did not occur in the Roman Rite before Vatican II. When it was introduced into the 1970 Missal, a new Collect was composed which, like many of the newly-written prayers in our Missal, lacks the conciseness and simplicity of the older tradition. Its seven lines contain no fewer than three participial phrases - a challenge to the translator.

The alternative Collect is simpler and much more ancient, being found already in the Gelasian Sacramentary. In the official translation, the third and fourth lines contain a curious thought:

grant, we pray, that we may be inwardly transformed
through him whom we recognize as outwardly like ourselves.

Line 4 seems to imply that Christ, though outwardly like ourselves, is inwardly unlike us. This seems to me to veer towards the heresy of Apollinarianism, which holds that Christ had no human soul. Orthodox Christianity understands that Christ is 'like us in all things but sin' (Hebrews 4,15). 

The revisers have misunderstood the Latin. In fact it prays that our outward Christian profession may be matched by our inner lives. The problem, as so often in this translation, arises from incorrect placing of an adverb. It easy to mend with the help of the Morecambe Principle:

grant, we pray, that we may be inwardly transformed
through him whom we recognize outwardly as like ourselves.

As is predictable, in the conservative blogosphere there are histrionics and threats of leaving the Church. This indicates to me the idolatry of some who are in love with the Mass but not necessarily with the Church which is the Body of Christ who is the Head of the Church and we her members. Often they worship the form, direction, music and language of the Mass and thus become idolaters. Idolatry is a mortal sin as it breaks the First Commandment.

And just as conservatives did the same sort of inviting to liberals to join the Protestant Episcopal Church since they didn't like the direction the Church was going under Pope Benedict, so now liberals are inviting conservatives to leave for schismatic traditionalist groups since they don't like what Pope Francis is doing!

But apart from us liturgical geeks 99% of practicing Catholics have greater worries than things liturgical. In fact I could use the old English translation of the 1970's Missal for the priest's prayers and I doubt anyone would notice it this weekend. Of course if I prayed them in Latin or Spanish they would notice!

As everyone knows that I am clairvoyant, I predict the congregation's parts will not change again or revert to the 1970's version. Thus I see no changes to the greeting responses, the Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Mystery of Faith, Amen, Lord's Prayer or Agnus Dei.

Some of the priest's orations such as Collects and prefaces need minor revisions to make them less clunky and good English syntax. In other words these will be refined but remain authentic to the theology, spirituality and pious and devotional qualities of the Latin texts that were absent in the 1970 version.

Finally there is good reason not to lose hope about this yet again revision of our English Mass as the chairperson of the committee has a sober approach to what method should be used to translate.

This is what He as said in the past:

Archbishop Arthur Roche, who was for 10 years chairman of the International Commission for English Language in the Liturgy, addressing the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops in September 2014, said the major difference between “Comme le Prévoit” (1969), which governed translation for the first liturgical books after the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), and “Liturgiam Authenticam,” which has since determined the translation of the Roman Missal in English, French and some Spanish-speaking countries, “was that the Holy See in its directives opted for a shift of the guiding principle of translation from that of ‘dynamic or functional equivalence’ in 1969 to the principle of ‘formal equivalence’ in 2001.”

He explained that “dynamic equivalence” was achieved when a translator detached the “content” of an utterance from the “form in which it was expressed.” But this approach has become “outmoded,” he said. Over the last 40 years, specialists in language “have become more aware that the form we choose for an utterance is itself expressive of our purpose in speaking.” The Holy See in “Liturgiam Authenticam” opted for “the formal equivalence,” he stated.