The Praytell, seldom witty or filled with wisdom, reports both sad news and fake news. The first is the sad news with my commentary and then the second is the fake news posted by Rita Ferrone on the method of translating Latin into English.
The sad news:
At the website of the Congregation for the Clergy, there is a report on the plenary session of the Congregation held this past summer. Cardinal Beniamino Stella, prefect of the Congregation, says the following (see p. 3) about “traditionalist” seminarians:
As an addition to the various aspects of formation already treated concerning the Ratio, I wish also to emphasize the situation of “traditionalist” seminarians, who create not little difficulties first for the formators, then for the bishops after ordination. “Rigidity,” which the Holy Father has spoken about to us this morning, should thus be the object of careful discernment – fixation on an image of the past church, and also on appearance and external superficiality, often visible especially in the liturgical realm; not infrequently this can reveal narcissistic and vain personalities, and a propensity to “flee” from real pastoral duties, to take refuge in the intimacy and forms of a past which they have not lived and which does not pertain to their life. (tr. awr)Stella, 76, was created cardinal by Pope Francis in 2014.
My Comments: I have no doubt, having been a vocation director, that scrupulosity and narcissism can occur in men interested in the priesthood or in the seminary with rigid personalities incapable of dealing with the reality of the Church today. They can be said to create their own safe world that is more monastic than active when it comes to the pastoral demands of our parish. Traditionalists can be rigid and unforgiving of the real world parishioners they will encounter. They can be very divisive and troublesome for pastors who try to unite their parishes rather than divide and conquer.
Narcissistic personalities, though, can be either scrupulous or unscrupulous. Both are personality defects to say the least, but which is more dangerous to the Catholic Faith and priesthood? I doubt that most priests who have sexually abused teenage boys were scrupulous or traditionalists, although I suspect some were. The majority though were liberal, unscrupulous men who could care less about the damage they inflicted on teenage boys, their families and on the Church herself. Because of their narcissism, they were in denial about their personality defect, immaturity and in fact thought they could get away with it and cause no harm. It would seem to me that the good Cardinal above could have said the same thing about these candidates for the priesthood who can hide their narcissism under the guise of liberalism and then become tormentors of teenage boys and of the Church herself, not to mention their bishops!
A narcissistic personality is drawn to a liturgy where he can manipulate the laity and manipulate the liturgy they offer in order to be self-promoting, either friendly or pious, priest at the altar offering the one Sacrifice or an actor showing off his acting skills. The liturgy is his personal playground for self-fulfillment--rubrics and tradition mean nothing. The same cannot be said for traditionalists, although the liturgy can become for them too their playground of escapism. But they do the liturgy as the Church requires!
Praytell could correct this message from the Cardinal above by telling us about the priest abusers at St. John's Abby in Collegeville which has had an inordinate percentage of their priests accused of sexual abuse--how rigid were the personality types there, given the fact that this group of Benedictines are well-known for promoting the spirit and law of the post Vatican II reformed Liturgy? They have lawsuits galore and many priests incarcerated for their crimes (and more importantly mortal sins) and other Benedictine abusers under what is called supervision at the Abby.
However, what the good Cardinal above fails to point out is that the current Liturgy celebrated by narcissistic priests who are far from conservative, rigid or traditional have created a Catholic laity who themselves are narcissistic. The liturgy is not about God, the reverence due Him alone or about God acting through the given Liturgy of the Church, no matter which valid rite, to save our souls from the eternal fires of hell as the Fatima Prayer makes so explicit. Lay Catholic narcissists (not all Catholics, btw) provide the Church with laymen who will become priests! Let's start with the narcissism on the parish level and see what it has done to the Catholic Church since Vatican II, please!
The fake news:
And now for Rita Ferrone of Praytell and Commonweal and her fake news. I will only print the comments of others and Rita and not my own and let you draw your own conclusions. You can read the actual article printed by Praytell here (which I think was revised when Rita's fake news was called out by the first commenter below):
Matthew Hazell says:
The secretary for the Congregation for Divine Worship,
Archbishop Arthur Roche, in an official comment released with the text,
wrote that the new wording of Canon 838.3 (the canon concerning the role
of bishops’ conferences) “clarifies that the translations must be
completed fideliter according to the original texts, thus acknowledging the principal preoccupation of the Instruction Liturgiam authenticam.” But this gives Liturgiam authenticam
too much credit; it never uses the word “faithfully” (fideliter), not
even once, in all its one hundred and thirty-three paragraphs. It is
from Comme le prévoit.
This quote from your Commonweal article is flat out wrong, as the most basic Ctrl+F text search of the Latin text of LA would have shown you, had you bothered to do one:
Ut tantum patrimonium tantaeque divitiae serventur et per saecula transmittantur, ad principium in primis attendatur versionem textuum liturgicorum Liturgiae romanae opus esse non tam artificii quam potius textus primigenios in linguam popularem fideliter et accurate reddendi. (LA 20; see also 21, 31b, 42, 73, 80)
(English: “In order that such a rich patrimony may be preserved and passed on through the centuries, it is to be kept in mind from the beginning that the translation of the liturgical texts of the Roman Liturgy is not so much a work of creative innovation as it is of rendering the original texts faithfully and accurately into the vernacular language.”)
This quote from your Commonweal article is flat out wrong, as the most basic Ctrl+F text search of the Latin text of LA would have shown you, had you bothered to do one:
Ut tantum patrimonium tantaeque divitiae serventur et per saecula transmittantur, ad principium in primis attendatur versionem textuum liturgicorum Liturgiae romanae opus esse non tam artificii quam potius textus primigenios in linguam popularem fideliter et accurate reddendi. (LA 20; see also 21, 31b, 42, 73, 80)
(English: “In order that such a rich patrimony may be preserved and passed on through the centuries, it is to be kept in mind from the beginning that the translation of the liturgical texts of the Roman Liturgy is not so much a work of creative innovation as it is of rendering the original texts faithfully and accurately into the vernacular language.”)
Matthew, I can’t really mistake your tone here: “flat out wrong”
shows you are pretty angry. Sorry it strikes you that way. I really am.
Because LA was written in English and then translated into Latin, no,
it didn’t occur to me that what did not appear in English would occur in
the Latin, so I did not do a search for the Latin text. Thanks for
pointing this out. That reference may indeed be what Archbishop Roche
was thinking about. Still, I think he gives LA too much credit. LA’s
preoccupation is with exactitude and accuracy. CLP’s is with fidelity in
the broader sense that Francis uses.
Rita: But “faithfully” appears in both the Latin and English of LA, as I quoted above! (The English translation is straight from the Vatican website.)
I’m not particularly angry, just disappointed that it didn’t occur to you (or any of the editorial team at Commonweal for that matter) to check whether the claim that underpins half of your article’s argument was in any way accurate. Even more so because in this instance such a check would have been so easy to do! One could perhaps infer from all this that a particular faction’s animus towards LA, and insistence on reading the Pope’s recent motu proprio through the lens of this animus, has gotten the better of everyone concerned.
I’m not particularly angry, just disappointed that it didn’t occur to you (or any of the editorial team at Commonweal for that matter) to check whether the claim that underpins half of your article’s argument was in any way accurate. Even more so because in this instance such a check would have been so easy to do! One could perhaps infer from all this that a particular faction’s animus towards LA, and insistence on reading the Pope’s recent motu proprio through the lens of this animus, has gotten the better of everyone concerned.
Thanks so much for your help, Matthew. I do appreciate it. I’ve
updated the line in the original article, so as not to sow further
confusion or distract from the point I was trying to make.
What Christopher says is quite correct: the question of what constitutes a “faithful” translation is precisely the preoccupation of CLP. LA is far more concerned with producing an exact rendering of Latin into English. That’s the point.
By making the claims of CLP his own, and raising them, as Jim noted, to a higher level, Francis has enlarged beyond LA how we must understand what “fidelity” means: it is more than word for word accuracy. It must take into account pastoral values, and protect the integrity of the receptor language.
What Christopher says is quite correct: the question of what constitutes a “faithful” translation is precisely the preoccupation of CLP. LA is far more concerned with producing an exact rendering of Latin into English. That’s the point.
By making the claims of CLP his own, and raising them, as Jim noted, to a higher level, Francis has enlarged beyond LA how we must understand what “fidelity” means: it is more than word for word accuracy. It must take into account pastoral values, and protect the integrity of the receptor language.
