As the bishops gather in Baltimore this week, an important topic of discussion will be the new mass translation.
Ann Rodgers of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette takes a look:
Bishop Donald Trautman of Erie has led the charge against what he sees as a “slavish” rendering of Latin into convoluted, ungrammatical English.“American Catholics have every right to expect a translation of the new missal to follow the rules for English grammar. But this violates English syntax in the most egregious way,” he said.
The bishops didn’t write it. Rome requires one international committee to translate for each major language, and this text is intended to serve nations as diverse as Ireland and Pakistan. The bishops can propose amendments, but Vatican officials have final say over the text.
In 2001, the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments published Liturgiam Authenticam, new rules for translation. It stressed faithfulness to fourth-century Latin texts that were translations from Greek, Hebrew and other languages. It encouraged a special vocabulary for prayer that differed from everyday speech.
“Thus it may happen that a certain manner of speech which has come to be considered somewhat obsolete in daily usage may continue to be maintained in the liturgical context,” it said.
Bishop Trautman, a biblical scholar and a past president of the bishops’ committees on doctrine and liturgy, has been the most vocal critic of the resulting translations. The bishops have already approved most of the new Mass. The last few parts — mostly prayers for saints days — are now up for a vote.
Bishop Trautman’s objections aren’t to the most recent changes but to the tone of the entire translation. He wants the bishops to reject at least one set of translations this week, then send a high-level delegation to Rome to work out revisions throughout the Mass.
“This is our last chance to raise these issues and talk about them. But the parliamentary laws probably won’t allow us to get at the heart of the issue [in Baltimore], because we can only discuss and debate the four items before us,” he said.
In a recent lecture at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., he cited examples of mangled English.
A Lenten prayer says, “May we bring before you as the fruit of bodily penance a cheerful purity of mind.”
A current Easter prayer says, “Almighty and eternal God, for the glory of your name fulfill the promise you made long ago to men and women of faith, to bless them with descendents forever. Increase your adopted children throughout the world, that your Church may see accomplished the salvation which those saints of old so firmly expected.”
The new version is, “Almighty everlasting God, for the honor of your name, surpass what you pledged to the faith of the Patriarchs, and by sacred adoption increase the children of promise so that your Church may now see abundantly fulfilled what the holy ones of old never doubted would come to pass.”
“If you just read them silently, it isn’t so bad. But, if you read it out loud, it’s hard to understand,” Bishop Trautman said.
He already has lost arguments against changing the Nicene Creed’s declaration that Jesus is “of one being with the Father” into “consubstantial with the Father.” His focus now is on an issue that any parochial school student should understand: poor grammar and syntax.
You can read more examples of that “poor grammar and syntax”
here.
And the USCCB link with the new mass translation is right here.
posted November 16, 2009 at 9:35 am
The bishop here is exactly right. Change is not synonymous with improvement. Anyone who has studied Latin beyond Caesar knows you can’t import Latin syntax into English. A dreadful mess done for a series of ideological reasons (inoculation from inclusive language, maybe?) that will damage our worship for decades to come.
posted November 16, 2009 at 9:53 am
It’s no coincidence that the “priest parts” of the Roman Missal are surfacing a few last protests.
Bishop Trautman is about five years late on this one, I’m afraid to say. American Catholics (not to mention those in Canada, Britain, and Australia) are a lot more uppity than South Africans. He and others know a firestorm is ahead, and much of it will be from their brother priests.
The worst of this situation is that it has the potential to fracture unity within parishes. One can reasonably say that despite a lack of uniformity in music, preaching, and the rest, the vernacular liturgy has maintained a unity of sorts for Catholics. After implementation, barring some unbelievably better Mass settings than we currently have, and some amazing pastoral smooth-overs at daily Mass, we have a potential three-way split. We’ll have people loud and proud on the new words, others uttering the old responses and not bothering to pick up the books, and we’ll perhaps see a larger portion than before folding their arms and keeping silent.
A much wiser course would have been to keep the Ordo Missae intact for the time being, and implement the Eucharistic Prayers and other clergy orations, possibly in a limited way. Assess the reception from priests and laity and move from there. Commission musical settings of new Ordo Missae texts, chant and other genres, and assess those too.
Not only are a lot of liturgy-minded people not going to like this, but they will share space with those who just don’t like the bishops these days. This was possibly the worst time (except 2002) for the USCCB to be implementing this. If Bishop Trautman can convince any of his confreres of this, he has a prayer.
posted November 16, 2009 at 11:49 am
“Anyone who has studied Latin beyond Caesar knows you can’t import Latin syntax into English”
This is very true. However, being fluent in both English and Spanish I have noticed that some prayers, as currently translated, have rather different meanings in the English and the Spanish versions. The new translation is very close in meaning to the Spanish translation which, being a romance language, I presume is closer to the original Latin.
posted November 16, 2009 at 2:49 pm
That’s the solution for sure!
Threaten schism if it helps me get my way!!!
(By the way, I only have a high school diploma and the new translations arent the least bit difficult to understand. Are certain bishops and liturgists intellectually defective, or do they just assume the schmoes who fill the coffers and fund their salaries are?)
posted November 16, 2009 at 3:50 pm
…and we’ll perhaps see a larger portion than before folding their arms and keeping silent.
Anyone who has ever tried to change their parish from one sung mass part to a different one will vote for the prediction of silence. We change one setting about every two years (18 months ago we changed settings of the Alleluia. Seven years ago, we changed Eucharistic Prayer Acclamations and a new Lamb of God. Nine years ago, a new Gloria.) The change seven years ago was enormous enough that it took a good six months before our people started singing again. And this is basically a change in notes only — the words are the same!
Our diocese requests that parishes at least cycle through a designated diocesan set of sung mass responses so that when we have diocesan masses the people are at least familiar with a particular repertoire. We never would have chosen to change Eucharistic Prayer acclamations AND Lamb of God at once, but we got a new bishop…
We are, after all, only a generation away from Catholics who figured out how to pray during mass no matter how un-edifying. Pray your rosary, or out of your prayer book, and ignore the Twelve Minutes Of Uninflected Noise And Your Obligation Is Fulfilled For The Week that was going on in front of that back that you were ignoring. Given modern marvels (download some edifying podcast into your iPod, and plug in your headphones when you get to church) and you don’t have to care what anybody else is doing.
posted November 16, 2009 at 5:37 pm
These examples are not bad. Looking at the mass texts on the USCCB website, there are some areas that could have been made more “proclaimable” but in general these texts are superior to the current ones. Maybe if the focus was more on tweaking the proposed texts instead of altering the principle behind them, I could be more supportive of Bishop Trautman’s view (who by the way is an excellent bishop overall).
posted November 17, 2009 at 2:16 am
I can’t get the “You can read more examples of that “poor grammar and syntax” here.” link to work. I had no problem with the quote Deacon included, but then until I was 14 I was worshiping in an Episcopal church and this kind of language was the norm in the 1950/60s.
From what little I’ve heard of the Spanish translation in current use it has seemed to be more faithful to the Latin than what we’ve had in English in the US, if indeed the new English texts posted on USCCB are closer to the Latin.
posted November 17, 2009 at 5:24 am
I fixed the link, Mary Louise, and added a link to the USCCB new mass translation website.
Dcn. G.
posted November 17, 2009 at 1:53 pm
I am sorry for you Deacon and Bishop Trautman. I pray for you, both. You have lost a perception that many of the priest and people over fifty have come to realize. The first is that the number of priest has decreased directly with the year that change the Mass to English. Secondly, A Vacitian survey has shown that the Bishops in last twenty years have become more materialistic, than spiritual. How is changing wording of the Mass more going to make the people , priest, Bishops more spiritual. The previous changes have proven that is not the case. PRAY for them dear Lord for they know not what they DO.
posted November 17, 2009 at 8:11 pm
“We are, after all, only a generation away from Catholics who figured out how to pray during mass no matter how un-edifying. Pray your rosary, or out of your prayer book, and ignore the Twelve Minutes Of Uninflected Noise And Your Obligation Is Fulfilled For The Week that was going on in front of that back that you were ignoring. Given modern marvels (download some edifying podcast into your iPod, and plug in your headphones when you get to church) and you don’t have to care what anybody else is doing.”
So your parents sucked at practicing the faith. Why should we pay the price?
posted November 18, 2009 at 12:27 am
So your parents sucked at practicing the faith. Why should we pay the price?
Actually, my parents paid the price of a church that sucked at practicing the faith. And beginning in 2 years, they’ll get to start paying some more.
(Well, to be fair the priest that said mass in 8 minutes flat and then stood silently staring at his watch for 5 more minutes because he had been instructed that mass must be at least 13 minutes long amused my mother as well as that other kids. The people who paid the price were my grandparents, who had trouble getting to church perfectly on time and 8 — or even 13 — minutes doesn’t leave a lot of slack.
As for my other parent, my dad spent 8th grade in a parish where they spent a lot of time teaching the parishoners to understand Latin well enough that they could follow the mass (and actually said the mass with spaces between words and at the ends of sentences, with proper pronunciation and inflection.) He had moved away, though, by the time somebody reported that parish to the chancery and they were forced to put a stop to it. So it’s debatable whether he “paid the price.”)
This has been a very long war between those who advocate the congregation perceiving the mass as prayer, and those scandalized by the thought that the congregation might pray incorrectly. In the 40s and 50s the battle lines were drawn at dialogue masses and congregational singing…
(At the University of Chicago in the 50s, virtually all of the Catholic students had a pretty strong mastery of Latin, and so the entire congregation would say — and understand — the altar boys’ responses. Until their chaplains were ordered by the bishop to stop it.)