The International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) proposes the following translated text:
Accept, O Lord, these gifts,
and by your power change them
into the sacrament of salvation,
in which the prefiguring sacrifices of the Fathers have an end
and the true Lamb is offered,
he who was born ineffably of the inviolate Virgin.
—Prayer over the gifts,
Season of Advent
Can We Participate?
The above citation is a proclaimed prayer. What will the person in the pew hear and comprehend? Will the words “prefiguring sacrifices of the Fathers” and “born ineffably of the inviolate Virgin,” for example, resonate with John and Mary Catholic? Is this prayer intelligible, proclaimable, reflective of a vocabulary and linguistic style from the contemporary mainstream of U.S. Catholics? Is the liturgical language accessible to the average Catholic and our youth? Does this translated text lead to full, conscious and active participation? I think not.
This prayer is not an isolated example. While the latest ICEL translations for the proper of the saints and the commons are improved, we still encounter the following: “O God, who suffused blessed John with the spirit of mercy” (Collect for March 8) and “Cyril, an unvanquished champion of the divine motherhood” (Collect for June 27) and odd expressions like “What you have charged us to believe will taste sweet to the heart” (Collect for April 21). Does the heart “taste?”
The Right Language
All liturgy is pastoral. If translated texts are to be the authentic prayer of the people, they must be owned by the people and expressed in the contemporary language of their culture. To what extent are the new prayers of the Missal truly pastoral? Do these new texts communicate in the living language of the worshiping assembly? How will John and Mary Catholic relate to the new words of the Creed: “consubstantial to the Father” and “incarnate of the Virgin Mary”? Will they understand these words from the various new Collects: “sullied,” “unfeigned,” “ineffable,” “gibbet,” “wrought,” “thwart”? Will the assembly understand the fourth paragraph of the Blessing of Baptismal Water, which has 56 words (in 11 lines) in one sentence? In the preface of the chrism Mass, one sentence runs on for 10 lines. How pastoral are the new collects, when they all consist of a single sentence, containing a jumble of subordinate clauses and commas?
Will the priest and people understand the words of Eucharistic Prayer 2: “Make holy these gifts, we pray, by the dew of your Spirit”? This translation was among the top 10 texts that the U.S. bishops in their consultation considered most problematic, but still ICEL did not change it.
In the new missal you will hear awkward phrases like “We pray you bid.” This is not American English. Ponder these concrete examples and judge for yourself.
What happened to the liturgical principles of the “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy”? The council fathers of Vatican II stated: “Texts and rites should be drawn up so that they express more clearly the holy things which they signify; the Christian people, as far as possible, should be able to understand them with ease and to take part in them fully, actively and as it befits a community” (No. 21). Note the words “with ease.” This is the norm, the expressed wish in the constitution. This is a prerequisite that calls not just for the accuracy of translated texts but for the easy understanding of those texts.
The council fathers of Vatican II had a pastoral sense and focused on John and Mary Catholic. Why have the new translations become so problematic, so non-pastoral? What is the basic difficulty?
Consult and Communicate!
The drafting of principles and norms of translation for vernacular languages should have involved the broadest consultation of episcopal conferences as well as liturgical and biblical scholars. But the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments in 2001 issued a 36-page instruction on liturgical translation without collegial or collaborative effort. The cardinal and bishop members of the congregation were not consulted by mail or in a plenary session. The Pontifical Biblical Commission was not formally consulted. The episcopal conferences were not consulted.
When the instruction Liturgiam Authenticam (On the Use of Vernacular Languages in the Publication of the Books of the Roman Liturgy) was issued in 2001, the executive board of the Catholic Biblical Association stated that the document “contains provisions detrimental to solid biblical scholarship…and advocates policies that make it difficult to produce good vernacular translations.” Those were prophetic words that have now been verified. Did anyone listen?
Liturgiam Authenticam rightly stresses fidelity and exactness in rendering liturgical and biblical texts into the vernacular. For the authors of Liturgiam Authenticam, however, that means “as literal as possible.” That was not the mind of St. Jerome, the greatest Doctor of the Sacred Scriptures. Jerome was a precise translator but not a literalist. He himself said, “If I translate word by word, it sounds absurd.”
Liturgical translations must communicate. If liturgical language is divorced from the reality of culture, communication is impossible.
What is missing in the present moment, unfortunately, is the voice of liturgical scholars and the voice of the laity, the assembly. I was dismayed when I recently learned that our liturgists—professionals with degrees and experience, teaching at our academic institutions—did not have access to the work of ICEL. No wonder there has been such limited public scrutiny of these translated texts. Some bishops have consulted individual liturgical experts, but the learned societies of liturgists have been excluded. It would be pastorally prudent and so beneficial to translated texts destined for the worshiping assembly if the laity were involved in the preliminary process for judging the ICEL texts. The proposed translated liturgical prayers, for example, could be proclaimed to lay groups to elicit their initial reactions: What did they hear; what did they understand; did these texts lift their minds and hearts to God? Such input would be helpful to translators in perfecting the proclaimability of texts.
If the language of the liturgy is inaccessible, how can liturgy catechize and convey the reality of the living, risen Son of God in the Eucharist? If the language of the liturgy is a stumbling block to intelligibility and proclaimability, then the principle lex orandi, lex credendi is severely compromised. If the language of the liturgy does not communicate, how can people fall in love with the greatest gift of God, the Eucharist?
Church of God, judge for yourselves. Speak up, speak up!
If so, for my part, I hope that the ICEL contains some Latinists accomplished enough to realize that in the Nicene Creed, the phrase "et propter nos homines et propter nostram salutem" should not be translated, as it all too commonly is, "for us men and for our salvation," but simply "for us and our salvation." A real Latinist (which I am obviously not) might point out that "for us men" would be a translation of "propter nos viros." I think I've got the grammar right, though it's been some years since I tangled with the language. It's been even longer since I tangled with the Greek, but there too, the word used in the Creed is "anthrópos" -- human being -- and not "andros," -- man.
Bishop Trautman urges us to speak up against the infelicities (absurdities?) which he finds so common in the new ICEL translations. But to whom do we speak? And, more important, among those to whom we might speak, are there any who will do us the courtesy of listening?
Jean Christiansen Sun City West,AZ
It seems far too late in the game for the "Church of God" to offer a constructive judgment. And how -- or to whom -- are any of us -- lay and clergy alike -- supposed to "speak up"?
The most cynical or despairing might suggest that God's people are already beginning to "speak up" to the too-often sorry state of Lord's Day worship. Maybe they are speaking up by walking out, or not showing up at all.
And convoluted, indecipherable language will only exacerbate that unfortunate trend.
The difficulty arises in part from the prayer’s allusions to two doctrines that were better understood in patristic times than today. Not only its language, but also its thinking, is remote from what Bishop Trautman calls ‘the contemporary mainstream of U.S. Catholics’.
The first doctrine is that the sacrifices of the Old Testament prefigured and were brought to an end by the sacrifice of Christ. The Church’s redefinition of her attitude to Judaism at Vatican II has made Catholics hesitant to speak of the New Testament as superseding the Old, but without some notion of the bond between the Testaments it would make no sense to read the Hebrew scriptures at the Christian liturgy at all. The translators have found no word better for expressing the concept in question than the traditional one, ‘prefiguring’.
The second is the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Our Lady, which means not only that she abstained from intercourse, but that she remained physically intact as she gave birth. How this happened is a mystery. Some of the Fathers said that Christ passed from her body ‘like a light through glass’. Our text uses the word ineffabiliter. ‘Unspeakably’ does not seem to be a good translation. Nor do ‘inexplicably’ ,‘indescribably’ ‘inconceivably’ or ‘incomprehensibly’, all words whose connotations would not fit the context. So the translators chose, here and elsewhere, to press into service an English word that, though rare, is not difficult to explain: ‘ineffably’.
‘Inviolate’ is aurally ambiguous, since it can be heard as ‘in violet’. The translators wished to avoid it, and looked around for an alternative term to use in this sensitive area of discourse. They felt that many would find ‘intact’ too directly physical or medical. Other terms that were proposed could be heard as indelicate. In the end, ‘inviolate’ was the best they could do.
Though the theology of this prayer is ancient, its text is not. It was not even in the Missals of 1970 or 1975, but first appeared in the 2002 Edition. It may have been written as late as 1987. Translators find recently composed prayers among the most difficult of all because, in eagerness to hand on the Church’s tradition or to incorporate the insights of Vatican II, modern authors sometimes cram too many ideas into too small a space. But their compositions are in the Missal and they must be translated.
Bishop Trautman ends with a call that ICEL can readily echo: ‘Speak up!’. Anybody who can offer a better version of this difficult text is most welcome to send it to the ICEL Secretariat for consideration by the Bishops of the Commission when they meet in July. It is healthy for critics of any translation to ask themselves not only ‘Do I like this version?’ but also ‘Can I do better?’.
It is tragic that his voice has not been heard, by the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments. It is even sadder that they have not consulted with those who could have given good advice.
When Bishop Trautman tells the church of God to speak up, he is right to do so. But if they will not listen to him, whom will they listen to? As a priest who is charged with conducting the liturgy, and ensuring participation of the people, I would be tempted to retranslate the words. But that is also forbidden, and I am sure a punishable offence.
As bishop Trautman states so clearly, "If the language of the Liturgy does not communicate, how can people fall in love with the greatest gift of God, the Eucharist?" It is not only the people who want to be there who will be compromised, but it is also those they struggle to bring - their children, who will have logic behind them when they say, "It's boring!"
Long ago I learned that Latin is "a dead language." And so is a literal translation of it. When Jesus spoke to the people of his day, he used the language and the imagery that people could understand. He never claimed to be "consubstantial" with the Father.
If this translation is finally approved, perhaps Pope Benedict will be kind enough to allow us to continue the celebrate the Eucharist using the Missal of Pope Paul VI, since he seems willing to allow others to continue to celebrate the Mass in Latin. What a circus this is!
The People ARE THE CHURCH!