Amen to That!
by Andrew Rabel
This month of December marks the 40th anniversary of the conciliar document, Sacrosanctum Concilium. It was the first of the 16 documents of Vatican II to be promulgated, on the question of the Sacred Liturgy.
The issue of the liturgical reform has been one of the most contentious inside the Catholic Church since the close of the Council.
Prior to 1970, the Mass was celebrated in Latin almost everywhere; today, it is the vernacular tongue that predominates.
There have been several translations of the standard Roman Missal into English, but many have criticized these as not being an accurate rendering of the Latin and, more importantly, not clearly supporting traditional Catholic doctrine.
Cardinal Francis Arinze, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Liturgy and the Sacraments, drew attention to a number of these issues involving translation, in an address that he gave to the Federation of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions, at the Omni San Antonio Hotel, Texas in the USA in October.
"Liturgical translations into the mother tongue pose the demanding challenge of producing translations which are faithful to the Latin original, which are excellent literary productions, which can be set to music, which will stand the test of time and which will nourish the piety and spiritual sensitivity of the people," Arinze said. "Dangers and abuses arise from ex-tempore translations, hurried works and illegitimate translations not approved by the Conference of Bishops and ratified by the Apostolic See."
Participants expressed similar concerns about abuses at a meeting in Rome October 23 of the officials of the International Commission for English in the Liturgy (ICEL), the Congregation for the Liturgy, the Vox Clara committee (set up by the Holy See to supervise new English translations), and the presidents of the majority of English speaking bishops' conferences.
The new benchmark for liturgical translations was the release in 2001 by the Congregation for Divine Worship (CDW) of Liturgiam Authenticam.
That document stressed that translation of the Latin liturgy into the vernacular tongue should be as accurate as possible, and mandated new translations. Cardinal Jorge Medina-Estevez, who was appointed the prefect of the Congregation in June 1996, had struck the lightning rod.
In 1998, the Holy Father in his apostolic letter Vicesimus Quintus Annos, asked for a review of the "mixed commission" involved in translation.
The following year, Medina-Estevez expressed dissatisfaction with the previous work of ICEL, particularly that it went beyond its mandate of mere translation, and was actually involved in compiling new texts. (It had produced "original texts" for responsorial psalms and other prayers used for the Mass, for instance.)
In the early 1990s, ICEL was involved in a translation of the Psalter to be used for the Liturgy of the Hours. This version, incorporating inclusive language, was published in 1994 — after the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) had disapproved use of both the New Revised Standard Version and New American Bible Psalms for use at Mass.
The ICEL Psalter was forbidden to be used for liturgy and ordered removed by the CDF, the dicastery that oversees Scripture translations.
ICEL's Ordination Rite was rejected by the CDW in 1997.
Because of these problems, Medina-Estevez requested new statutes for ICEL. These were approved on September 15 (just before the meeting in Rome) and confined ICEL's work to translation of the normative Latin texts of the Missal into English.
Some bishops in the English-speaking world expressed criticism over these developments, saying Rome was trying to take control of the translations away from them.
But it seems that, on the other side, there was reason for the Vatican's concern.
Monsignor Peter Elliott, a sacramental theologian from Melbourne, Australia who worked for 10 years in the Holy See, is the author of a number of books on the liturgy including Ceremonies of the Modern Roman Rite and Ceremonies of the Liturgical Year. "The work of ICEL in the past has been open to criticism because of the principle they followed known as 'dynamic equivalence'," Elliott told Inside the Vatican. "I have been following this problem for some years, and I am delighted at the great change that is happening, that is, the move away from dynamic equivalence. Unfortunately, those words concealed mistranslations, and indeed some translations that are simply untrue.
"One could go through the Missal and check all references to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and find mistranslations that in fact deny or water down Catholic doctrine," he said. "So too, the word 'grace' in the proper prayers virtually vanishes. At times it is replaced by 'love,' which is completely inaccurate in terms of doctrine. I am pleased dynamic equivalence is going out, and that we will receive accurate translations."
The criticisms of some of the bishops and ICEL leadership following some of the interventions of Medina-Estevez, was that this was an abandonment of translation principles devised by a task group of the Consilium (the group which worked on the implementation of the liturgical reform after the Council). Critics said these principles were agreed to at the close of the Council and placed in the 1969 instruction on translations of the Missal, Comme Le Prevoit. Did "dynamic equivalence" come from this document?
"I think Comme Le Prevoit was used as the excuse to justify dynamic equivalence, and unfortunately it was taken much too far," Elliott said. "We lost the richness of the Collects, we lost hieratic language, we lost many poetic expressions — the obvious one is the banal from 'east to west' in the 3rd Eucharistic Prayer, whereas the Latin, from the Book of Malachi (1:11) refers to the sacrifice 'from the rising of the sun, unto its setting.' There are many other examples where there has been an amazing failure to maintain quality language, as well as clear Catholic doctrine."
Dr. Anna Silvas, an expert on patristics and ancient languages at the University of New England in New South Wales, in a recent address to the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars in Australia took up this point. "ICEL seems to have acted as if had a mandate to desacralize the text," she said. "To systematically distinguish or extinguish the holy in the liturgy is effectively to plan for the ruin of the Church, in my opinion. Irrefutable evidence that this was done is that whenever the text addresses God as Pater Sancte, i.e., 'Holy Father' the word 'holy' is consistently deleted — four times in all. What makes this deletion particularly disconcerting is that the phrase 'Holy Father' has the supreme warrant of being Our Lord's own address to His Father (Jn 17:11). ICEL appears to have engaged in correcting our Lord Jesus Christ!"
Father Bruce Harbert, a priest of Birmingham, England, who expressed similar concerns about the English translation of the Missal, was appointed General Secretary of ICEL last year. Bishop Arthur Roche, Co-Adjutor Bishop of Leeds, England, is the current President of ICEL'S Board of Bishops.
Most who have been following this controversy are of the opinion that, the new leadership of ICEL is more reflective of the attitudes of the Holy See. Thus, there should be fewer obstacles to a new translation of the Roman Missal in English.
Bishop Roche, quoted in The Tablet says, "The show is back on the road," and praises the new leadership style of Cardinal Arinze, who was appointed to succeed Medina-Estevez by the Holy Father a year ago.
Helen Hull Hitchcock, editor of the Adoremus Bulletin, a liturgical journal published in the US, said it is significant that the Nigerian cardinal is someone who comes from the Anglophone world. This gives him a particularly strong interest in securing authentic liturgical texts for English-speaking Catholics, even though Nigeria, interestingly, is not a full member of ICEL and has not yet been involved in their composition. According to Bishop Roche, Arinze is a "man of dialogue," no doubt a skill acquired from his many years of building bridges with other faiths as head of the Vatican's interreligious dialogue dicastery.
Some of the critics of the Vatican's new approach to these matters also had concerns over the creation of Vox Clara (a committee with international membership appointed by the CDW to help facilitate English-language translation), saying it was placing another layer between the bishops' conferences and the Holy See. Cardinal George Pell, the chairman of the Vox Clara committee, quoted in the same article from The Tablet, said it was "simply a committee of advice to the Congregation for the Sacraments and no more than that."
He also confidently predicts there will be a new English translation of the Roman Missal within two years.
So what might be a distinguishing feature of the new translations? "I believe that our translations, while retaining dignity and quality, must at the same time reflect the English of our times," Elliott says. "Therefore, I would not favor sliding back to old English or heavy archaisms, beautiful as these may be. There is also a strong case for accurate language, in terms of giving the people what the liturgy of the Church really says and teaches, because as we pray, so we believe. And I think in the English-speaking world much of the sloppy doctrine has been supported by the wishy washy and inaccurate translations people hear every Sunday. This also flows through to the clergy, who have had to use these unfortunate versions of a vernacular translation of the Roman Rite. This has also been fuel for attacks on the modern Roman Rite by the Lefebvrists, and you'll notice that many of their attacks are aimed at the vernacular translations. Unfortunately, I believe the old ICEL texts, as we can now call them, have helped recruit for that cause."
The last word on the subject, for the time being, belongs to Dr. Silvas. She says, "What if this was truly the 'Catholic Moment' with regard to the English language. What if the Church, by actively revisiting her own deep tradition, may have a providential role to play in service of English speakers by providing some kind of ballast of sanity and a sense of the sacred and of the objective, transcendent truth? It is crucial that Church authorities and their collaborators take great care as they revisit the whole issue of English in the liturgy, which, praise God, at last seems to be happening, after a decades-long disaster!"
Amen to that.
Andrew Rabel lives in Australia.
© 2003 Robert Moynihan
This item 6006 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
