Catholic World News News Feature

Former ICEL official faults new Mass translation April 29, 2004

Speaking on an Australian radio program, the former executive secretary of the International Committee for English in the Liturgy (ICEL) sharply criticized new procedures for liturgical translations, charging that the Vatican has endorsed "a more secretive process and definitely a process that seems to be less open to the wider Church."

In an interview for the "Religion Report," broadcast by the Australian ABC network, John Page complained that a new translation of the Mass is the result of a closed process, in which "the bishops are the only participants in the conversation." He said that ICEL, during his years there, had tried "to bring the wider Church into the conversation."

John Page resigned from his post at ICEL in 2002, after the Vatican revised procedures for liturgical translations into English, in response to widespread protests about the texts produced under ICEL's guidance.

In the Australian broadcast report, host Stephen Crittenden took a critical approach to a new translation of the Mass, saying that the revised language suggested a return to the theological and liturgical trends that had governed the Church prior to the Second Vatican Council. In response to a question from Crittenden, John Page said that the language of the new translation "is a form of English, but it's not a form of English that's living."