In Koch’s view, the readmission of the celebration of Mass in the preconciliar form is “only the first step,” but “the time is not yet ripe” for further steps. Rome can take further actions only when there is readiness among Catholics to consider new forms of liturgy “in service of the Church.”

According to Koch, “the pope suffers from accusations” that he wishes to go back on the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). On the contrary, the pope wishes to take up statements of the Council on liturgy which have not yet been implemented.

Koch maintains that not everything in today’s liturgical praxis can be justified by the texts of the Council. He named as an example the priest facing the people during the celebration of the Eucharist, about which the Council said  nothing.

In Koch’s opinion, further development of liturgical forms is necessary for an inner renewal of the church. “If the crisis of church life today is above all a crisis of liturgy, then the renewal of the church must begin with a renewal of the liturgy,” he said.

The cardinal’s remarks provoke several reflections.

It is not the case that the Second Vatican Council exhaustively defined the parameters of liturgical reform. Much of this was left to the Consilium to carry out after the Council closed. The Council never mandated versus populum (priest facing the people), nor has any Church document since the Council, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the practice an illegitimate development. Scholars such as Fr. John O’Malley have demonstrated that there is a “spirit of Vatican II” opening up new vistas for the Church. It is to be expected that responsible and creative implementation of the Council would lead to possibilities not yet foreseen at the Council itself. Whether versus populum is one of these can remain an open question. Which is to say, the fact that it isn’t mentioned by the Council doesn’t really answer the question.

I suppose it’s inevitable that any interpretation of Vatican II will emphasize some passages more than others. Ratzinger and Koch and others can point to a few statements of the liturgy constitution (Gregorian chant is to have pride of place, Latin is to be retained) to buttress the claim that they wish to implement the Council’s statement that have been ignored up until now. Fair enough – but specific directives of the Council have to be ever reevaluated in within the broader context of ongoing liturgical development. Within this context, it is difficult indeed to see how the Council fathers ever intended that an unreformed rite of Mass would remain in use alongside a reformed rite. And there is no denying that Liturgiam authenticam, the 2001 Roman document on translation, introduced centralism and thereby undoes the explicit directive of the liturgy constitution that translations are to be prepared and approved by bishops (not Rome).

Finally, I would be very interested in the cardinal’s thoughts on liturgy and ecumenism, not least because he is the head of the Holy See’s ecumenism department. How does he understand his liturgical proposals to contribute to the work for church unity? Some theologians believe that Roman decisions in recent years have been a setback for the cause. What would Cardinal Koch say?

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He claims that “language is a piece of social technology for enhancing the benefits of co-operation.” At the same time that the total number of languages in use globally is falling rapidly (it is now something between 7,000 and 8,000), some groups, e.g. on Pacific islands, are creating new languages every day, with significant language variation appearing every kilometer or so. Papua New Guinea, for example, has somewhere between 800 and 1,000 distinct and mutually incomprehensible languages.

Pagel sees language as a means of strengthening group identity. “We use language not just to co-operate but to draw rings around our co-operating groups.”

“This seemingly natural tendency we have toward isolation, towards keeping to ourselves, crashes head-first into our modern world,” he says. He cites the EU as an example; it spends over €1 billion (about 1.3 billion U.S. dollars) annually on translation costs alone. And he concludes:

If language really is the conduit of our co-operation, can we afford to have all these different languages? … In a world in which we want to promote cooperation and exchange, and in a world that might be dependent more than ever before on cooperation to maintain and enhance our levels of prosperity … it might be inevitable that we have to confront the idea that our destiny is to be one world with one language.”

The quotes above are drawn from a talk that Pagel gave at a conference in July of this year; you can watch the video here.

I’m sure that others can contribute sources on language and identity, but I have enjoyed The State of the Language by Christopher Ricks and Leonard Michaels, published first in 1980 and again in 1989 by the University of California Press, with different essays in the second edition. The 1980 edition features a blistering attack on the language of the revised Episcopalian Prayer Book, and the same author, Margaret Doody, returns in 1989 with an essay on the folly of revising classic hymns for inclusive language. Both editions seem to be readable online through Google Books.

The discussion of language and identity naturally led me to think about the new translation. Some praise it because it will ‘strengthen our Catholic identity’; several blog posters have commented that it ‘sounds more Catholic’ than the 1973 translation. This idea of a distinctively Catholic liturgical language seems to have been mooted in Liturgiam authenticam:

§27   … it will be seen that the observance of the principles set forth in this Instruction will contribute to the gradual development, in each vernacular, of a sacred style that will come to be recognized as proper to liturgical language. 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.

Similar remarks crop up about Latin, once proposed as a universal language, more recently seen as the ‘sacred language’ of a specific group, rather as classical Hebrew is used in Jewish liturgical worship.

One problem with a group-defining language is that it naturally excludes others. Apparently this was not a problem for the authors of LA:

§29   It is the task of the homily and of catechesis to set forth the meaning of the liturgical texts, illuminating with precision the Church’s understanding regarding the members of particular Churches or ecclesial communities separated from full communion with the Catholic Church and those of Jewish communities, as well as adherents of other religions – and likewise, her understanding of the dignity and equality of all men.  Similarly, it is the task of catechists or of the homilist to transmit that right interpretation of the texts that excludes any prejudice or unjust discrimination on the basis of persons, gender, social condition, race or other criteria, which has no foundation at all in the texts of the Sacred Liturgy. Although considerations such as these may sometimes help one in choosing among various translations of a certain expression, they are not to be considered reasons for altering either a biblical text or a liturgical text that has been duly promulgated.

Our group-defining language is here. Like the rosary or holy cards or the Angelus prayer, the new translation now distinguishes us from other Christians: we are the ones who now say ‘consubstantial’ in the Creed, ‘chalice’ in the Eucharistic Prayer and ‘with your spirit’ to the priest. As a writer in Our Sunday Visitor put it,

The [1973] translation, growing out of the changes initiated by Vatican II, was born in a period of great Catholic optimism. In the spirit of the council, at least as it was popularly understood, the Church was more a partner to society than its scold or its antagonist. In this country, the council coincided with the election of John F. Kennedy, and there was a palpable sense that Catholics had arrived in America. No more Latin. No more fish on Friday. Like the theory that had guided the first vernacular translation, there was now a “dynamic equivalence” between Catholics and their fellow Americans. What so many Catholic leaders of the 20th century had worked for was now true: Catholic Americans were seen as the same as all other Americans.

Some of the younger priests I know seem enthusiastic about no longer being seen as the same as others.  They lard their conversation with Latin words – mens instead of mind, creatio instead of creation; and Latinate locutions – ‘apprehend’ rather than ‘understand,’ for example. Their language creates a stronger Catholic identity.

If all this is true then what does this imply for ecumenical work and worship? Some Orthodox friends of mine say that they are forbidden from praying with non-Orthodox. We aren’t barred from praying with Protestants, but in what language should we do so? How, like Paul, can we become ‘all things to all people’ when our language is distinctive?

To put it another way, how can we be truly Catholic, in the sense of ‘universal’?

Jonathan Day is a consultant and writer; he is also a member of the parish council of the Jesuit Church of the Immaculate Conception (Farm Street) in central London.

One problem I see with the current translation is what appears to be an almost unthinking preference for using the nearest English cognate for Latin words. This is a problem not only with out-and-out “false friends” (which for the most part the new translation avoids) but also with the use of English terms that might be accurate in term of their denotation — i.e. their dictionary definition — but can have misleading connotations.

This was brought to my mind this morning as I was grading a student’s final exam in which he began a discussion of the first of Thomas’s Aquinas’s “Five Ways” by noting, “In Aquinas’ first argument, he states that God can be proven through the argument of motus, loosely translated as change or motion.”

When I read this I thought, “Well, ‘change’ might be a loose translation of motus, but ‘motion’ is quite literal.” But as I thought further about the student’s statement, and what I  had tried to convey to them about Aquinas’s argument, it occurred to me that both “motion” and “change” could be described either as “loose” or as “literal.”

As those who have studied Aquinas know, his term motus includes, but has a wider meaning than, the movement of a body through space from point A to point B. It also includes things like wood burning, clay being formed into pottery, minds learning new facts, food being digested, children growing, muscles cramping, people falling in love, etc. In other words, as Aquinas actually uses the term it includes things that we, in English, would not normally describe as “motion” but rather would describe as “change.” In fact, if we were to restrict Aquinas’s argument for God’s existence to motion in the sense of movement through space, certain problems arise with it, so if one is using a translation of Aquinas that translates motus as “motion” . . . well, one has some explaining to do.

The translation of Aquinas’s Summa done (anonymously) by Laurence Shapcote in the 1920s, which is widely available on the internet, translates Aquinas’s certum est enim et sensu constat aliqua moveri in hoc mundo as “It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion.” The “Blackfriars” translation done by Timothy McDermott in the 1960s translates the same sentence as, “Some things in the world are certainly in process of change: this we plainly see.” Which of these is more “literal” and which is more “loose”?

In one sense, McDermott’s translation pays little attention to the Latin word order, to which Shapcote hews more closely, and in that sense might be described as loose. But in terms of the translation of motus, it seems to me that it is Shapcote who is being loose in translating it with the cognate “motion” and McDermott who is being literal in translating it as “change.” For while, as we use these term in contemporary English, all motion involves change, not all change involves motion, and Thomas Aquinas clearly intends something that we would call “change” rather than “motion.” So while the denotation of “motion” might be included in motus, the connotation of such a word choice can be misleading.

Which leads my wandering mind to think that all chalices are cups, but not all cups are chalices, and that all people are clearly many, but many people are not so clearly all.

So my student’s identification of both “motion” and “change” as loose translations of motus seems to me about right. All translations are to some extent loose — even, and perhaps especially, those that at first glance seem “literal.” The idea that the English word that looks the most like the Latin word is clearly the right choice seems clearly mistaken.

In [the previous three parts of this series] we have been thinking together on these pages about translation, its hazards and possibilities.  This is a subject of great importance given the new texts to be read aloud in the Roman Catholic assemblies, some of them anyway, beginning with the Advent season. The discussion of translations here has necessarily been interwoven with the political/ideological story that drove the translation story.

Now we leave translation aside to talk about a much less noticed disaster. In the 2010 missal, the Vox Clara missal, why are there no “alternative” collects?  These original English texts have been an element of our sacramentary since 1973. The responsible bodies in other language groups have also composed and put into use original texts in their post-Vatican II sacramentaries. Original texts in English have become part not only of the sacramentary but of other rituals such as those for pastoral care of the sick and dying.  What became the ICEL project of creating a second generation of these alternative texts, a project carried out in the 1980s and 1990s when ICEL commissioned, tested and evaluated original texts, prayers written to be faithful to the Roman Rite’s way of praying, but written also in with awareness of the seasonal and scriptural context for the assembly’s prayer. Much careful and often inspired work went into composing such prayers in tune with the genius of English, specifically of English to be proclaimed and to be heard.  Why are we now left with no alternatives to the poor-to-mediocre translations of prayers that were all too often already poor to mediocre in their original Latin?

For example.  On the First Sunday of Advent, in each year of the three-year lectionary cycle, the 2010 Vox Clara missal (they’ll have no more of that “sacramentary” talk) will have this prayer, one that we touched on [previously]:

Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God,
the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ
with righteous deeds at his coming,
so that, gathered at his right hand,
they may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ . . .

I’m told that is a fairly accurate translation from the Latin, a text guaranteed to touch neither mind nor heart.  Perhaps that does not matter, but what does matter is that the speaking of the text evoke the assembly’s church-forming Amen. It won’t happen.

Would we like an alternative to that text?  Let’s go back to that wild, rebellious decade, the 1980s. In 1983, ICEL explained a continuing effort to create a body of texts composed in English, a second generation of those “alternative prayers” of the l973 sacramentary.  These newly-composed texts were to relate in subtle ways to the scripture texts of the Sunday. That dictated a separate opening prayer for each year of the three-year lectionary cycle. The authority to explore original English texts came from the Instruction on the Translation of Liturgical Texts issued by the Vatican in 1969.

Texts translated from another language are clearly not sufficient for the celebration of a fully renewed liturgy.  The creation of new texts will be necessary.  But translation of texts transmitted through the tradition of the Church is the best school and discipline for the creation of new texts so “that any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already in existence.”

The ICEL process involved invitations for submission of compositions for certain Sundays, review and revision of texts submitted, then publishing the resulting texts for use in participating parishes over several months. Two booklets of prayers for a limited number of Sundays were published by ICEL, one in 1983 and one in 1986.  I certainly do not know what feedback ICEL received from these experiments with original compositions in various US parishes, but the texts offered might be looked at anew in light of the abandonment of original compositions since Liturgiam Authenticam.  In their language, content, possibilities as spoken and listened to texts, do these prayers clarify or mystify why the Vatican forbid any texts that are not slavish translations of the Latin?

We should note also that some of these prayers, usually in slightly altered form, were included in the sacramentary approved by ICEL and by the American bishops in 1998.  In fact, that document included three original compositions for the collect of each Sunday, each of these designated for Year A, B or C of the three-year cycle.

Other bishops’ conferences of English-speaking countries likewise gave their approval, but when this sacramentary was sent to the Vatican in 1998 for the usual ratification, the ratification never happened.  Instead, ICEL was, in effect, disbanded by the Vatican and reconstituted to do Rome’s bidding.  What that bidding would be became clear in Liturgiam Authenticam. This document, basic to the effort to undo Vatican II, prohibits prayers composed in any vernacular for the liturgy of the church. For the story of Rome’s campaign against ICEL from the pen of one who was there, see Bishop Maurice Taylor’s recent book: It’s the Eucharist: Thank God. (The book is available from Amazon.  The Tablet said: “…this [book] presents the authoritative inside story of how officials in the Roman Curia usurped the right of the bishops’ conferences to oversee the translations of the missal into English, and destroyed the bishops’ translation agency in the form they had given it.” See the review in The Tablet here. )

Although the 1998 sacramentary and its original English compositions were never published in a sacramentary for parish use, the texts for these collects did become available. First in their experimental form in the small booklets of 1983 and 1986, then in their final form in various places where the collects of the 1998 sacramentary were included for study purposes. A book was published in England making many of them available: Opening Prayers:Collects in a Contemporary Language, Scripture Related Prayers for Sundays and Holy Days, Years A, B and C. The book is available from Canterbury Press and from Amazon.

But what of the texts themselves?  How good were they? How substantial?  How attuned to the context of the assembly doing its liturgy?  Do they call forth a presider’s effort to speak them clearly, aware that they don’t do their work if the presider doesn’t cannot be caught up in their proclamation?  Part of making a judgment about texts for prayer demands reading through a prayer more than once, then proclaiming it aloud. Consider the original text of the collect for the First Sunday of Advent, Year A, as given in the ICEL trial booklet of 1986:

Above the clamor of our violence
your Word of truth resounds,
O God of majesty and power.
Over the nations enshrouded in despair
your justice dawns.

Grant your household
a discerning spirit and a watchful eye
to perceive the hour in which we live.
Hasten the advent of that Day
when the weapons of war shall be banished,
our deeds of darkness cast off,
and all your scattered children gathered into one.

We ask this through him whose coming is certain,
whose Day draws near:
your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

When the 1998 ICEL sacramentary was approved by the various conferences of bishops in English-speaking countries, the above text had been modified:

God of majesty and power,
amid the clamor of our violence
your Word of truth resounds;
upon a world made dark by sin
the Sun of Justice casts his dawning rays.

Keep your household watchful
and aware of the hour in which we live.
Hasten the advent of that day
when the sounds of war will be forever stilled,
the darkness of evil scattered,
and all your children gathered into one.

The concluding sentence (“We ask this . . .”) is essentially the same in both prayers. I find some of the changes between 1986 and 1998 to be improvements, others simply changes. But both are strong texts.

I would never argue that it is crucial to have shared images between the Sunday scriptures and the opening prayer. But I would argue that excellent texts like these, well proclaimed as the opening prayer, allow images in the scriptures to be heard anew and to open our ears. Do you find a poetry in these two texts above? How well do they or do they not lend themselves to proclamation, spoken or chanted, in a way that can be readily grasped by the assembly? Count the times you hear an echo of scripture. Do they meet the high standard we should have for any words spoken and heard in the assembly?  Why do you think so? Hold either of these original texts against “Grant your faithful people,” the Vox Clara translation of the Latin collect, and ask which text could, properly spoken, call an assembly together to celebrate eucharist and keep the Advent season.

A homilist needs to heed texts like these that respect the scriptural images as images, as shapers of our prayer and a way to grasp the times and our own lives. All of us gain when we hear these lively images spoken aloud with care, even with passion, in the heart of the assembly’s prayer. What the prayer puts into words may itself be pondered by the homilist, almost as an example of how scriptural texts don’t wear out but continue to define our selves and our assemblies.

Between the early 1980s and the completed sacramentary of 1998 the project of original English compositions became a basic element of the coming ICEL sacramentary.  The bishops, advisors and others involved in ICEL’s work  understood that the new sacramentary would have original English compositions – and many of them.  They agreed to and arranged for the writing and evaluation, rewriting and editing of optional, original texts.  In the case of the collect there would be three such texts for every Sunday, one text for Year A, one for Year B, one for Year C. These were part of the volume approved by all the English-speaking conferences of bishops and sent to Rome in 1998 (never to be seen again).

Look at one further example of these original texts, the Third Sunday of Advent.  First, the following is the only prayer we will find for that Sunday in the 2010 Vox Clara missal:

O God, who see how your people
faithfully await the feast of the Lord’s Nativity,
enable us, we pray,
to attain the joys of so great a salvation
and to celebrate them always
with solemn worship and glad rejoicing.
Through our Lord . . .

And here is Year B in the 1998 ICEL sacramentary:

O God, most high and most near,
you send glad tidings to the lowly,
you hide not your face from the poor;
those who dwell in darkness you call into the light.

Take away our blindness,
remove the hardness of our hearts,
and form us into a humble people,
that, at the advent of your Son,
we may recognize him in our midst
and find joy in his saving presence.
We ask this through him whose coming is certain . . .

If we demand of the Sunday collect what we ought to demand, which one would we take to the assembly?

At some point we have to stand up and say: Latin rhetoric was Latin rhetoric and still is –but you can’t translate it and get acceptable English rhetoric.  Even alive Latin was just one of the many languages of early Christianity. It has never been the language of all the churches in union with Rome. What foolishness to let Latin’s rhetoric control the sound of any assembly gathered to do their liturgy in their own language.  All this time we are wasting when the real task is so obvious: An English (or Chinese, or Arabic, or Spanish) able to bear the weight of an assembly’s ritual. The 20 years of work by ICEL leading to the 1998 sacramentary made clear gains toward the texts we need for the liturgy envisioned by the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy.  But that work became the nearly helpless target of those dedicated to rewriting the story, erasing Vatican II altogether.

So in the 2010 Vox Clara missal we have no such prayers as the 1998 ICEL sacramentary.  The Vatican’s Liturgiam Authenticam simply declared original compositions unacceptable and the English-speaking bishops buckled (they bent and bowed both). In doing do, they chose also to ignore what caving in would mean to the other language groups of the world. We should remember that English speakers are not the only Roman Catholics who had begun to use original vernacular texts.  The Polish and the Italians are among the language groups that have had and continue to have original texts in their own languages in their sacramentaries. The Vatican clearly singled out the English-speaking hierarchy to give an example for less humble hierarchies.

Most of the chatter has been about the other ill effects of LA and they deserve attention, but this prohibition on original texts in vernacular language should not be ignored.  If enforced, it will change the fine sacramental rituals that were approved and published before LA appeared ten years ago.  Hold unto your copies!  And remember: It isn’t that hard to find the texts of the 1998 ICEL sacramentary.

“Without real necessity, successive revisions of translations should not notably change the previously approved vernacular texts of the Eucharistic Prayers which the faithful will have committed gradually to memory,” according to Liturgiam Authenticam (§ 64), issued in 2001 by the Congregation for Divine Worship, the rationale for the new translation of the Roman Missal. Priests, who have celebrated Mass in English since 1974, though unlikely to be envisaged at this point in the CDW instruction, may perhaps include themselves. For those who have Eucharistic Prayer II by heart, for example, the changes do not always seem really necessary. Indeed, in the light of the CDW document on how to translate from Latin into the vernacular, the revisions turn out sometimes to be idle tinkering, and not always closer to the original.

Eucharistic Prayer II, as approved in 1974, opens as follows: “Lord, you are holy indeed, the fountain of all holiness, / Let your Spirit come upon these gifts to make them holy.” The Latin runs: “Vere Sanctus es, Domine, fons omnis sanctitatis. / Haec ergo dona, quaesumus, Spiritus tui rore sanctifica.” Compare the revised text: “You are indeed Holy, O Lord, the fount of all holiness, / Make holy, therefore, these gifts, we pray, by sending down your Spirit upon them like the dewfall.”

The revision sticks to the Latin order, in the sense that “Lord” moves to the middle of the first line. The vocative “O,” not in the Latin, presumably makes the language more “sacral” as the CDW instruction desiderates. The word “fountain” gives way to “fount.” In Lewis and Short, the first meaning of fons is “spring,  fountain, well-source.”  Why the cardinals and their language experts, gathered in some high-ceilinged Vatican salone, changed to “fount,” we shall never know. Powerful enough in sixteenth-century verse — “Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears” (Ben Jonson) — the word “fount” has long since decayed into pseudo-poetic diction.

On the other hand, if the image of the fountain is curtailed, the new translation retrieves that of the dew. Why the experts in Washington DC, who created the 1974 text, left out the dew, is another mystery. Perhaps they felt it would evoke the wrong associations: “Like the dew on the mountain, / Like the foam on the river, / Like the bubble on the fountain. /Thou are gone, and for ever” (Scott) — suggesting something fleeting and impermanent. In Latin ros means “dew”: “dewfall” and, for that matter, the “sending down” of the Spirit, are not word-for-word translations. Not really a natural English expression, the dewfall refers, in some American regional dialects, to the time in the evening when the dew appears. Taken literally, ‘Spiritus rore tui’ translates as ‘by the dew of your Spirit’— which means that this graphic, rather challenging, metaphorical identification of the Spirit with the dew is dissolved into a simile: ‘your Spirit . . . like the dewfall’.

Translation never pleases everyone. The most notable change in Eucharistic Prayer II comes in the phrase “We thank you for counting us worthy to stand in your presence and serve you” — “gratias agentes quia nos dignos habuisti astare coram te et tibi ministrare” — which now runs: “giving thanks that you have held us worthy to be in your presence and minister to you.” Of course astare means “stand at or near (someone),” and then via “stand by” comes to mean “assist.” Since only the priest should be standing at this point, “stand” has been replaced with ‘be’— rather a colorless word in English but perhaps we are meant to inject a bit of existentialist-ontological oomph.

Funnily enough, in the anaphora in the early third-century Apostolic Tradition, from which Eucharistic Prayer II was created, the text runs: “to stand before you and to serve as your priests” (my emphasis). A century later, at the First Council of Nicaea (held in 325), Canon XX goes as follows: “Since there are some who kneel on Sunday and during the season of Pentecost, this Holy Synod decrees that, so that the same observances may be maintained in every diocese, one should offer one’s prayers to the Lord standing” — a decree which has long been ignored in the West by Catholics but which remains in force in the ancient Churches of the East (they think it appropriate to stand, except on penitential occasions, if you believe in the Resurrection). It’s more than just translation that never pleases everyone.

There are factual errors of which Somerville seems blithely unaware. I am no linguist but examine Somerville’s statement that since “Catullus was a contemporary of Caesar Augustine, the Latin in which he wrote would have been about the same as that used by Romans during the time Jesus lived on earth”. Even though this author is herself a poet she does not seem able to distinguish between poetic speech and everyday talk. It is hard to imagine ordinary Romans speaking in hendecasyllabic or elegiac couplets. And are we suggesting that Jesus spoke Latin?

Somerville alleges that the “Eucharistic Prayer may not be a poem in a technical sense, but it functions as one.” There may be a good point buried here, but what kind of poetic function is she talking about? I would have thought that the EP should instead consist of a ritual language, i.e., one that expresses (repetitively) truths that are already deep within the assembly—which includes the people in the pews, and therefore must “come across the footlights”, as the theater world say. As far as I can see this form is therefore quite different than most poetry.

That said, I do agree with some main points of Somerville. The new language does seem “stiff and unwieldy,” as she says. And I think it is silly for Church to say that, in the United States, the word “men” today still means men and women. This is quickly becoming a dead usage, and it certainly is out of place in a time when women are at last being recognized as equals to genetic “men”. I would agree that “chalice” is an awkward substitution for “cup.” It caters too much to the monarchical phase of the Church. And finally, I believe that the reversion to “for you and for many” is simply trouble-making. Again, I am no scholar in this, but those who pleaded with the Pope to allow at least “the many” as making good and proper sense in English were right. Somerville unfortunately labors the obvious but unthinkable interpretation that Jesus died for one group of people but not for any others. If anyone sees a valid reason for such wording, I hope we hear from them below.

These reflections are in continuity with the considerations about translation in [my previous two articles]. Through various experiences and examples I have tried to open the complexities of worthy translation and of translation for use in ritual. Even with the best of intentions, which certainly the new “missal” lacks, we have seen that translation is not an easy nor a once-and-for-all matter. We’ve seen that the receiving language is never neutral, indifferent, or perfect. The receiving language – its vocabulary, its order, its strengths and its weaknesses – are to be treated with respect and with love if the translator’s craft is to produce excellent results. Not only that, but the translator must attend to special circumstances. Texts that are to be spoken aloud by individuals or by an assembly bring their own demands.

We can safely say that these matters of common sense were deliberately ignored in the new texts for the missal. Liturgiam Authenticam (LA) replaced any concern for the receiver language and with those who speak that language with a command to do something as easy as it is disastrous: Let the Latin original control everything. Imagine reading Dostoyevsky or Gabriel García Márquez in a translation done in accord with LA. The texts we will read in this coming missal are simply the word-for-word rendering that might be given to a writer who does not know Latin but who knows what makes for good English. These are no more than a tool to begin the task, and even at that we would question the quality of this tool.

But why would anyone publish the tool, the starting point? What might have been that word-for-word starter tool is now what parishes in the US are being told to use. (Important book to know: Translating Tradition: A Chant Historian Reads Liturgiam Authenticam. Peter Jeffery. Liturgical Press. His writing should have brought, from all involved with LA, a very simple: “We’re sorry. We take it all back and will do penance.”)

Here is a prayer you might be hearing as Advent begins at the end of this November:

Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God,
the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ
with righteous deeds at his coming,
so that, gathered at his right hand,
they may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom.

This is a fair example, neither the best nor the worst text in the book. Look at it, read it aloud. Better: read it aloud one time to some children, some teens, some adults, some old folks. Then ask: What did I just pray for? To whom did I pray? What result am I hoping for? What phrase caught your imagination? What would you be saying Amen to?

Someone might argue: So what? Was the Latin original written to answer questions like that? I would respond: Perhaps it was not written with such intent. Perhaps it was composed simply to sound wonderful and to sing well. In fact, most of the time this Latin text has been prayed with assemblies that have no idea what it means. But that is not our problem. In Latin, it probably does one thing important for ritual: It can be chanted and the sound itself will do good work. Fine.

Now look at the title of Rita Ferrone’s article in the July 15 issue of Commonweal: “It Doesn’t Sing: The Trouble with the New Roman Missal.” Probably her use of “sing” is meant to describe the overall dullness of this English missal, the difficulty in proclaiming it and the near impossibility of being caught up in it. But let’s take that “singing” title literally: This trouble making the English understood would only be compounded by chanting it. It simply doesn’t sing unless you pretend you understand English as little as you understand Latin.

Read or chanted, who will remember who “they” may be when we hear “they” in the last line? One further observation: Why “they” at all? If the Latin felt adequate with “your faithful” in the first line, was it necessary to use the third person rather than the first person plural in the fifth line? At least “we” would be understood whether, by that point in the sentence, you remembered “your faithful” or not. But the Latin is what it is, and the translator is not free to think it through, so “they” is what we get. Did you think of that when you read it through? Probably not. It was just awkward in general. And besides, the logical reference of “they” in normal English is going to be “righteous deeds,” the noun closer by far to “they” than “your faithful.”

So the translator, here and throughout, could not be both faithful to LA and of service to us. The translator could not offer us anything worth an honest Amen.

Have we challenged the wisdom of LA? Have we seen this abuse of English (and any other receiver language) as the canonization of Latin text? On what grounds is this being done? After all, these Latin texts should never be treated as is they had any such authority even for Latin-speaking assembly, if any such assemblies exist. They are the striving after worthy voicing of ritual texts in a certain language, a language that was spoken by some Western Christians for a certain period of time, and then forgotten. They have no more authority than any other collection of prayers used in the rituals of the various churches. Let them be judged on their merits and, for the better ones, let them be translated by wordsmiths who know the ways that the English language does its work, and let those wordsmiths be well instructed in what exactly is the work of ritual speech.

This whole project went off the track and everyone is pretending the train is still moving. We’re asked to be Alice in Wonderland, and many go along.

We are being told something by this new missal and we had better understand: “Your language doesn’t matter. Nobody’s living language matters. Latin matters. The words you English speakers will speak and hear in your English language do not matter.” This is not just a view of language though, it is a misunderstanding of ritual. And what matters, according to those who have given us this book, is not our being at home in doing the rituals that should be sustaining our lives. We cannot have those rituals without the basic tools of a language that will be both beautiful and filled with meaning. The only task of the English language in this ill-conceived adventure could be called suicidal: to betray its very own genius in slavish service to the master language, Latin. Another way of making the metaphor for what is happening here would use gender images all too familiar to those in charge of this work. The “male” language must be in charge and the receiver (“female”) language just does the grateful reception and let’s keep it that way.

A few months ago I was spending a two hours every week studying English poetry with two of our Iraqi students in Damascus. For me this brought such joy in revisiting the poets I have loved and in sharing their work, and such regret in realizing how I never found much time to know later poets than those I loved 50 years ago. We looked at a few of the poems by W.B. Yeats, among them “Adam’s Curse.” This poem in its first verse has something to say about this business of the language worthy of our prayers in the assembly.

We sat together at one summer’s end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, “A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.

We will be living and dying probably with the results of these non-translations. But think what could be if we who need texts in our rites made demands on our writers and translators like those Yeats describes: this stitching and unstitching and stitching again on and on until good writing has been done. This, Yeats says, is harder work by far than scrubbing a kitchen pavement on hands and knees or breaking stones in the depths of winter or the heat of summer. And in the end, the successful line must “seem a moment’s thought” precisely because it is not a moment’s thought but is as simple and real as that kitchen pavement or those broken stones. (I am trying not to dwell on the very interesting trinity that Yeats mocks in the second-last line.)

Is it a leap too far to think this should be said also of those who seek to translate the texts to be spoken in our rites? LA hardly deserves to be taken seriously on so many grounds, but maybe this is the most important because it is most destructive of our common prayer. The depth and the beauty of a text may well depend on the meeting of meaning and sound, but LA subordinates everything to replicating the Latin and poses no test whatsoever for the Latin! Why ask for poets and others who know the ways of words when all that LA is asking would be satisfied with translation software for the Vatican computer?

Remember Monsignor Ronald Knox? In a book called Englishing the Bible in the UK and Trials of a Translator (in the US), Knox wrote: “You can have a literal translation or you can have a literary translation: you cannot have both … Words are not inanimate things, like coins, that have an exact counterpart in a different currency. They are living things … And the translator must never be afraid of the accusation of having paraphrased. Paraphrase is the bogey-man of the half-educated….”

To some extent then, this whole effort gave up, meant to give up, the vision taking shape in ICEL’s earlier work: English texts that are not dependent on translating Latin texts but instead, taking what inspiration they can from the Latin, flow not only from the poetic genius of the modern language but from the world in which (gasp!) we are living, speaking and listening now. ICEL made a beginning of something that might have been achieved with the work of poets and theologians, pastoral ministers and musicians. But the head office closed it down. Nevertheless, we can’t forget that the work now is not simply to use or not use this awful book. The work is to take ourselves out of this sad and ridiculous situation.

Let’s believe that the good that can come of the “new missal” is our greater awareness that the words of ritual matter and that our English language is more than up to the task.

On Sunday, November 20, our assemblies will speak and hear their last of a simple if sometimes inadequate English. The 40-some-year-old ritual texts will, a Sunday later, be replaced by an English so much less adequate that its defenders come off, to be kind, as tone deaf.

The story of how we came to this place was told well and succinctly by Robert Mickens in three brief Tablet articles in June and July of this year. In the second of these Mickens comes to the crucial moment in 2001 when the Congregation for Divine Worship

issued a fifth instruction on translating liturgical texts, Liturgiam Authenticam. In a break from the previous four instructions, it unveiled a new set of translating principles. From now on – the document said – translators were to apply “formal equivalence,” carefully assuring that every word in the Latin text was replicated in the vernacular. The instruction, which is still in force, also directs that the vocabulary, syntax, punctuation and capitalization patterns found in the Latin must be reproduced as much as possible. And, of course, the document took aim at inclusive language. An overriding concern of the document was that translations employed what is called a “sacral vernacular” that was different from ordinary speech. Liturgiam Authenticam also drove a stake into the heart of the well-established ecumenical efforts at composing common texts. “Great caution is to be taken to avoid a wording or style that the Catholic faithful would confuse with the manner of speech of non-Catholic ecclesial communities or of other religions, so that such a factor will not cause them confusion or discomfort,” it said. . . .

If 2001 spelled doom for ICEL, then 2002 will be remembered as the year that Cardinal Medina delivered his crushing blow to that Episcopal power and authority over the liturgy that the young Fr. Ratzinger spoke about during Vatican II. On 16 March, the CDW formally rejected the 1998 English Sacramentary, four years after the 11 English-speaking conferences of ICEL had approved it and submitted it to Rome. Then in April 2002, the CDW announced the establishment of Vox Clara, a committee of 12 senior English-speaking bishops appointed by the Vatican to help it oversee the translations. The Vatican finally had a mechanism for asserting more control over the conferences and ICEL. (The Tablet, June 25, 2011)

Liturgiam Authenticam thus drew together and nailed down the following: 1) Any vernacular used in Catholic liturgy is to be a slavish rendering of the Latin. 2) Any sort of effort toward an inclusive vernacular liturgical language will be denied. 3) The vernacular must somehow find a sacral tone. And 4) who will be the arbiters of this? Not those untrustworthy conferences of bishops who actually speak the various languages, but the Vatican bureaucracy. The strategy was clear: if English is the middle language between Latin and the local languages in so many cases, then English must be written like Latin.

Why not? Hold on. Vox Clara’s definitive answer to how that is to be done will be heard but little listened to on the First Sunday of Advent 2011.

There are so many grounds for bemoaning and opposing the situation. Certainly one of these is the use of liturgy and its words to make a political conquest over the decentralized church Vatican II envisioned. Another is the assumption that the liturgies of the Roman Catholic church are to be worded with a non-inclusive language because that pleases the rule makers, all of whom are certainly male and without a sense for how non-intrusive inclusivity has progressed in English the last 40 years.

We should discuss two other facets of what LA did to all of us. First, can the slavish rendering of Latin into a vernacular, let alone a “sacral” vernacular, ever sustain the ritual deeds of Christian assemblies? Second, why does it sound like they are dictating and we are accepting that our liturgy must begin with Latin texts as if they somehow hold a scripture-like place in our common prayer?

So first, what does it take for a “formal equivalency” English translation to be strong English, strong for prayer together and able to bear the weight of repetition? Consider a successful example:

Pour forth, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy grace into our hearts
that we, to whom the incarnation of Christ, thy son,
was made known by the message of an angel,
may, by his passion and death,
be brought to the glory of his resurrection.

This text, well known to many, seems to do all that Liturgiam Authenticam demands of English. It’s one long English sentence translating one long, elegant Latin sentence into 44 English words, but it flows. One doesn’t get lost. It helps that the English is mostly one- and two-syllable words. It helps that when praying aloud the voice almost can’t help making the right pauses and putting the right emphases. But its excellence is due at least in part to the basic but never exhausted content of the Latin prayer. It takes gratefully what it takes for granted: our baptism into the paschal dying and yet the glory of the word-made-flesh.

As translation, this text seems somehow natural. The just-on-the-edge quality of this English sentence passes without notice simply because it is so well-formed. And it calls no attention to itself or to the craft that went into making it. You will find this text, unchanged from the prayer above, except “thou” is “you,” on the Fourth Sunday of Advent in the coming sacramentary. But that single bit of good sense and taste should not mislead us. Lest that happen, consider the collect for the First Sunday of Advent in the new book:

Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God,
the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ
with righteous deeds at his coming,
so that, gathered at his right hand,
they may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom.

Come again? Contrast that with the banished version of the 1998 book as approved by all the English-speaking bishops:

Almighty God,
strengthen the resolve of your faithful people
to prepare for the coming of your Christ
by works of justice and mercy,
so that when we go forth to meet him
he may call us to sit at his right hand
and possess the kingdom of heaven.

Not great, but because it was apparently judged a failure by the norms of LA, it was replaced with “Grant your faithful . . . ” Judge for yourself.

Now consider this bit of the Exsultet translation by Dame Maria Boulding of Stanbrook Abbey. To the great relief of many, this was retained without change in the new edition from the work of the 2008, the pre-tinkering and unpublished edition of the sacramentary:

This is the night of which it is written:
The night shall be as bright as day,
dazzling is the night for me, and full of gladness.
The sanctifying power of this night dispels wickedness, washes faults away,
restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to mourners,
drives out hatred, fosters concord, and brings down the mighty.
O truly blessed night,
when things of heaven are wed to those of earth, and divine to the human.

Now compare, overall and image by image, these same lines in the ICEL translation approved by the bishops in 1998:

This is the night of which the Scripture says:
“Even darkness is not dark for you, and the night will shine as clear as the day!”
How holy is this night, which heals our wounds and washes all evil away!
A night to restore lost innocence and bring mourners joy!
A night to cast out hatred!
A night for seeking peace and humbling pride!
O truly blessed night when heaven is wedded to earth
and we are reconciled with God!

Worthy English both, I think. But different. Different ways of choosing the English word and building the English structure. Our language has so many ways it can work. As does Latin. The translator makes choices. Somehow the first text above escaped the net of LA.

In a time when ICEL was helping not simply with translation but at times with alternate texts, ICEL proposed offering an alternative text for use in English-speaking churches. That text approached the above section in this way:

This is the night, most blessed of all nights,
when your creating Spirit stirred again
to turn back chaos and renew the world,
redeeming it from hatred, sin, and strife.
This is the night, most blessed of all nights,
when all the powers of heaven and earth were wed
and every hungry human heart was fed
by Christ our Lamb’s own precious flesh and blood.

We see in all three texts that a strong English is more likely (not to mention more honest) when it translates a strong Latin. That, in the opinion of many, is enough to show how futile it is for the Vatican to insist on an English sacramentary limited by Latin texts that seldom have the poetic power of the Exsultet. They may indeed capture Latin rhetoric well, but often do this without much of anything on which to base a strong prayer in English. For, as we should expect, these languages do their work in very different ways. By the same plain reasoning, no other language’s book should be held to imitation of an empty English necessitated by sticking to Latin’s long sentences, many abstractions, loads of clauses, all of which work (we’re told) in Latin rhetoric.

These three Exsultet translations manifest something else: Once you get beyond “Push” or “Pull” on the shop door, translators must make judgments where right and wrong are probably not the best words to describe what happens. No translation will say exactly what the original says to one for whom the original language is the mother tongue. But the receiver language? Read the English instructions on something you purchased recently where the English is clearly one of the receiver languages for taking the pills or assembling the gadget. Adequate? Probably, but here adequate is enough. When the original is prayer or exhortation or acclamation in the assembly, then the receiver language has to be challenged to do the work of a ritual text in all the unique ways of English or Japanese or any language. This is far more challenging work. This seems not to be recognized by the LA directives as faithfully implemented in the coming sacramentary. Until ICEL’s leadership was dismissed and new staff, loyal to LA, was assembled, the ICEL translation projects were increasingly conscious of the responsibility of those to whom translation is entrusted for the liturgy.

Somehow we expect now so little of our words in the assembly. No one ever remembers a collect. Few pay attention. By the time we say Amen we are unlikely to recall to what we are giving our Amen. Why? This would be a challenge today even if we were taking to heart the need for crafting English worthy of its ritual task. Inundated with words from all directions, we expect little, demand little, attend little. Some want liturgy’s words only to take them back to an imagined childhood. Most simply presume that this speaking of prayers is what a presider does and, never having been struck by a good text brought to life by a good speaker, only some sort of listless background music is expected and that’s what is heard.

Perhaps we have LA to thank. Down here in the dumps, we may begin to know what sort of language fails and what sort might sustain.

(To be continued.)

For most of its life since its foundation in 1963, ICEL members had maintained cordial relationships with the CDW. However, things changed dramatically in 1996 when the Chilean Cardinal Medina Estevez, Archbishop of Valparaiso and former friend and fellow peritus of Joseph Ratzinger at the Second Vatican Council, was called to the Roman curia by Pope John Paul II as Prefect at the CDW. Bishop Maurice Taylor recorded what transpired when Medina took over at the CDW:

It soon became clear that things were going to change. Until then it was common for ICEL to send a few officials to Rome from time to time for informal discussions with officials of the congregation. They would speak about ICEL’s work at the time and of the progress of the work; they answered questions from the congregation’s representatives, heard their comments and, in a word, worked collaboratively for the good of English-speaking Catholics throughout the world.

From the start of his reign Cardinal Medina let it be known that relations with ICEL, if any, would be formal and cold. There were no further collaborative meetings, no advice or comments were forthcoming in the course of our work and, in general, we felt that we were under suspicion.

Cardinal Winning was well aware of all this and as a consequence, he made a dozen attempts between 1999 and 2001 to arrange a meeting with Cardinal Medina to discuss the proposed document, but was repeatedly rebuffed.

When Pope John Paul II called an extraordinary consistory of all the cardinals in March 2001 to discuss his apostolic letter Novo Millennio Ineunte, Winning was delighted with the opportunity it presented. He considered the letter to be one of Pope John Paul’s finest and noted with glee the criticism in it of ‘careerism’ among the curia. As a result, he decided that his own contribution to the extraordinary consistory of cardinals in May 2001 would address the subject of collegiality since he believed that consultation and cooperation ought to be the hallmark of the relationship between the Vatican dicasteries and bishops’ conferences throughout the world. However, one week before the consistory opened, the document he knew the CDW had been preparing – without any consultation – on the principles of translation was released, unannounced, on the Holy See’s website. An authoritative summary of the ramifications of this document, Liturgiam authenticam, can be found in Bishop Maurice Taylor’s book.

Cardinal Winning was greatly angered not only by the secret manner in which the document had been put together and then published, but also by its content which arbitrarily overturned the principles, approved by Pope Paul VI, on which ICEL had been basing its work for three decades. It made him even more determined to highlight what he believed to be the important issues at stake during the consistory.

In order to be able to speak with the maximum degree of authority, he faxed a draft of his proposed intervention to the presidents of the English-speaking bishops’ conferences around the world, including England and Wales, United States and Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa asking for consent to speak in their name. He duly received the authority he sought.

When he addressed the extraordinary consistory of Cardinals on the afternoon of Wednesday 23 May 2001, he spoke in English and his address was translated into ten languages. He began by setting out the context of his unease:

My particular concern is with relationships between the Roman curia and the episcopal conferences. The apostolic constitution Pastor Bonus [John Paul II's Constitution of June 1988] rightly defines the function of the Roman curia as a service, or diakonia. It is a service to the Holy Father in whose name the various dicasteries [Curia subdivisions] act, but it is also a service to the college of bishops. As diocesan bishops, we value greatly the insight, the pastoral concern and support we receive from the heads and collaborators of the various dicasteries here in Rome. I personally have experienced very warm and friendly meetings with many members of the Curia.

He went on to describe the nature of the problem and what caused it before proceeding to outline what was necessary for the situation to be corrected.

On occasion, however, tensions can and do arise. I know I speak for many bishops when I express my disappointment that the diakonia and collegiality of Pastor Bonus have, of late, not been evident in certain situations involving the Roman curia and the bishops’ conferences. I emphasize that such tensions are more due to misunderstandings and poor communication than to ill will and divergent ecclesiologies. I wish to suggest very strongly that a primary way of fostering the full potential of the Roman curia is the need for greater consultation and dialogue between bishops’ conferences and the curia.

The Cardinal then spelled out the importance of this consultation and dialogue if the needs of the Church were to be best served, and what the consequences would be if this did not happen, implicitly suggesting this had been the case in the preparation and publication of Liturgiam authenticam.

An essential element in genuine dialogue is that full information is available to those engaged in it. To engage in fraternal dialogue particularly before the publication of documents of far-reaching importance and with grave pastoral implications, is not to undermine or interfere in the work of the dicasteries. Rather it is in the interests of the whole Church as well as being the expression of the fraternal and collegial spirit which is the legacy of the Second Vatican Council.

If we are sincere in practicing the principles of collegiality and subsidiarity, there have to be consultation and exchange of views prior to the publication of major church documents. When such dialogue is lacking, misunderstandings arise and when, without due dialogue, major documents are published which appear to be contrary to previously established policies, these misunderstandings give rise to serious concerns, even to questioning the very reasons for the document and its canonical validity.

The cardinal then went on to address the unsatisfactory manner in which the documents were published and distributed by the Vatican.

Moreover, given our modern communications technology, it is disappointing that major documents are released unannounced on the internet. Not only does this mean that the bishops find themselves relying on others to bring these documents to their notice, but the secular media are able to deal with the contents of the documents before bishops have been properly briefed, causing misunderstanding and confusion among the People of God.

In concluding his address, Cardinal Winning generously opened the way for all concerned to engage in a fresh start which would avoid the pitfalls of fear and distrust. Finally he stressed that he spoke on behalf of English-speaking bishops throughout the world.

I offer these thoughts in the spirit of openness and sincerity and my plea today is that any communication blocks which may exist between the bishops’ conferences and the Roman curia will be examined and cleared so as to allow a full, free and genuine dialogue and collaboration. The church we all love is ill served by attitudes of fear and distrust. This is a plea from the heart reflecting the minds of the presidents of nine English-speaking conferences of bishops, and all the members of my own bishops’ conference.

These strong words drew a mixed reception from his listeners. Stephen McGinty recounted what happened in the immediate aftermath of Winning’s intervention:

The speech caused great offense to Cardinal Medina Estevez who, quite correctly, read it as a direct rebuttal to his treatment of ICEL and the manner of the publication of Liturgiam authenticam. Winning was relieved when two cardinals approached him afterwards and praised his words. At the end of the day Winning and Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor walked to the café within the building for an espresso….. In the café Winning was approached by Cardinal Estevez who was visibly angry and said, “You denigrated me in there.” He then began to complain about the difficulty of his job, that it was forced upon him against his wishes. Winning had no time for either his evasions or his self-pity and was brisk in his response. “I didn’t denigrate you. We’re all adults here. We can speak as adults.” At this point Estevez turned and walked off.

Perhaps his earlier experiences as Pinochet’s chaplain had caused the Chilean Cardinal to grow unaccustomed to being treated as an equal!

Cardinal Thomas Winning could – as Cardinal Medina discovered – be abrasive and hard-hitting. He was no stranger to controversy. He was outspoken on life issues, homosexuality, the Section 28 issue in Scotland, nuclear disarmament, and a host of other social matters. Many would fundamentally disagree with a number of the targets he chose to attack. And yet in certain respects Thomas Joseph Winning was most definitely a prophet. The new translation of the Mass is not a ‘document,’ but what Winning says about ‘major church documents’ in the third paragraph of his intervention could well be viewed as applying equally to the new translation.

Nor was Cardinal Estevez the only Vatican official unhappy at the content of Winning’s intervention. His words seem to have been too controversial and provocative for Dr Navarro-Vals, the director of the Vatican’s press office, who apparently attempted some internal censorship, making no mention of the speech in the daily press conference given on May 23rd, 2001.

Sadly, Cardinal Winning died suddenly of a heart attack on June 17tg, less than four weeks after delivering his address at the consistory.

In light of all of the above, it is clearly inaccurate to claim, as many opponents of the new translation have done, that the conferences of English-speaking bishops have never taken the Congregation of Divine Worship to task over its successful efforts to interfere in and seek to curb the rightful authority of episcopal conferences in this area. The various conferences clearly supported Cardinal Winning’s initiative and empowered him to speak on their behalf. The tragedy is that when he died, it seems they lost not only their spokesman but also their way. Indeed a decade later, the bishops seem to have performed a veritable volte-face: they seem to have surrendered their authority and no longer try to reclaim and reestablish their rights. For many of us, their increasing failure during these years to exercise their episcopal authority in this area has been both sad and rather humiliating.

It would appear that our bishops have allowed themselves to be bullied by Vatican officials who are actually in post in order to serve them. They seem to be embarrassed, and with just cause. It is, after all, the passivity of those bishops who have been in post for the past ten years that has landed us with a new translation of the English sacramentary in a style which the vast majority of English-speaking bishops neither asked for nor wanted: indeed, which it appears virtually no one except the officials in the CDW actively sought. But surely our bishops need to get over their embarrassment and seek to begin to reclaim their rights. Power and control are addictive, and it seems fair to assume that unless they are forcefully confronted by the bishops, the CDW, and indeed much of the Curia, will continue to act in an imperious and high-handed manner.

The Second Vatican Council articulated that ultimate authority rests with the college of bishops in union with the Pope. Unless there is strong leadership from a prophetic voice like Winning’s, the respective roles of bishops and curial officials will become even more blurred and the rightful authority of the bishops will be further usurped. History shows the need for prophetic figures like Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Siena who, as loyal critics, challenged the status quo in the governance of the Church and were canonised for their efforts.

The question now is whether such a prophetic figure will emerge at this time in the English-speaking church. Or will history show that the capitulation of the English-speaking bishops over the new translation effectively signalled the demise of the authority of local episcopal conferences and the subjugation of the clear teaching of the Second Vatican Council ?

Perhaps our shepherds need to know that they have both our encouragement and our support so that they can rediscover the confidence they need to reclaim their rights as pastors. Unless that happens the flock will be left following sheep. Cardinal Winning would not be impressed.

Source: Association of Catholic Priests

On the distasteful political machinations behind the new missal text, retired or near-retired bishops obviously feel freer to speak than bishops expecting to remain some time in office. Two such bishops have written in to The Tablet: Archbishop Carroll, former archbishop of Canberra, Australia, and Bishop Cullinane, bishop of Palmerston North, New Zealand, who has been given a coadjutor and will step down in November. These bishops give us inside info on the 2001 Vatican instruction Liturgiam authenticam (on which, see Peter Jeffery) and the process for translating liturgical texts.

Pray Tell applauds the bishops for their honesty. Their letters are below. – awr

* * * * *

In the third part of Robert Mickens’ account of how the new translation of the Missal came to be adopted (“A war of words,” July 2), he mentions the 2002 meeting of the presidents of episcopal conferences of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) with Cardinal Arinze in which “they acquiesced in the Congregation for Divine Worship’s claim that the Holy See alone had the right to create mixed commissions” and “Not a single bishop raised his voice in protest.” While it’s water under the bridge now, it may be of historical interest that it wasn’t as simple as that, at least in my memory.

The meeting comprised, besides the conference presidents, a considerable number of the Congregation with their president together with some of the Vox Clara members and some ICEL members, including Fr. Harbert. A preliminary agenda had been sent to participants beforehand and it contained an item that would allow for discussion of Liturgiam Authenticam and its statutes. Arriving at the meeting, Archbishop (later Cardinal) Napier of South Africa, Bishop Cullinane of New Zealand and myself from Australia noticed that the agenda item had been deleted from the revised meeting agenda, presumably because in the meantime the Holy Father had signed off on the statutes. We expressed our disquiet to Cardinal Arinze and he restored it to the meeting agenda.

When this agenda item came around, we three presidents voiced our concerns and in particular about the Holy See’s right to approve the statutes contrary to Sacrosanctum Concilium. After we spoke, Cardinal Arinze called a canon lawyer presumably from the Congregation to respond to our concerns.

We did not believe that he had in fact refuted our arguments but there was no further discussion. Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor thanked us for airing the matter and the meeting moved on. It was apparent that the fact that the Holy Father had approved the statutes, including the offending one, had closed the question, one might say definitively.

The Most Rev. Francis P. Carroll
Emeritus Archbishop of Canberra and Goulburn, Australia
The Tablet, July 16

* * * * *

Your Rome correspondent, Robert Mickens, is incorrect in saying (“A war of words,” July 2) that “not a single bishop raised his voice in protest” at the Congregation for Divine Worship’s (CDW) claims regarding mixed commissions. Those claims were the subject of a submission to the Pontifical Council for the Authentic Interpretation of Legislative Texts by the New Zealand Catholic Bishops’ Conference. In its reply, on December 18, 2002, the Pontifical Council declined to adjudicate the questions put to it, on the grounds that the instruction Liturgiam Authenticam was not a legislative text. This means, of course, that it lacks binding force if it conflicts with existing church law. And the question of its compatibility with current law, and legitimate custom, was precisely the point of our submission.

The Pontifical Council hoped that the issues could be resolved through “mutual collaboration … in a spirit of true ecclesial communion.” They probably didn’t know that for over two years the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) bishops had unsuccessfully tried to meet with the Congregation to discuss these issues.

Furthermore, in October 2003, the presidents of the English-speaking conferences met in Rome at the invitation of the cardinal prefect for the purposes of facilitating “understanding and cooperation between the CDW and the bishops’ conferences.”

The first item on the agenda sent out before the meeting was “the respective roles and areas of competence of the Congregation and the bishops’ conferences.” But when we arrived at the meeting, this item – the very reason for our going to the meeting – had disappeared from the agenda. At the urging of Cardinal W. Napier (South Africa), Archbishop F. Carroll (Australia) and myself (New Zealand), it was restored to the agenda. But what was the point? A decree dated September 15, 2003 and published days before the meeting establishing ICEL as a mixed commission entirely preempted any meaningful discussion on whether it is the CDW that establishes mixed commissions or the bishops’ conferences.

So it is not really true that we “acquiesced” in the actions of the Congregation. Rather, recognizing the impossibility of genuine dialogue on this matter, we made our point and then got on with the rest of the agenda. This piece of history needs to be on record because it is still incumbent on bishops’ conferences to reclaim the rights and responsibilities entrusted to them by law, and wrongly usurped.

The Rt Rev. P.J. Cullinane
Bishop of Palmerston North, New Zealand
The Tablet, July 30