Joe O’Leary: The Translation of the Roman Missal

The Church is still aching from the terrible act of violence committed against the liturgy in English little more than a decade ago. Here at the very heart of the Church’s speech a great betrayal has been enacted, and it is re-enacted every day in the hypocrisy of its perpetrators who continue to pretend that nothing is the matter. When the botched translation of the Roman Missal was introduced in 2011, there was a wide outcry among students of Latin and of English. The authorities ignored all this, and adopted an adversarial stance toward all critics. Bishop Donald Trautman of Erie, chairman of US bishops’ liturgy committee, was the only voice of commonsense in the US hierarchy, but his warning of imminent “pastoral disaster” was dismissed, and he himself was marginalized and bullied. His voice was going against a current of folly.

   The Church sleep-walked into the disaster that has now settled on us. Bishops were incredibly timid about offering critical observations to the Vatican, sensing that they were not welcome. Not a single episcopal conference dared to question the merit of the entire translation. Prelates offered imperceptive eulogies of the alleged sonorous beauty of the new texts, clearly without looking at them critically. Even today some will profess to admire the fustian language of the translations, just as Brexit still has its praisers. To pile on words such as “oblation,” “laud,” “graciously grant” does nothing to reinforce the sense of the Eucharist opened up at Vatican II, but rather seems calculated to recreate a stuffy simulacrum of pre-Vatican II liturgy. The result is that young people are fleeing the English liturgy for the Traditional Latin Mass. The translation that had been in force since the 1970s was rather flat and drab, but at least it was intelligible and breathed the atmosphere of Vatican II. The world’s bishops had approved a new translation in 1998, of superior quality, which the Vatican rejected on the basis that it did not follow the Latin in the strictly accurate way prescribed by Liturgiam authenticam (2011), replacing the “dynamic equivalence” preferred in Comme le prévoit (1969).

  Listen to the Preface for Easter Sunday:

It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation,
at all times to acclaim you, O Lord,
but on this day above all
to laud you yet more gloriously,
when Christ our Passover has been sacrificed…
Therefore, overcome with paschal joy,
every land, every people exults in your praise
and even the heavenly Powers, with the angelic hosts,
sing together the unending hymn of your glory,
as they acclaim:
Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God of hosts . . .

 “Right and just” is dull and inexpressive; Latin “iustum” has connotations for which one reaches for words such as “meet,” ”fitting,” “worthy,” whereas “just” here falls with a thud, shorn of connotation. The verb “acclaim” occurs twice in this text, apparently without anyone adverting to the clumsy effect. The second use, at the end, stretches the use of the verb beyond normal usage. Its defenders deny that it is grammatically incorrect, yet it is still bad English, which the faithful are forced to listen to Sunday after Sunday, so that children are learning eccentric English every time they go to Mass. “I acclaim: ‘You are great’” will never become normalized as English usage, whereas if the verbs “declare, exclaim, proclaim, cry,” were used they would not generate this irrepressible feeling of unease. Since the Latin is “dicentes” a purportedly literal translation should simply have used the verb “say.” Defenders of the odd construction found a precedent for it in a poem by Robert Southey and in a sports journalist of the 1920s, exceptions proving the rule. This sort of shoddy reasoning was typical of the frivolity with which the promoters of the new translation fulfilled their task. Some objected that the phrase “like the dewfall” in Eucharistic Prayer II was awkward, obscure, archaic, heavy-handed, or distracting. Msgr Arthur Roche assured them there was no problem. Why, on his way to the meeting in the USA, he had seen signs advertising Mountain Dew! Another example concerns the translation of astare coram te et tibi ministrare in Eucharistic Prayer II as “to be in your presence and minister to you” (formerly: “stand in your presence and serve you”). The reason for mistranslating astantes was allegedly Cardinal Pell’s objection that the faithful are not supposed to be standing at this point of the Mass. The aggressive authoritarianism of the architects of the new translation took all objections as signifying insubordination, and even non-English speakers assumed authority over the texts because of the authority given them by the Vatican, with contempt for those who had the authority of long study and practice of the English and Latin tongues. This has been identified as a scandal second only to the child sexual abuse scandal, and in fact showing the same attitudes that led to it.

   The translators simply had no ear for the cumbersome and unprayable texture of the language they came up with. “To laud you yet more gloriously” is a case in point: the verb “to laud” has a place in English, in certain specific contexts. “I can only laud your efforts,” etc. But we do not say, “I laud you, O God” and we never say “to laud gloriously” – the verb and the adverb are mismatched, which is something good writers instinctively avoid. The composition of English prose is a much more difficult art than non-English speakers or English speakers who are not also readers realize. “Overcome with paschal joy” is heavy and distracting – the sensation of being “overcome” has a rather negative connotation. The language protests too much – “Oh, I am overcome!” –and carries no conviction. When the language of worship is malfunctioning and is heard as a set of hollow gestures, what is being conveyed is not faith, but a lack of faith, as if the celebrant, in his eagerness to make suitable old-fashioned noises, had forgotten what he is supposed to be talking about and were celebrating the Eucharist in a robotic trance. “And even the heavenly Powers, with the angelic hosts,” – why “even” and how are the Powers different from the hosts? Would it be unkind to infer that the composers of such verbiage have no living belief in angels? And if, in fact, angels are a representation that has become archaic, why do we not seek a dynamic equivalent conducive to worship rather than distracting from it?

   For the Roman Canon we should return to the text of 1970. A booklet from ICEL, The Roman Canon in English Translation (Roman Canon in English Translation, ICEL 1967.pdf ) explained its translation choices one by one. Since 2011 it has been impossible to pray this venerable text in English. The same is true of the Fourth Eucharistic Prayer. Indeed, the predominance of the Second Eucharistic Prayer suggests that the clergy have given up on the other alternatives, or are perhaps sticking to the short and relatively simple prayer as an act of defiance against the clunky texts foisted on them. Pope Leo has warned that priests should not tamper with the text of the liturgy, but if “the salvation of souls is the supreme law” such tampering may be a duty.

   In 2017, Pope Francis issued Magnum principium, which shifted authority over liturgical translations from the Vatican back to national bishops’ conferences, very much in line with Vatican II. But the gravity of the problem was not realized. Instead of proposing to replace or even just thoroughly revise the 2011 version, piecemeal corrections here and there were envisaged. Nor did any episcopal conference take advantage of the authority now restored to them. Too much trouble.  A simple solution would be to dump the present translation and exhume the one approved by all the world’s bishops in 1998. This could be a base text of any further improvement. The present text cannot serve as the base of anything, since it lacks any stylistic character and unity. Nine years after Magnum principium, nothing has been done.