A leading American bishop has launched a fierce attack on the new English translation of the Roman Missal, as the US bishops’ conference prepares to vote on the acceptability of the missal when it meets in Baltimore.

Bishop Donald Trautman of Erie, Pennsylvania, a former chairman of the conference’s liturgy committee, said in a lecture at the Catholic University in Washington DC last week that the new translation was “slavish” in its overly literal translation of the original Latin.

Insisting that translators should be guided by the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, that stipulated the use of vernacular rather than “sacred” language, he said that the average Catholic would not understand words like “ineffable”, “consubstantial”, “incarnate”, “inviolate”, “oblation”, “ignominy”, “precursor”, “suffused” and “unvanquished”. Using such words, he said, could lead to a “pastoral disaster”.

He also suggested that the prefaces of the new Missal “violate English syntax”. “The translators have slavishly transposed a Latin ‘qui’ clause into English without respecting English sentence word order,” he said, while subordinate clauses from the missal were “represented as a sentence”, and some sentences lacked a subject and a predicate.

The new translations “give kind admittance to your kingdom”, that replaces the current wording in Eucharistic Prayer Three, “welcome into your kingdom our departed brothers and sisters”, he said called to mind “a ticket-taker at the door”.

Moreover, the problems did not end with issues of elegance and accessibility. Currently the words of consecration refer to the blood of Christ being shed “for all”; the new missal has “for you and for many”. This raises a “major pastoral, catechetical problem”, the bishop pointed out. “Jesus died even for those who reject his grace.”

James Roberts