by Raymond G. Helmick
Next year, we are due to have a major change in the way that English-speaking Catholics experience the Liturgy of the Mass. New translations of the ordinary parts and the Eucharistic Prayers have been prepared, largely at the instigation of the Holy See and its Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.
Both the English versions of the 1960s and these new ones have come in for criticism. I happen to approach the change as one of the group who prepared the translations we have used these last 40 years and more, and must say first that it has been a joy for me to hear these prayers in the words that I had so much to do with. I read these new translations with a great deal of reservation, which I will try to explain in this article.
What we did back in the 1960s was not perfect, of course. After it had gone through several revisions, I wrote to the rest of the group about the First Eucharistic Prayer (it was the only one then, hence “The Roman Canon”), which I felt was rather like the camel – the horse designed by a committee– and that we needed to have more unity at the centre on any further translations. All the same, I remain very conscious of a number of principles we followed that I think were important, and that have been quite deliberately disregarded now.
Among the 10 of us who did that translation, I was particularly insistent that the English should be the English we actually speak. In that, I was supporting the principal translator, Edward Harold, a most extraordinary critical linguist who did the heaviest lifting on the project. Fr Fred McManus had invited me to take part, because of the work I was doing then on liturgical chant, which involved a lot of sensitivity to the language. My contention was that to address God in language that was either archaic or artificial was to assert that the one addressed was not real.
That is my basic concern. I fear that this new translation, often clumsy to the point of incomprehensibility, is going to alienate our Catholic people still more than the current turmoil has already done, discouraging Mass participation by making the language opaque. Even now, despite this latest translation having been given official approval, or recognitio, it appears that there have since been yet more changes, with, as Alan Griffiths warned in his letter in last week’s Tablet, incorrect English and a lack of understanding of English grammar.
There are things that I like in the new translations
I’m glad to see us responding again “And with your spirit”. In the Gloria translation, I was happy to see that the triple formula, qui tollis … , qui tollis … , qui sedes … , was restored, as it was a bad idea to condense it in the first place.
I thought the changes in the new Creed translation rather unhelpful – “I” form rather than “We” form for what is a communal profession of faith, the loss of the articulation offered by the repeat “We/I believe” before Son, Holy Spirit and the articles at the end of the formula. But I thought the substitution of “consubstantial” for “one in Being” truly egregious. We are translating Greek and not Latin in the Creed, and the Latin consubstantialem is already an inadequate translation of homoousios, whereas “One in Being” translates it better than any Latin term. “Consubstantial”, in English, is without any meaning that can be deciphered without elaborate exegesis.
And there, exactly, is the central problem: the edict laid down by the Romans that everything should be the most literal possible cognate of the Latin. Defences of the translation that I have read try to make it a virtue that the language is not the English we speak, but somehow “elevated”. I think the translators have run right into the critical problem we were all so aware of in the 1960s – that artificial language says “God is not real”…….
We have been presented with a drastically botched job, botched basically because the Romans, people of goodwill whose language is not English, insistent on literal cognates of the Latin forms, have imposed an ill-chosen criterion. I wish this could be said more politely. I don’t feel, as one who seriously thought through these matters of liturgical language in crafting, all those years ago, the versions we have been using, that I can responsibly let that pass unchallenged.
Our Catholic people have been presented, in recent years, with a series of shocks that have profoundly disorientated, disillusioned and disappointed them about our Church. Making the language of liturgy opaque will be one more reason for them to stay away.
Raymond G. Helmick SJ is based in the Department of Theology, Boston College, Massachusetts, US
(Edited version)
