Sunday, November 27, 2011

Anyone peppersprayed at the New Translation?

All quiet on the Massachusetts front!

A reader pointed out this fun article from week's Pilot written by Fr. Jonathan Gasper.

It's an excellent article but I particularly liked this fun quip:

Many of us are excited about this weekend and finally having the opportunity to pray with the Roman Missal. Some perhaps are less excited. One anonymous writer recently compared the implementation of this missal to the anxiety provoked by a looming root canal! No one looks forward to a root canal -- but anyone who understands oral hygiene would agree that root canals are always good in the end. The medical procedure goes right to the root of the tooth, treating infection and preventing tooth decay and loss. A root canal, while uncomfortable, is absolutely necessary and good in the end.


..and absolutely loved his ending.

New words will shape us and form us, just as they have in the past. There's the old saying that goes like this: "What we pray is what we believe." The new words of the Mass aren't really that new, they're not foreign to us. They are what we believe. My deepest hope and prayer is that these words will begin to sound familiar with time. We'll need to reflect on them and in some cases learn the meaning of a few of them. But that's not a bad thing. If it means getting to the root of our faith and discovering again what it is that we believe, and what it is that gives us life, then it's not a bad thing at all.


What a magnificent summary the fruit of the subtle changes in the new translation will bring.

Two thought-provoking pieces from our eloquent Fr. Rutler: Riots, Coups and Abdication.

Le Pays Rél, a paper in the same vein as Au Pilori, took up its case against the nuns at Namur: who “listen tenderly to their pupils, duly trained, singing the praise of murderers and expressing the hope that the dear heroes of the R.A.F. will burn and devastate our country.”
Sounds like the OWS crackpots doesn't it?

The second piece:

FROM THE PASTOR
November 27, 2011
by Fr. George W. Rutler

Our Lord is astonishingly patient with our culture, given that He has made the world so wonderful and yet those who live in it can be so banal in what satisfies them. The season of Advent explores life's wonders, but it is widely ignored by people rushing to celebrate a Christmas they do not comprehend. If culture is satisfied with banality, those who would know deep joy must be counter-cultural.

In many places there will be no meditating on the four Advent mysteries: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. But these are the very things that save us from the insufferable boredom of life lived only on the surface of reality.

A good patron saint for counter-culturalism would be Pope St. Leo I. Although he lived in the fifth century, he is just what we need today, and Pope Benedict XVI often strikes me as his double. Pope Leo lived in a culture of political and moral decay. He confronted powerful barbarians threatening what remained of classical civilization. Attila the Hun and Gaiseric the Vandal were not the sorts you'd want to meet in a dark alley, and yet this pope faced them down in 452 and 455 and saved Rome. He was no less strong against various Christian heretics whose pessimism about life had created a “culture of death,” denied that Mary was the mother of her own true God, thought that Christ could not be truly human and divine, and assumed that they were morally fine without God's help. Today we do not call them Manicheans, Nestorians, Monophysites and Pelagians, but they are alive in the schools and on television.

On the First Sunday of Advent, the new translation of the Creed renews the ancient formula for Christ as “consubstantial with the Father.” When this was defined at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the assembled bishops declared: “Peter has spoken through the mouth of Leo.” The Successor of Peter as center of the Church's unity knew that this inspiration was more important for civilization than defeating Vandals and Huns.

On this Sunday we also say in the General Confession an accurate translation of the Latin: “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault,” striking the breast in an outward sign that our souls and bodies have fallen short of the God-given dignity that a superficial world tries daily to take away. In a sermon on how to prepare for Christmas, counter-cultural Leo preached:

“And hence we warn you, beloved, in fatherly affection, to make this winter fast fruitful to yourselves by bounteous alms, rejoicing that by you the Lord feeds and clothes His poor, to whom assuredly He could have given the possessions which He has bestowed on you, had He not in His unspeakable mercy wished to justify them for their patient labor, and you for your works of love.”


The changes to the Mass are coming just in the nick of time. I love them.

8 comments:

Adrienne said...

Firm believer in lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi.

So as we pray do we believe, and as we believe do we live.

Anonymous said...

I give two cheers to the new translation. We heard one of its many shortcoming in the Prayer after Communion for the First Sunday of Advent, which reads:

May these mysteries, O Lord,
in which we have participated, profit us, we pray, for even now, as we walk amid passing things, you teach us by them to love the things of heaven and hold fast to what endures.

The problem is that “them” seems to refer to “passing things,” as if we should make use of transitory and superficial things to learn to love heavenly things.
A check of the Latin text and the earlier (2008) version of the translation shows that “them” refers to “mysteries” way up in the first line:

Prosint nobis, quaesumus, Domine, frequentata mysteria, quibus nos, inter praetereuntia ambulantes,
iam nunc instituis amare caelestia et inhaerere mansuris.

May the mysteries we have celebrated,profit us, we pray, O Lord, for even now, as we journey
through this passing world, you teach us by them to love the things of heaven and hold fast to what will endure.

TTC said...

I don't see anyone in their right mind comprehending the prayer that way. I would not wring my hands over it Martha.

kd said...

I LOVE them too! Pretty easy to learn since I never stopped saying them the "old way" especially the prayer before receiving Communion. Now all we need is for them to turn the Altar facing God and kneeling for Communion & the Church will make the front page of the Globe again! So nice of them to let us know what's going on at Mass, even made the 11pm news on ch 5 woo hooo... I'm sure they hoped to stir up trouble.

breathnach said...

Carol,

The pastor of my parish announced that "sign of peace", as practiced for the last 40 years or so eg.shaking hands, backslapping and yucking it up with your homies, was headed for the dustbin of history. Yet on Sunday it reared it's head like the monsters that won't die in horror films.

The Magnificat missalette says in parenthesis "when appropriate". It won't be easy to change 70s fossilized "progressive" priests, what's the deal???

Anonymous said...

For the most part I like the, but they changed some things that should not have been changed and sound very awkward (i.e. the last line of the Creed).

I thought that this would have been a good time to correct a lot of things all around - for instance, this silly hand-holding and/or orans position of the people during the Our Father, and the excessive nonsense during the abhorrent "Kiss of Peace". However, not a peep from the priests.

Am glad, though, to once again hear "for many" instead of "for all". That in itself was a great victory.

Anonymous said...

More on the shortcomingd of the new translaiton:

Informed of multiple errors, Congregation for Divine Worship did little or nothing

May 1, 2011
http://www.praytellblog.com/index.php/2011/05/01/the-2010-received-text-the-internal-report-and-the-final-text/

You still remember the Gray Book and the Received Text and the number 10,000 and the internal report “Areas of Difficulty,” right? How’s that? You want a refresher? OK, here we go.

The Gray Book is the final version of the missal translation ICEL sends to the national bishops’ conferences, after having worked for many years with the conferences in developing it. Then the conferences approve the Gray Book, sometimes as is, sometimes with a few amendments, and send it to Rome for recognitio (= approval).

Last summer the story leaked that Rome allowed a few people on Vox Clara to redo the final text. They made over 10,000 changes – introducing all sorts of mistranslations, contorted English, and even theological errors. Since Vox Clara had received every draft translation over the previous years with opportunity to give feedback, it was especially puzzling that they held back all the way through, and then at the last stage undid and redid whatever they wanted.

Perhaps we’ll never know who was responsible for this mischief, but in some circles they speak of the Missale Moronicum. Its other name is the “Received Text” – the text received by Pope Benedict at a luncheon on April 28, 2010 with Msgr. James Moroney and everyone else from Vox Clara.

Xavier Rindfleisch wrote four articles for Pray Tell (part one, part two, part three, and part four) comparing the ICEL 2008 Gray Book text to the 2010 Received Text.

Enter the internal report, “Areas of Difficulty in the Received Text of the Roman Missal,” reported on by Pray Tell and later leaked by someone on WikiSpooks. Whoever wrote it – we’re sure it’s someone within the translation machinery – knows his stuff. The internal report is a devastating critique of the problems in the Received Text.

The final text which will appear in our missals next November has been leaked at WikiSpooks.

Put these three things together:
* the Received Text,
* the internal report showing the problems in the Received Text,
* and the final text,
and you have a rare opportunity to examine how Rome responds to highly competent critique of its work. Does the final text correct the problems? Does it address the grave concerns of the report?

Pray Tell is happy to report that Xavier Rindfleisch is back! And he has done exactly this work. He lays out in summary form each problem identified in the internal report, noting whether or not the problem is corrected in the final text. See Xavier’s full report here:

“The 2010 Received Text, the Internal Report, and the Final Text” by Xavier Rindfleisch [ http://www.praytellblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Xavier-Rindfleish-Comparing-Received-and-Final1.pdf ].

TTC said...

Thanks for the links. I will catch up with them over the next few days. I should have been more clear this morning that I am not empathetic to sloppy translation. You would think somebody over there would see the flaws and fix them so the syntax would unambiguously point to the mysteries. But for those of us suffering the insufferable, this is a huge improvement.

Re: the kiss of peace. It will go. It's already gone in some strong pockets of orthodoxy (like Virginia). In the meantime, we should probably just continue to quietly maintain our intimacy with Christ and the mystical at that critical moment in the Mass and let the thing die a natural death.