Rob Mickens at The Tablet is telling the truth about the translation saga, and his three-part Tablet series is fantastic:
- “Unlocking the door of the vernacular” (June 18);
- “How Rome moved the goal posts” (June 25);
- “A war of words” (July 2).
With the kind permission of our Tablet friends, Pray Tell is happy to reprint part three, “A War of Words.” The conclusion is a zinger:
The real shock came in November 2010 when a scathing report, written anonymously, produced extensive evidence that last-minute changes had been made to the English Missal without the knowledge or approval of the competent conferences and in violation of the Vatican’s own translation rules…
So it was a bitter irony that the officials of the revamped ICEL should also be fed a poison similar to the one they had dished out to the predecessors. They believed their Missal, which had been given the Vatican’s recognitio, was a done deal, only to discover that Vox Clara and/or the CDW had revised it. Some estimate that 10,000 changes were made.
Read all of part three here.
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The issue of The Tablet that went online yesterday reports on Cardinal Pell’s remarks at the Fota International Liturgy Conference in Cork City, Ireland, “Pell says Missal translation is model of collegiality” (subscription required). The cardinal said:
Don’t believe newspaper reports telling you that there was no consultation, that it was all imposed from Rome or the like. It’s total nonsense… This is a text prepared and then improved by virtually all the bishops sharing our common English language.
Cardinal Pell said that complaints are based on ideological or even sub-theological objections and that the criticisms are ignorant of translation and not based on linguistic arguments.
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St. John’s School of Theology•Seminary is just wrapping up the huge “Lay Ecclesial Ministry” symposium, co-sponsored by offices of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, universities, ministry organizations, and dioceses across the U.S. Hundreds of participants including several bishops. One bishop sought me out to tell me something. It was this: he wanted to acknowledge that the missal translation process was flawed, that Roman was heavy-handed and made serious mistake in the final text. He’s grateful for the work all of us did, however it turned out.
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Did you know that the medieval Averroïsts held a Theory of Two Truths? Anti-scholastics, they. “Dicunt enim ea esse vera secundum philosophiam, sed non secundum fidem catholicam, quasi sint due contrarie veritates.” Two contradictory truth claims can at the same time both be true.
Not sure why that popped into my head just now.
awr
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