LOST OR MISLAID IN TRANSLATION?

English-speaking Catholics might have expected some benefits from a Native English-speaking Pope: a return to the good English of the old pre-2011 Missal, nothing lost in translation, promises of visits.  But Leo has seemed reluctant to communicate in English.   And the British are notoriously bad at foreign languages.

We need to try harder.  Perhaps going to Mass on holiday abroad might help.  The words are in English in your head as you hear or read  them in another language.  Someone else has done the work translating.  The universality of the Church shines out in the marvelous equivalence of meaning in the liturgy.
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Translation in its struggle to preserve and transmit  meaning between different cultures and epochs is notoriously difficult.  I remember a new, young, Belgian White Father in Kigali in near despair preparing a sermon in Kinyarwanda on Trinity Sunday.  The problem is compounded when dealing with religious texts in which individual words themselves, rather than meanings, are treated as sacrosanct.  Hence the deadening word-for-word translation, a malady of Vatican authoritarian centralism, once known as ultramontanism, that prevailed for many years.

Contemporary translations of Mass and Missal in English grew out of the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council.  ‘Lost in Translation’  Commonweal. Vol. 132, no. 21, New York 2005 by John Wilkins tells the story.  The Council lead to the creation in 1964 of an International Commission on English in the Liturgy  (ICEL) made up of ten anglophone Bishops’ Conferences. Philippines joined later as did 15 associate members such as Nigeria with its popular pidgin English.  British bishops played an important role.  But the most outstanding figure was Archbishop Denis Hurley of Durban, South Africa, a hero of the anti-apartheid struggle.  He was appointed by Pope Paul VI to serve on the council to implement liturgy reform and was ICEL’s chairman from 1975-1991, and subsequently associated with its work for several years.
 
Taken forward by Hurley, the revision of the 1973 Roman Missal began in 1983  and succeeded in finding a balance between preservation of the religious meaning of the Latin text and adaptations to capture English idiom and expression.  American bishops did, though, balk at the inclusive language ICEL had used in  translation of the Psalter.  Then in 1995, at the instigation of a minority of some 30 conservative bishops, the United States Catholic Bishops Conference complained the work wasn’t literal enough.  With full translation of texts under scrutiny, to use succinct Nigerian pidgin, ‘troubles dey come’.  And they came.

At an ICEL board meeting in Washington DC in June 1998, the new US representative on the board,  Archbishop of Chicago , Francis George, arrived from Rome bearing bad news.  Archbishop George had just been made cardinal by Paul VI in the same January cohort as Bishop Medina Estévez of Valparaiso, Chile, Prefect  of the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments (CDWDS) since 1996.  Estévez was a stickler for keeping to Latin grammatical structure and word-for-individual word translation, what is known by professional translators as ‘formal equivalence’ versus ICEL’s ‘dynamic equivalence’, that is in words that convey meaning in modern language.  He had supported the Pinochet coup and, as dean of the Pontifical Catholic University in Santiago, been accused of informing on left-wing students.   Cardinal George’s message to ICEL boiled down to four words: their work was unacceptable.

The then ICEL chairman, the gentle Bishop Maurice Taylor of Galloway in Scotland, did his best to find a compromise.  Archbishop Hurley tried to explain ICEL’s methodology and wondered what had happened to the collegiality and dialogue advocated in the Second Vatican Council.  An angry outburst was Cardinal George’s response. There was to be no dialogue.  Instead the  Vatican CDWDS produced a ponderous 130-page Instruction, Liturgiam authenticam, insisting de facto on comprehensive control over the principles and practice of translation.  Anything produced by ICEL had to be authorized by Rome, CDWDS staff were changed in compliance with the Vatican’s wishes and an oversight committee Vox Clara was set up in Rome by Pope John Paul II.  In July 2002 Bishop Arthur Roche of Leeds was appointed ICEL chairman.
 
That, in summary, is how we arrived at the wording of the 2011 Missal and Mass.  “Consubstantial with the Father” not “of one being with the Father”; “chalice not cup”; “keep us safe from distress” not “protect us from all anxiety” and, in the Offertory prayer for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, “prevenient Grace”. 

The Vatican  might easily have come unstuck in their changes to the words of consecration: back to the literal Christ’s blood shed ‘for you and for many’ following the  Latin ‘pro vobis et pro multis’.   This is not the wording in Italy - of all places.  Holidaymakers at mass may notice the words are “per voi e per tutti”, for you and for all/everyone. 

Which is it then, tutti or multi?  St. Thomas Aquinas comes to the rescue.   The power of the sacrament is sufficient for the salvation of all but its efficacy may not be universal because it may be rejected - hence ‘the many’.  Or something like that….  So neither wording contradicts the other while conveying a different nuance in their meaning.  The trouble is we are not all  Dominican scholars.

This does not indicate a soft spot for slang or attention-grabbing  vernacular versions.  The Archangel Gabriel’s greeting to Mary “you who are highly favoured” translated, for example, as “pick-me girl for God” on Tik Tok.  But Christian thinking has been enriched by scriptural texts and prayer passing from Aramaic, to Greek and Hebrew, to Latin and then into the vernacular.  The late Lamin Sanneh, a Professor in Yale Divinity School for many years amongst other distinctions, went further. “Christianity identified itself with the need to translate out of Aramaic and Hebrew”, he began his 1989 book Translating the Message, published by Orbis, an important contribution to missiology.
 
Born in Gambia, a 96% Muslim country, Lamin Sanneh became a Catholic and served on the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences.  His Muslim background gave him insights into a fundamental differences between Christianity and Islam, the importance of Catholicism’s passage through, and translation into, different cultures and languages over the centuries.

Muslims have the poetry and beauty of Qur’anic Arabic which they hold to be the very Words of God passed to his messenger, the Prophet, rasul, Muhammad [Peace be Upon Him].  But translation of Qur’an into the vernacular is generally felt by Muslim scholars to involve desacralization so diminution. True piety  means receiving  the message of the Qur’an in its unchanged original language, in Allah’s words.  For Christianity, transitions accompanied fresh translations allowing not only adaptation of idiom and expression, but a development of doctrine in Newman’s sense,  and a potential deepening of faith.
In summary, the Council’s Documents were a development too far for the likes of Cardinal Estévez, and their implementation a source of anxiety for Pope Benedict XVI.  This was what lay behind the approach to the wording of the 2011 Mass and Missal with its now jarring lack of inclusive language and rewording of the familiar Nicene creed.
 
In September 2017, Pope Francis made the necessary changes to canon law and returned control over translations to Bishops’ Conferences.  Henceforth, English-speaking bishops would approve translations - with their approval confirmed/ recognised by the CDWDS.   Francis issued his Motu Proprio (an edict ‘on his own initiative’) just prior to leaving for Medellin in Colombia, famous for the Latin American bishops’ commitment to the option for the poor made at its 1968 meeting, and the first major post-conciliar expression of collegiality.  A  vindication of the late Archbishop Denis Hurley.  But, eight years later, no signs of the English-speaking bishops seizing the opportunity offered by Francis.
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There are 1.5 billion native or second language English speakers in the world.  There are 1.4 billion Catholics, a significant proportion in Africa, and probably some 5-8% will understand English.   The Pope should speak to them in English more.   We appreciate that he does not wish to project an American identity.  But it is time for an English-speaking Pope to ensure the faith is available to “you and to all”, in the best, most meaningful English possible.