What We Have Done, What We Have Failed to DO by Irwin Kevin W.;

Author:Irwin, Kevin W.; [Irwin, Kevin W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL102000
ISBN: 4625709
Publisher: Paulist Press
Published: 2014-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

I, for one, did not shed a tear when this text found its way to the floor of the scriptorium and not into the revised Roman Missal.

Overall, I judge that we are far better served by using traditional sources and voices from our family album, like Leo the Great on Christmas, than by searching for the novel and contemporary.

Translation of the Missal

The vernacular English translation of the Missal and of all other post–Vatican II liturgical documents is intertwined with the establishment and continued efficient operation of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL), founded by ten (eventually eleven) English-speaking bishops’ conferences just prior to the promulgation of Sacrosanctum Concilium in 1963. The first text produced by the young translation body was the Roman Canon in 1967. It was only subsequently in 1969 that the Holy See issued the document Comme le prevoit (which I alluded to previously) that would govern the unprecedented and herculean task of translating the liturgy into English through to 2011.

This document contains several principles for translation, among which the best known is probably that of “dynamic equivalence” as opposed to “formal equivalence,” meaning that in translating from the Latin, certain liberties could legitimately be taken for the sake of comprehension in the “receptor language.” For example, in the third Eucharistic Prayer, the new Missal used the words “so that from east to west a perfect offering may be made to the glory of your name.” The scriptural reference was to the Book of Malachi 1:11—“So that from the rising of the sun to its setting, a perfect offering may be made to the glory of your name”—but the exact wording was lost. “From east to west” was judged a more adequate way to describe this cosmic reference, but that it was geographically focused meant that any reference to the offering of an ongoing, eternal sacrifice in which an individual celebration of the liturgy participates would be diminished if not lost altogether. But even as I say this, I want to be clear that ICEL was following its “marching orders” with this kind of “dynamic equivalence,” as well as in its composition of original texts for the liturgy.

At the same time, actual mistakes were made in the translations. How could there not be? There was no precedent in the Catholic Church for such a wholesale revision of all of our liturgies at one time, which now had to be translated in rather quick succession into English acceptable to all eleven bishops’ conferences. ICEL was the first to admit that a better translation was needed and undertook a revision that culminated in what is now often called the 1998 Sacramentary (translated by ICEL and approved by all its member conferences). The years before the final approval of the 1998 Sacramentary saw increased interest in and oversight of the texts by individual bishop-members of the ICEL episcopal conferences. On this side of the Atlantic, the debates were at times intense, and unfortunately name calling and personal attacks were not absent.

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