Roman Missal Three and Those Darn liberals

I am an ordinary parish priest, a practitioner, not a linguist. But, after stumbling through the proper prayers of Advent these past few weeks and continuing to stumble through Christmastide, I do not think that Roman Missal Three is working very well.

What a disappointment. Not only is the translation awkward, but the way the Latin phrases are structured into English gives the translation an unnatural, tortured formality where, for example, the faithful become oblations as dew falls on the altar. Beautiful, ain’t it?

I’m confident that the translators wanted to keep certain values intact. As they faced translation problems they tried to retain core elements of the official Latin translation so that the final English text would attain a beauty and formality comparable to the Latin text.

      At some point they made a decision to remove options among the prayers, apparently feeling that priestly spontaneity would mask the mystery of the Eucharist.

The resulting third edition of the sacramentary is the proverbial camel produced by the committee which was in charge of creating a horse.

Over fifty years ago, John Ciardi, American poet and writer approached his attempt to translate Dante’s Divine Comedy with humility. Though he was learned in old Italian and modern English, he gave up trying to rhyme tercets and decided literal translation meant that he had to translate ideas not individual words. He called the result a “transposition,” not a translation. Dante's great Italian classic lives beautifully in Ciardi's faithful transposition. But, then, he was an artisan in English which took him beyond dynamic equivalence.

The one consolation in all this is that the bishops who approved the translation must also try and proclaim the liturgical prayers themselves. Therefore, I beseech and heartily pray that these authorities may so rejoice in the novel experience, that they may soon be brought to the eternal judgment seat of God where, retaining all humility and confidence, and as perfect oblations, they will receive their right and just reward. Amen.

A long-time parishioner came up to me after a recent Sunday Mass: “Father, I am so angry at all these liberals and what they’re doing with the Mass…stuffing this new translation down our throats….”

Ah, yes, those darn liberals are at it again.

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