Porthos and Russ wrote: *Porthos: Oh, thanks for the clarification on the Comfortable Words; I wouldn’t really have known as I have no King James, Coverdale, or English Missal on me. As for the RSV, I hold both Catholic Editions in high esteem so I have no issues with one edition over the other for use in Liturgy. I’m just glad the Ordinariate made its first inroads in Calgary, so now I have the Extraordinary Form and the English Missal available and fully Catholic. For me both liturgies are testaments to the Catholic Church’s ability to preserve its heritage and yet take what’s good and beautiful even from Protestantism and add them to her treasures. *
Russ: I used to chant the Coverdale Psalter for Morning and Evening Prayer every day but abandoned it when I became a Catholic. Perhaps I should go back to it.
There is a liturgically and musically important reason to stick to the English of Coverdale and of Cranmer, namely that these Anglican liturgists, like Luther in German, in translating from the Latin, retained the metrical scansion of the Latin texts, thus fitting their English and German to the music of the Gregorian chants like a glove. It is true that the accents of their Tudor English and High German do not always fall in the same place as in the Latin texts, but since the classic Gregorian chant music is musically unaccented, the metrical fit works wherever the accent might happen to fall in Latin.
On the other hand, the unmetrical fit of the texts of the 1965

and 1969/1970 (
Novus Ordo)

make singing the English or French of those liturgies to the Latin chants impossible; the translators of the 1965 and 1969 (
Novus Ordo) editions of the
Missale Romanum in English did not care one whit about the old chants, so that they did not provide texts of such musical utility, which has had the catastropic consequence of causing them to fall from regualar use in the Western Rite. The
Anglican Missal, now adopted and adapted in the Ordinariate is by far the best Western Rite liturgy in use and conforms largely to the wonderful 1962 Missale Romanum rather than to its lacklustre 1969/1970 successor.
Both editions of the R.S.V. for Catholic use are much better than other “modern English” Bibles, aside from the 1969 Confraternity Bible (1969 O.T., 1941 N.T.) and Confraternity-Douay versions (mixed Douay-Challoner and Confraternity O.T., 1941 Confraternity N.T.), which remain the best translations of the 20th and 21st centuries, but I still would assert that the R.S.V.-C.E.2 is just that much superior and more fully Catholic than the R.S.V.-C.E.1.