We are living in a time of liturgical change. The last fifty years have seen almost constant change in the liturgy, including the introduction of a new order of Mass in the 1970s and the celebration of the Mass in English. Today we are experiencing the most dramatic change since that time. Another version of the Mass is being implemented, and with it comes a new, improved translation into English. This time will not be easy. The previous version and translation of the Mass was in use for almost forty years. Its prayers have become familiar, ingrained in memory by years of use. Some Catholics today have never known any other form of Mass than the one introduced in the 1970s. And yet the Church deems it necessary to change the Mass again. Why? Part of the reason is that we live in a world of change. Times change; customs change; languages change. The reason that the Mass used to be said in Latin was because that is what people in many areas used to speak. But Latin fell out of popular use, and the local, vernacular languages arose. Eventually the Church decided it was prudent to allow Mass to be celebrated in the newer languages, such as English. That was a momentous transformation, but there is always a certain amount of minor adjustment going on in the liturgy. In fact, there has never been a time when the liturgy was absolutely static. The Church is always making small modifications as it seeks to adapt the liturgy to the conditions of the day. Most popes, and certainly all the recent popes, have left their mark on the liturgy in different ways. In other words, change in the liturgy is not unexpected. But there is another reason the new version of Mass is being introduced, and it has to do with the magnitude of the change that happened in the 1970s. The Second Vatican Council, which had met in the previous decade, released a document on the liturgy known as Sacrosanctum Concilium. It called for modest reform of the liturgy, proposing that certain rites in the Mass be simplified, that certain rites that had fallen out of use be restored, that texts be clarified so that the faithful might understand them more easily, and that the vernacular languages play a greater but still limited role in the Mass. Over the next few years a group known as the Concilium worked on this project and, in consultation with various bishops’ conferences, proposed changes that went much further than those the Council had indicated. They included the use of English and other modern languages for the entire Mass, not just parts of it. Eventually, Pope Paul VI approved the proposals. When the then-new version of Mass was implemented in the 1970s, it represented two huge changes: a major revision of the rites of the Mass itself and the translation of those rites into the vernacular. Either one of these would have been a huge change on its own. The two put together were even more massive. And that leads to the second reason significant changes are again being made in the liturgy. Any time one makes a big change, it can have unforeseen consequences, and not all of them good. That’s why newly built boats have shakedown voyages, newly designed computer programs have bug releases, and so forth. It takes a while for a new or changed system to show how it works in practice, and often a little experience with it shows that some tweaking is necessary. That is essentially what has happened with the liturgy. A big change was made in the 1970s, and from the decades of pastoral experience that followed, Pope John Paul II became convinced that the liturgy could be improved. Thus in the early 2000s he issued a new edition of the Missale Romanum, which is the book containing the rites and prayers of the Mass in Latin. The changes made to this version were not large—certainly nowhere near as large as those that Paul VI had approved—just minor modifications. Many of them were implemented without much fuss in 2003. What had to wait was the new translation of the Missale Romanum. The translation that had been prepared in the 1970s was put together somewhat hastily, and it used a trendy philosophy of translation known as “dynamic equivalence.” In this method, a translator tries to take the thoughts expressed in one language (in this case Latin) and bring them into another language without carefully mirroring the vocabulary, word order, or style of the original. One way to think of dynamic equivalence is as a thought-for-thought translation rather than a word-for-word translation. For example, in Matthew 16:18, Jesus tells Peter that he will build his Church and that “the gates of hades” will not prevail against it. This is a literal translation of what he says, but it could be confusing to some English-speakers, because in our language hades is often thought of as the same thing as hell—the place of the damned. In Greek, that’s not the case. Hades is the place of the dead—both good and bad.
