"Pasch" vs. "Passover" in Catholic Bibles

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BartholomewB

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The Confraternity Bible, first published (NT only) in 1941, uses the word “Passover”, where the Douay Rheims had used “pasch”. Can this have been the first appearance of “Passover” in a Catholic Bible?

Ronald Knox’s NT came three years later, in 1944, but the term “passover” evidently still failed to meet with his approval. On the other hand, he also avoided “pasch”. Instead, he resorted to various longer forms, such “the paschal feast”, “the paschal rite”, “paschal-time”, “the paschal meal”.
 
The Latin Vulgate says pascha, and I'm assuming that the DRV sought to adhere to the Latin as closely as possible here.

This is interesting. I have to wonder if avoidance of the word "passover" could have been, I won't go so far as to call it anti-Semitism, but let's just say a desire to avoid anything that sounded specifically Jewish. I read something one time, from a pre-Vatican II source, that asserted the Latinate names in the OT (Osee, Sophonias, and so on) were actually closer to the original than the commonly encountered names such as Hosea, Zephaniah, Obadiah, Haggai, and many others too numerous to mention, but I had a hard time buying that then, and I have a hard time buying it now. Felt a bit like gaslighting to me.
 
As well, WWII was raging. Jews were extremely sensitive to many things, and for very good reason. There were heightened sensitivities all round. I don't know if monsignor Knox dealt with this in his book "On Englishing the Bible", but he may have.
Practically, the terms are interchangeable, with "Passover" being anglicized.
 
Fashion and the ever-changing nature of the English language. IIRC, it was called "Passover" in Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments" so it appears to be simple linguistic evolution. Here's what my super-duper computer dictionary has to say:
late Middle English: from Old French, from ecclesiastical Latin paschalis, from pascha ‘feast of Passover’, via Greek and Aramaic from HebrewPesaḥ ‘Passover’.
Click to expand...
 
In England, at least, for several centuries it was a Catholic vs. Protestant issue. The word Passover first appeared (in the form “passeover”) in 1530, in William Tyndale’s Bible translation, printed without the permission of the Church. Tyndale’s theology seems to have been mainly Lutheran. The first occurrence in the OT is in Exodus 12:11:

And ye shall eate it in haste, for it is the Lordes passeover,

https://archive.org/details/1530-tyndale-pentateuch/page/n116/mode/1up

Four years earlier Tyndale had published his translation of the NT, but instead of “Passover” he had then used the term Easter, spelled “ester”. Matt 26:18 reads:

I wyll kepe myne ester att thy housse wiht my disciples.

https://archive.org/details/1526-tyndale-nt/page/n39/mode/1up
 
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The further back we go, the more of the Frisian language influence is observed. Due to the vagaries of human language, the Church is brilliant to capture revealed truth in a dead language which, like truth, cannot change.
 
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