No, I am not kidding.
I’m speaking about my own experiences–and the old translation is all I have known. I had absolutely no idea that there was ANYTHING “wrong” with it until a year and a half ago.
I’ll be going to Mass again next Sunday. Hopefully this will grow on me, but for the time being, I’m unhappy about it.
And yes, I realize that I’m apparently in the minority.
Thanks for letting me vent.
My friend, the problem may not be completely you, but shared. Part of it lays in these fora. Catholic online fora should have a filtering system; but, unfortunately they don’t. People often come on to these fora and write as if they were conversing in the same room with their audience, where the other person can see you, hear you and stop you to ask questions as you go along. When they write that way on a board, they can inadvertently mislead and confuse people. This is one of those situations.
The word “wrong” has been thrown around on CAF to describe the previous edition of the Roman Missal, as if one were throwing rice at a wedding. I’m assuming that this is still done. Be that as it may.
The proper way of explaining this is that the committee that translated from the Latin to the English used a method that is called, Dynamic Equivalence. Dynamic Equivalence does not mean “wrong.” They were trying to get the translation to sound smooth as opposed to clunky. Whenever you translate anything literally, it’s going to sound clunky. To give the words some rhythm and cadence, they replaced the words with synonyms. When they couldn’t find a good synonym, they simply dropped the word altogether. This is where the problem began.
When you go from “I’m not worthy that you should come under my roof” to “I’m not worthy to receive you” the translator is thinking of “I’m not worthy to receive you [in my home],” which would be the dynamic equivalent to “under my roof”. However, the person in the pew does not know the mind of the translator and probably does not know the origin of the sentence, which is from the Gospel of Matthew. In his or her mind, the statement means exactly what it says, “I’m not worthy to be receiving you in Holy Communion;” but that’s not what it said in Matthew’s Gospel, nor in the Latin text.
The original text in Hebrew lays out for us a scenario where the speaker sees himself as a sinner who is unworthy to receive Jesus in his home or abode. That whole idea of Jesus entering our abode, which is our person, is lost when you take out “under my roof.” When you lose that, you lose sight of the fact that in Holy Communion, we receive Christ and Christ enters. There are two parts here. We do the receiving and Christ does the entering. In the dynamic translation, there is mention of half of what’s happening. It only mentions us receiving the Lord, but fails to mention the Lord freely entering into our space.
It’s not that “I’m not worthy to receive you” is wrong. That’s perfectly true. The problem is that this sentence does not convey the fact that Jesus is choosing to enter our physical space even though we’re unworthy. There is a difference between something being wrong and something being an incomplete idea. The original idea was complete in the mind of the translators, but it was not conveyed to the people in the pew who are saying the prayer.
The Holy See sat back and observed for a number of years. It concluded that this translation does not work. Because people don’t realize the full meaning of the statement, the way that it’s written. Therefore, the Holy See says, “We’ve watched to see what happens and we observe that this translation does not work. Go back and do a literal translation. Focus on the sentence, not on the rhythm.”
The Church likes the idea of the mass available in both Latin and the vernacular, as long as the Latin and the vernacular are true to the meaning of what is happening at that moment. When the meaning is not clear or lost, then the liturgists have to do whatever it takes to recover it.
This re-translation is not about righting a wrong. It’s about recovering meaning that was lost, because the method used to translate did not do what they hoped it would do. They hoped that it would preserve the meaning and sound fluid. Well, it sounded fluid, but it lost the full meaning of what’s actually in the Latin missal.
That leads to my final point. The missal is not being re-edited. This is the same missal that was issued by Pope John Paul II back in the 1990s. They had to redo the translation from Latin to English. For many people, especially the priests, this is even more difficult than going from Latin to the vernacular. That’s probably easier. When you go from your language to your language, you tend to switch over to auto pilot. At least, when you’re going from one language to another, you tend to be more focused. In auto pilot, your mind wants to go to what is familiar. For some people, it will take longer than it will for others. Language is not an easy thing for many people, even when it’s going from your language to your language. For daily mass goers, it’s going to come faster. As they say, “Practice makes perfect.” Well . . . almost.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF :christmastree1: