Yes and no. It’s true that the text of Nicea & Constantinople I was in the plural, but it is equally true that the liturgical use of same has always been in the singular (except in the Syriac Churches, and I’m not sure about the Alexandrenes or Armenians, but that’s irrelevant to this thread) .
That would have been nice, but the fact is they did their own thing.
I have to disagree. Given that the Latin liturgical use of the Creed is in the singular, and given that the English-language version of the Novus Ordo is supposed to be a translation of the official Latin text, changing the person from singular to plural goes well beyond translation, but it was well within the agenda of those behind the so-called “reforms.”
Oh yes, those are fair points. I will take issue, though, with your statement that “the English-language version of the Novus Ordo is supposed to be a translation of the official Latin text.”
You suppose it to be so, and in a post-
Liturgiam Authenticam climate your supposition is no doubt justified. The people who carried the work in the late '60s and early '70s, however – and the people who approved their results – seem to have been laboring under no such supposition.
What I am responding to is the trendy thing that people say in our post-
Liturgicam Authenticam world: “Oh, those translators made mistakes no first-year Latin student could make!
Credo doesn’t mean ‘we believe’;
peccata mundi doesn’t mean ‘the sin of the world’;
mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa doesn’t mean ‘through my fault’! Ha ha, what morons!”
Some people stop there, getting their chuckle at the idiots who somehow didn’t compute that
credo is singular. The next group says, “Well, I can tell they deliberately changed it, so it must have been a change with absolutely no legitimate basis, coming from nothing but the translators’ pure whim and personal preference for a touchy-feely, I-love-you-you-love-me, group-hug spirituality, if not an outright desire to subvert and destroy the traditions of the Church at every opportunity. That makes it ludicrous, if not evil; case closed.”
Neither of those views is really accurate. By and large, the translators (1) knew what they were doing, (2) were trying to do something within the realm of reasonable goals, and (3) successfully accomplished it. Today, we disagree with their aims and methodology: we no longer want to archaeologize at the expense of overturning longstanding usages; we no longer want the vernacular text to be a simplified and plain expression; we assign the translators the task of bare translation, never rewriting or proposing changes for approval by Rome. And I agree! But the prior, contrary view of the role the translators should take was (1) widely held and backed up by the relevant documents, such as
Comme le prevoit, (2) approved at the time by the authorities in Rome, and (3) squarely within the spirit of the changes the Consilium was in the process of effecting for the global Church.
I think we can do what Bl. John Paul did in
Liturgiam Authenticam and reject that previous view without accusing those who held it of idiocy or bad intent.
).