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Lost in Translation: The English Language and the Catholic Mass (Liturgical Press Academic, 2017) is the latest work by Fr Gerald O'Collins, the prolific Australian Jesuit who taught for many years at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.
Here is an abbreviated version of the address Fr Brendan Byrne SJ delivered on Feb. 13 the book's launch in Melbourne.
LOST IN TRANSLATION by Gerald O'Collins and John Wilkins: The English Language and the Catholic Mass.
(Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press Academic, 2017).
This book with John Wilkins is Gerald O'Collins' 69th. If we were to think of his books as ships, they would amount to a sizable navy for a middle power. Many of them are weighty tomes of serious original scholarship. Within the naval image, these would be battleships, aircraft carriers or other large ships. This work is more in the nature of smaller but nonetheless necessary craft. We might think of it as a patrol boat or frigate or, perhaps, a guided missal destroyer.
But this work is not out to destroy — though O'Collins, it is clear, would happily see the 2010 translation given decent Christian burial. If Lost in Translation contains a serious critique, it does so entirely "within the family," so to speak. It is not taking pot shots at anyone from outside.
The facts are soberly presented, especially in the historical survey of British journalist John Wilkins, in the opening chapter. Then Gerry takes over, summoning up his vast armory of talent — historical, linguistic, theological, and literary — in a penetrating analysis of all the documents relevant to the case.
Of course, as in all stories, there are heroes and villains — wearers, as in Westerns, of hats white and black — though, in the latter case, the hats here for the most part tend to be purple or red.
Wilkins and O'Collins simply recite the facts, allowing us readers to judge for ourselves the motives of the major players involved.
However, O'Collins is not here playing the man — and, yes, they are all men. He is reaching behind the polemics to state a case for rejection of the translation introduced — or rather imposed — in 2011, and doing so on two grounds in particular: first, the theological and pastoral intent of the Second Vatican Council; second, a theory of translation, with a pedigree he shows to reach back behind George Steiner, T.S. Eliot, Ronald Knox, and Cardinal Newman, to Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages, and even to the Patristic era.
If it is still acceptable to speak of "trump cards" these days. Let me mention two that O'Collins slaps down on the table: Here is Thomas Aquinas, no less, writing in a letter to Pope Urban IV:
It is … the task of the good translator, when translating material
dealing with the Catholic faith, to preserve the meaning but to
adapt the mode of expression, so that it is in harmony with the
idiom of the language into which he is translating.
And with, surely, some measure of understatement, the Angelic Doctor continues:
When anything expressed in one language is translated merely
word-for-word into another it will be no surprise if perplexity
Still more forceful is the fourth century writer Evagrius of Antioch, admired for his intelligence by St. Jerome, one hardly given to throw around admiration loosely:
A word-for-word translation from one language to another
(writes Evagrius) conceals the meaning and strangles it, even
as spreading couch grass [does to] a field of corn.
It will help perhaps at this point to recall, briefly, the chief facts:
The first document promulgated in Vatican II, at the end of its work in 1963, was the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium — a document that had received virtually unanimous approval from the attending bishops.
A central principle, stated repeatedly in the text, was the desirability of "full, conscious, and active participation in liturgical celebrations … by all the faithful." To achieve this aim, the document, while insisting that Latin was to be preserved, allowed "a wider use of the vernacular, whether in the Mass, the administration of the sacraments, or in other parts of the liturgy."
The preparation of translations into vernacular languages, the Council entrusted to the relevant bishops' conferences with the results of their labors requiring a simple "confirmation" from Rome.
In 1969 the Holy See issued an instruction to translators known by its French title, Comme le prévoit. It is one of the great merits of O'Collins' book that he has, in a sense, retrieved this document and called attention both to its origins — in a conference of experienced translators — and its guiding principles.
Comme le prévoit endorsed the responsibility of episcopal conferences for the translations; it set its face, to use O'Collins' words, against word for word translations, insisting that "the unit of meaning" is not the individual word but "the whole passage." It called attention to the propensity of Latin to pile up alliterative phrases and superlatives to increase the sense of invocation. It went on to warn that to do so in other languages may actually undermine the sense.
Guided by Comme le prévoi, the International Commission on the English Liturgy (known by its acronym ICEL), had by 1978 produced English translations of all the texts issued by Rome following the post-Vatican II revision of the Latin missal — and these translations came into common use.
They were not perfect; they were at times reductionist and banal. Witness, for example, the reduction of the biblical and poetic "from the rising of the sun to its setting" to "from the east to the west." However, they were, on the whole easy to recite, and they allowed for use on an ecumenical basis.
It was accepted, however, that work on the missal had to continue. ICEL circulated a revised version, with much heightened style, to bishops' conferences in 1992.
By and large, this fresh version received wide acceptance. A minority of US bishops, however, whose churchmanship very much reflected the centralizing and conservative ethos of Pope John Paul II, thought the product insufficiently literal.
Though the translation received the necessary two-thirds majority, their complaints found a ready ear in Rome. The upshot is that since 1998 the translation, the fruit of 13 years of ICEL's work, lies, as John Wilkins writes, somewhere on a shelf in Rome.
Behind this shelving of the 1998 translation lies a series of centralizing and heavy-handed developments vividly described by John Wilkins and reflected upon by O'Collins, notably, the disbanding of ICEL, and its recasting, away from the English-speaking bishops' conferences, to become an organ of the Congregation for Divine Worship. The extinguishing of any sense that ecumenical considerations had a role to play in the construction of the text.
Above all, there was the appearance of the instruction, Liturgiam Authenticam on March 28, 2001, mandating as Lost in Translation asserts, "extreme literalism in translation, even extending to syntax, rhythm, punctuation and capital letter."
In connection with this document, O'Collins quotes an American liturgical scholar, Peter Jeffery. While castigating it as "the most ignorant statement on liturgy ever issued by a modern Vatican congregation," Jeffery also detects in it "a sincere desire for a deeper sense of the sacred, a hunger to be connected with eternal reality, and a yearning to experience the mysterious holiness of God."
This of course is the ultimate aim that both sides in the controversy share and one that could be a source of reconciliation between them. The issue is how best to secure that aim in contemporary English.
Imposing technical theological terms such as "prevenient" or "consubstantial" (in place of "one in being") will not achieve it. It is hard to think of an uglier sounding word in English than "oblation." Today it sounds like a surgical procedure. Couldn't we leave it, then, to the medical profession to give it a home?
To say that Jesus, after his death and before his resurrection, descended into "Hell," rather than, "to the dead" — to announce their release and salvation — is simply to mislead the faithful and very likely to disturb them. Mystification is not the path to mystery but to alienation.
The Latin liturgical patrimony of the Roman church is a magnificent cultural construct. Having experienced it richly in my own youth, I reflect upon its near demise with no small nostalgia and regret. To translate it into a modern vernacular, while preserving that sense of transcendence and beauty, is an immense cultural task — perhaps the work of generations.
Our Anglican brethren managed with some success to do so in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. They had at their disposal the gifts of Thomas Cranmer and the language of Shakespeare, from which of course, English has moved on. They too, for over a century, have wrestled with the challenge of preserving this patrimony while effectively communicating with people today.
Roman Catholics are surely not doing ourselves a service by turning our backs on the experience, guidance, and advice they have, fraternally, to offer.
After exposing the severe limitations of the principles of translation that inspired Liturgiam Authenticam and its dissonance with a broad tradition reaching back to Patristic times, O'Collins in the later chapters subjects the instruction's imprint in the 2010 translation to painstaking and meticulous critique, and also to comparison with the 1998 version, still lying readily to hand on the web.
Many may be thinking: in the face of the massive crises — of poverty, disease, dislocation of peoples — confronting the world at large, and the issue of clerical sexual abuse, considered by many to be the greatest crisis confronting the Roman church since the Reformation is it right or appropriate to be so concerned about liturgy?
After all, we may presume that no human beings or animals were injured in the implementation of the 2010 missal. But, when the chips are down, the church's core business is worship. And worship is what the church — and all churches — alone can provide. If the church doesn't get its worship right, that will soon redound negatively upon its proclamation and living out of the gospel, including the works of justice and mercy.
Worship shapes people's image of God. If they are led to address the deity in language fitting for a Byzantine emperor, they will imagine and think of God — and their relationship with God — in similarly oppressive terms.
If devout elderly faithful, who have spent many years in blameless and often heroic service of God and their neighbors, are constantly reminded that they have behind them a lifetime of "grievous" sinning, through their own "most grievous fault" — though how one could "sin" without its being one's "fault" is not clear —if these damning superlatives are laid upon them, instead of being consoled by God's mercy, they will be oppressed — surely a serious injustice.
Lost in Translation will be painful reading for current members of ICEL and not a few bishops of the English-speaking world. O'Collins is superbly equipped for his task: armed early in life with a first-rate degree in Classics, a biblical scholar manqué, a systematic theologian with a life-time's grasp of the tradition, a craftsman of written English, a flair for journalism: he mounts a powerful challenge.
Brendan Byrne, SJ, Emeritus Professor of New Testament at Jesuit Theological College, Melbourne Australia and a former member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission.
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