No, but I do like Latin

Monsignor Daniel Gallagher

Ok, I’ve already blown my cover.  I’m a liberal.  I’ll admit it.  I listen to NPR.  And this past week, listening to NPR’s All Things Considered with Audie Cornish, I heard an American accent tackle—syllable by stammering syllable-- Cuique nostrum necesse est proficere, propriam scilicet vitam emendare. Hi quidem quadraginta dies iuvant vitia vincere.
It was Monsignor Daniel Gallagher, one of the Pope’s seven official Latinists, talking about the challenges of putting the Holy Father’s Twitter-thoughts into Latin—one of about 40 languages in which they tweet. 
Now, I don’t tweet.  I don’t even text.  “Liberal” as I am, I am my own kind. I happen to be a liberal who likes Latin—though not for Mass.  That just doesn’t make any sense.  I like Latin like my sister-in-law likes Crossword puzzles or like my nephew likes Jeopardy.  I like to play with it.  I like it for fun.  I also do like it for its own elegant sounds and even more elegant syntax.  (When I say “sounds”—I follow the Ecclesiastical or Italian pronunciation rather than the German.  It never made sense to me why you pronounce an ancient language once spoken on the Italian peninsula like a constipated Berliner, but hey—that’s academia.  Norman Cantor and I used to have wars of the wills over pronunciation when I was one of his students, though he always praised my Latin and said that it gave me away as an alumnus of Jesuit Education.  Years later I met a Princeton contemporary of Cantor’s and he told me that Cantor couldn’t do his Latin to save his life.  Probably true because I am not really that good of a Latinist myself.  I would have said alumni back there if spell-check hadn’t corrected me.)    In any event, I recently served on a search committee for a Church Music Director and I showed off by asking him if he was familiar with the patrimony of music in the western Church and could we expect occasionally to hear Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus or Caesar Franks’ Panis Angelicus.  I mean, I like this music and a little Latin works in Church, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of prayer.  I mean prayer, not the sentimental slop-shop of pious feelings engendered by an unintelligible libretto combined with a clerical corps de ballet swishing through rubrics that exist for rubric’s sake.  As I have said before, if you like that sort of thing, go see Tosca.  You can leave after Act 1 and you won’t be deluding yourself into thinking that your aesthetic indulgence has anything to do with God.
But back, for a moment, to unintelligible libretto.  God bless Monsignor Gallagher, but I had to listen to him eight times to transcribe a single sentence.  The Latin is perfect—or certainly better than anything I could do.  But if we are going to use this language, we need to pronounce it with flow, not by climbing each syllable like it was a rock-wall. I mean the poor minor prelate was breathless after a minute. 
It reminded me of attending Mass at a little Church in rural Virginia one Monday morning.  I had stayed over at a friend’s the night before and we went off to weekday Mass at his parish the next morning.   About 40 people were there—mostly mantilla-draped soccer-moms with their home-schooled children.  Should have been a clue.  Father came out and began In Nomine Patris… The Mass was in Latin.  It was the Novus Ordo, but in Latin.  And so we listened to Father struggle through his Missal, syllable by breathless syllable, for thirty minutes.  He never took his eyes off the book—how could he: he was at sea in a language he had no idea what it meant.  You could tell from where he gasped for breath or how he clumped words (in his case strings of syllables) together that he had no idea, or at least no clear idea, of what he was saying.  On the way out of Mass I said to him.  “Father, I understood you perfectly, but then I am an ex-Latin teacher.  And I am sure God, who reads the heart, understood you.  But no one else in that Church—including you—had any idea of what you were “praying.”  I wished him luck.  But this is not what the Mass is about. 
Maybe I lived in Rome too long and it is easier for the Italians to pronounce the Latin more naturally.  And I don’t think I could to better than Monsignor Gallagher.  That isn’t my point.  My point is that this is the language for prayer only if it is a language that is natural for you.  Pray from the heart, not from a text.  There was a day when the Papal Latinist—an American—spoke Latin as fluently and naturally as he did his native American English.  Father Reginald Foster, a Discalced Carmelite Friar from Milwaukee, served as a papal Latin scholar from the late 1960’s until health issues forced his return to the United States in 2009.  We should do a few blog entries on Father Reginald as he is one of the great characters of Papal Rome, famous for his quips and bon mots that are anything but reverent towards supercilious churchmen.  Maybe before long I can get around to an entry or two that captures the gift this man has been to the Church and to those of us who refuse to take the Church as seriously as some would like.       

 

The "New Translation" of the Mass I--some initial comments

An illustration from the

Central Middle Ages,

c. 10th century, of the

Roman Mass. 

I went to Mass this morning in a parish in New Jersey and the priest was explaining a bit about the new translation of the Mass that will be introduced on November 27^th.  There is a lot of interest on this matter—I have been asked to speak about it perhaps five times in the last three months.  Of course, I approach it from a historical point of view but I am qualified to make some comments on the translation itself.  Let me just give you some background.             
     I am old enough to remember—and remember well—the “old mass” we had before the council.  I labored to memorize the nonsense syllables  Suscipiat Dominus sacrificium de manibus tuis, ad laudem et gloriam nominis sui, ad utilitatem quoque nostram, totiusque Ecclesiae suae sanctae.  Later on I would go on to study Latin (for six years), teach Latin, and now use Latin regularly in my historical research and writing.  But at the time—for a ten year old altar boy—they were nonsense syllables and only one of many such paragraphs of nonsense syllables we had to learn to serve at the altar.  I, for one, was delighted when somewhere about my junior year of high school, English slowly began to work its way into the liturgy.  The initial translations were awkward at times, actually somewhat makeshift, but at least they rendered the mass intelligible to a kid who—at that time—was in third year Latin in a Jesuit Prep School (and who had scored a 99 on the New York State Regents Exam in Latin) but still found the prayers of the Mass a stretch. 
     In 1970—when I was in college—Paul VI issued a radically revised Ordo Missae (Order of Mass for those whose Latin may not have scored a 99 on the Regents Exam).  It was a radical revision of the Mass.  At the time they told us it was the “same mass, different words.”  Baloney!!!  I have always maintained that the only people who understand the “New Mass” (the Ordo of Paul VI)  are those who are opposed to it.   There is a radically different theology of the Mass in the revisions of the 1970 Missal.  Personally, I think it is a healthy revision as it has helped return the Mass to the Patristic Theology of the Eucharist by purifying it (and I use that term deliberately) of the late medieval accretions which gave us a very faulty theology, particularly a highly flawed and only marginally orthodox theology of Sacrifice which implied, at least in the popular imagination, that Christ was sacrificed again and again each time the priest “offered” Mass.  This is contrary to both Scripture and Tradition—Tradition being the deposit of faith that has been held from the beginning and articulated in the teaching of the Fathers of the Church.  Anyway, not to get sidetracked, under the guidance of the remarkable and earthily holy Archbishop Denis Hurley, a committee known as ICEL (International Committee for English in the Liturgy) prepared a standard translation of the Latin Text of Paul VI’s missal into English. It was, arguably, a bland—even pedestrian—translation and needed an update particularly in the presidential prayers which the priest recites.  It was not a bad translation, just a bland one.  But then, when one considers the importance of the Liturgy as our primary experience as a Church of the Grace of God, a bland translation is a bad one.  
     The principle on which the original translation was based is called “dynamic equivalency.”  In dynamic equivalency the translator takes the key thought from the passage in the original language and asks himself or herself “how is this best expressed in the ‘target language’.”  In other words, how would an English speaker say  “Suscipiat Dominus sacrificium de manibus tuis, ad laudem et gloriam nominis sui, ad utilitatem quoque nostram, totiusque Ecclesiae suae sanctae.”     This is a challenge for several reasons.  First of all Americans, English, New Zealanders, Scots, Australians, South Africans, Indians, Canadians, and the Irish all speak the somewhat same language very differently.  While we usually understand each other, there are crucial differences in vocabulary and even grammar.   But there is an even bigger problem and that is that the host language, Latin, is structured very differently than is English.  The “syntax” of Latin—that is the grammatical structure (which is far more than grammar) is radically different.  English prefers short sentences—subject, predicate, object.  We will tolerate a single subordinate clause.  Not Latin!  Latin builds a sentence like a shipyard builds a warship: clause upon clause, subordinate ideas towering high over the main thought, not only expressing an idea but ladling it with nuances.  Latin being an inflected language does not depend for clarity on structure in the way that does English (or the modern Romance languages.)  Good Latin translation requires that you disassemble the sentence and rebuild it into a paragraph, or at least several sentences.  It can be done and done well.  During the Anglican Reformation, the architect of the Book of Common Prayer, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, did a magnificent job of translating many of the collects from the old Sarum and York Rites into beautiful English Prayers.  Over the centuries successive editions of the Prayer book have been able to update these translations while retaining their elegant style.  Unfortunately the ICEL work was more of a “dog’s dinner” to use an Irish aphorism.  The translations worked but they have not inspired.  There has been a need from the beginning for new and better translations.  
     In 2000 Pope John Paul issued a new Latin edition of the Roman Missal.  He did not substantially alter the Rite of Paul VI.  The Rite is left unchanged and the Latin phrasing is still intact.  However, he mandated a new translation, not only for English but for many languages.  We will talk about the reasons for this new translation in a future post.  Did he get the new and better translation?  Well, new yes.  Better? In some ways, yes.  The scriptural allusions of the original Latin text come out more markedly in the new translation.  Overall, however, it is neither what we needed—a translation into an elegant but usable English—nor is it even a more faithful translation.  More on that next time. 

New Translation of the Mass--A Mixed Reivew

Mass in the Grotto at Lourdes, always a simple,
straightforward, faith-filled, and prayerful experience

I had been planning on returning to the theme of the Gregorian Reform of the 11^th century as we still have considerable material there to look at, but the last several days I attended a workshop on the upcoming implementation of the new Roman Missal, famous (or infamous) for its revised translation of the Latin Prayers.  I have not been a fan of this new translation.  I  believe that the principles for translation laid out in Liturgiam Authenticam are flawed.  Anyone who speaks several languages (which admittedly excludes most Americans) knows that you cannot translate directly from one language to another.  Each language has its own idioms that are woven into its daily use and which the language into which an idea is being translated becomes confused by these idioms which make no sense in the new language.  As an example: I remember once saying in Italian to some European friends of mine: “well, that’s a horse of a different color.”  They stared at me blankly.   What did horses have to do with the subject at hand?  Of course, the liturgical texts are not replete with idioms (ah, but the scriptural texts, especially the New Testament ones, are).  Another problem is syntax.  I remember from Latin III (I go all the way through Latin VI) doing Cicero.  What a nightmare.  That boy could talk.  I remember one sentence, I think it was in the Catilinarian addresses, that had 105 words in fourteen separate phrases.  I would hate to have had to diagram that sentence.  Latin and English are constructed very differently and it is not easy to be faithful to the syntax and still have good English.  I was pleased to note, however, that in the collects and prayers which the presenter showed us, the final product was actually quite beautifully translated—very rich in its language and elegant in its construction.  I hope these examples are typical and not exceptions to the Rule.  I was actually somewhat soothed after the presentations.  Then we had Mass using the new translation and it all fell apart.  The Presider used Eucharistic Prayer III and it was horrendous—clumsy, almost impossible to render intelligibly much less prayerfully. 
     I intend over the next few months, interspersed with entries on the various Church Reforms in History—the Gregorian, Innocentian, Protestant, etc.—to do a number of postings on the upcoming liturgical revisions.  But what struck me most about this workshop—not only from the presenter but from a number of officially produced videos featuring Bishop Arthur Serratelli who chairs the Committee on the Liturgy for the American Bishops Conference, but also Monsignor James Moroney from the Federation of Diocesan Liturgy Committees, is that the emphasis is definitely on ritual/text rather than on a prayerful celebration.  These texts will be very difficult to pray, especially aloud.  They do not facilitate one’s entering into the deepest chambers of one’s heart and expressing what is found there.  The Presider will have difficulty in moving beyond an externalized fixation on the words; the congregants will have difficulty in absorbing the words much less in allowing the words to move the individual to prayerful attention (I won’t say recollection).   That is unfortunate as the texts, at least the ones we were shown, are deeply beautiful and rich but it would take a Shakespearean elocutionist to say them with any measure of poise.  It may be that the texts are too rich to use in vocal prayer.  I will need to look at Eucharistic Prayer III in more detail to see what caused it to come across as somewhat of a hodgepodge (to use an American idiom rather than the Irish: a dog’s dinner) of so many disparate elements.               
     English, at least American English, is a clean and simple language.   We tend to favor short sentences and we are sparing—perhaps too sparing—on both poetical imagery and literary (in this case scriptural) illusions.  We pray openly and frankly.  I agree that we need to use an elevated tone of language—but we are not given to the verbal baroque.  Read Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s addresses at Gettysburg or his second inaugural, Franklin Roosevelt “Day that will go down in infamy,” or John Kennedy’s address to the Houston Ministerium or his Inaugural Address.  Our English is short, crisp, current. That is how we know how to speak.  For that matter, read Winston Churchill’s addresses to the British Nation during World War II and you will find that same terse and to the point language.  It is eminently suited for prayer—and for those with the mindset of English speakers, far more suited than the courtly baroque of the new translation.  For those for whom prayer is words and pomp  and taking a stance before God, it might work.   For those for whom prayer is standing in the Presence of God, naked in one’s own truth with open heart and open hands—this ain’t going to cut it.  The very blessing of this new translation is its curse.  It will make our ritual less bland but I fear it will make our prayer more stilted