Rome takes a welcome step back

From the editor's desk

The Tablet

Rome takes a welcome step back 

13 September 2017

It may seem like a relatively small detail, but the change to Canon Law on liturgical translations, authorised by Pope Francis this week, is hugely symbolic. It represents a fundamental adjustment to the relationship between the periphery and the centre in the Catholic Church – between local bishops’ conferences all over the world and the Vatican. The latter made what the secular world would call a power-grab in the late 1990s, when bishops’ conferences were deprived of their right to approve translations of the Latin Mass into the vernacular, a right which had previously been given unqualified approval by the Second Vatican Council. Being the primary authority responsible for forms of worship in a particular diocese is an important element in what it means to be a bishop.
In the English-speaking world the result of this power-grab was the scrapping of a very good translation into English – readable, poetic, understandable and accessible – and its replacement by a clumsy attempt to render the basic Latin text into word-for-word equivalents in English, which was none of the above. That is the version now in use, and priests and people gritted their teeth in a spirit of unenthusiastic and even resentful obedience as they became used to it week by week. It is an unlovely thing, palpably the product of a committee predominantly made up of non-English-speaking cloth-ears.

The Pope has overridden an earlier instruction which made the Vatican itself both the initiator and final arbiter of any proposed new translation, relegating bishops’ conferences, in spite of the clear intentions of Vatican II, to the status of spectators. One curious aspect of this affair is why they did not protest louder, or at all. But this was the era when all dissent from, or even discussion of, the actions of the Vatican was regarded as disloyalty to the papacy. The price of trying to find equivalent words in English to the words in Latin often resulted in using inelegant Latinised English words whose meaning was obscure, and pronunciation difficult. Instead of word for word, the right method of translation intended by Vatican II was meaning-for-meaning. It may not be literal, but it facilitates communication.
The Pope’s new decree does not mean starting again. There is a perfectly good English translation already approved by all the English-speaking bishops’ conferences. Each bishops’ conference, or preferably all of them together, can now authorise that earlier version for use. And so they should. There is really no great virtue in liturgical uniformity. There is no reason why the two versions should not be allowed to exist side by side. There are at least two other rites authorised for use already, including the Extraordinary Form known as the Tridentine rite, and the rite used in the Anglican Ordinariate, in addition to the Ordinary Form celebrated in Latin.
Indeed, an appropriate response to the latest papal decree would be to encourage greater use of the Latin text in parish worship. Congregations already know the English words by heart, so the original reason for preferring the Mass in English, to aid understanding, no longer applies. Like good English, Latin is a cultural treasure well worth preserving.