Here is the link to Fr Z's original posts. The comments are particularly helpful. I reproduce a few below:
wdtprs.com/blog/2011/03/dissident-irish-priests-whinge-about-new-translation-again-after-meeting-with-irish-bishops/#commentsanilwang says:
28 March 2011 at 3:34 pm
“The guidelines state that they should be ‘comprehensible even to the faithful who have received no special intellectual formation’. This is clearly not the case.”
There’s a difference between being understandable by the laity and having the laity think they understand when they don’t. As a child, and long into adulthood, I thought the Catholic faith exposed Deism because of such “easy to understand language”.
Take the creed for instance. What does “one in being with the Father” mean? I understood at as meaning “Jesus was someone who is with the Father” in the same sense as “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you”. If I had been introduced to the proper translation “consubstantial with the Father”, I would have known that I had no idea what I just confessed to and be forced to ask questions or look it up.
There are hundreds of places in the current translaton where this sort of “help” is similarly harmful. I don’t know if the new translation would have prevented by faulty understanding (I was very poorly catechized and was not even told I should be confirmed or that all religions are not the same), from the little I’ve read, I am confident that it would have made me see that I didn’t know the Catholic faith as well as I thought I did. That knowledge would have forced me off the fence. I would have to make a choice, to stay willfully in ignorance, to learn and accept the faith, or to learn and reject the faith.
There are currently far too many people in my position who think they are faithful Catholics but are nothing of the sort, they’re only faithful to their misunderstandings of the Catholic faith. The current translations (and the secularized church buildings and music) are chiefly to blame.
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cothrige says:
28 March 2011 at 4:09 pm
comprehensible even to the faithful who have received no special intellectual formation
I am curious just what this is from? I did a google search on the phrase and it only came back here and another blog. Is this from a Church document? If so, it confuses me, and clearly isn’t itself “comprehensible even to the faithful who have received no special intellectual formation.”
How, for instance, if this is intended to be understood in anything like a literal sense, could it ever be implemented? The Our Father, in its standard use everyday, doesn’t meet this qualification. Neither does the Hail Mary or just about any other prayer in the Church. I would like to think we should expect to be lifted up by the prayer of the Church, and led into greater understanding of the sacred, rather than having the prayers never challenge us or require any “special intellectual formation.”
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Giambattista says:
28 March 2011 at 4:10 pm
The dissident’s say “we have reservations as to their theological veracity” in regard to the many/all issue.
I wonder if Byzantines Catholics and Orthodox know there are theological problems with the way they do the Divine Liturgy (i.e. they use “for many”)? Maybe the Irish ACP should go down to Mt. Athos and straighten them out. :-) [Do the Athonite abbots still administer corporal punishment? - HIB]
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Henry Edwards says:
28 March 2011 at 6:25 pm
frjim: Clearly the VC2010 [the corrected translation being implemented this coming Advent] is a badly damaged product.
By the time I’d read this allegation for perhaps the hundredth time, parroted repetitively back and forth among the relative handful regular participants at a certain pretty terrible blog devoted to dissent from all Vatican decisions, I’d begun to assume that there must be some serious basis for it.
But then I adopted as a Lenten project this year to print for each day the three propers — collect, prayer over the gifts, and postcommunion — in Latin-on-the-left, new-English-translation-on-the-right format on a card to carry around in my prayer book, using all three as multiple closing prayers for each hour of the Liturgy of the Hours that day. Thus reflecting both studiously and prayerfully on these new translations a half dozen times during the day.
So far, I’ve compiled all these for every day from Ash Wednesday through Saturday of this Third Week of Lent. That’s 25 days, thus 75 consecutive propers that will appear in the new English Roman Missal. Having for some time been familiar with most of them, in the original Latin and (in many cases) in Father Z’s slavishly literal translations.
Thus far I have not found a single example of arguably inaccurate translation or infelicitous English expression. Not a single one that fails to seem beautiful in its own way. Not one that fails to read smoothly. Above all, not one that falls short of such enormous improvement over the lame-duck ICEL version imposed on us for forty years as impugn the sincerity of anyone who claims otherwise. Although, admittedly, I occasionally see that I could have improved one a bit further if the Vatican had had the prescience to consult me. Not to think of what Father Z could have done.
But if these 75 consecutive prayers from the new Roman Missal were a scientific random sample, then I would be forced conclude that these “badly damaged product” whiners were either mendacious liars or were so ill-informed that an ordinary sense of self-respect ought to keep them quiet about it.
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amenamen says:
28 March 2011 at 7:33 pm
This cannot go unchallenged:
(“There was no consultation with either priests or people and this is contrary to the teaching of the Second Vatican Council on the Church.”)
There was consultation. There was consultation for many years. There was endless consultation. Everything that the ACP is saying now has been said before. They are not saying anything new. Every single “objection” that they are raising at this late date has been raised before, and it has all been carefully considered. In fact, there has been so much consultation, among priests and laity, that all of the “objections” raised by the ACP were rejected years ago. They were rejected with conviction. They were rejected in detail. Please read Liturgicam Authenticam. It was published exactly ten years ago, on March 28, 2001.
(“While the bishops listened to our concerns, we regret to say that, judging by their response, they failed to take on board what we said …We do not regard this as an appropriate form of listening or dialogue. “)
This is a remarkable admission: “The bishops listened to our concerns.” Even now, the bishops continue to listen to the same few people saying the same things. What remarkable patience. But the ACP does not consider this listening “an appropriate form of listening.” Evidently, it is not true “consultation” unless they agree with the ACP? [Very true, that's exactly how the ACP think - HIB]
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jflare says:
29 March 2011 at 12:07 am
That statement about “consultation” has me scratching my head, as it appears, everyone else is doing. I would’ve thought that, if these REALLY want something based on wide consultation, they would’ve rebelled against the ICEL translation decades gone. For my understanding, THAT had far less consultation involved than the new one did.
Consultation must only be useful if they can get the answer they want.
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Pachomius says:
29 March 2011 at 9:37 am
How is this language more difficult for the Faithful than, off the top of my head:
1. The doctrine of the Trinity;
2. Transubstantiation
3. Consubstantiality of the Father and the Son;
4. The Filioque understood as an expression of the mediation of Spirit through the Son, and therefore a Single Procession (have I got this right?);
5. Dyothelitism and Duophysitism, versus the heresies of monophystism, monthelitism, and monenergism (can anyone explain the last two in layman’s terms?)?
Surely, to be a Catholic requires a certain degree of “intellectual formation” to ‘get’ some deeply complicated Greek philosophy?
“I never attend the NO, but I’m seriously considering it on the first Sunday in Advent because I want to witness justice being done”
The Mass is not about ‘justice being done’ any more than it is about you or me. It is about one thing alone.
PhilipNeri:
“Their fantasies of “Dancing a New Church into Being” are sinking faster than Mee-Maw’s stockings at the last Hootenanny Mass.”
No, no – it’s the Divine Liturgy of St Cybele the Tambourinist.
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