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Post by Los Leandros on Sept 12, 2011 10:37:37 GMT
How disappointing to see that those greast defenders of the Catholic Church, RTE & the FG/ACP Priest, Tony Flannery, dont approve of the new Mass translation. After RTE's puerile News report, the Daily Mail has an equally moronic commentary in today's paper. They're concern is really touching. I almost shed a tear. Tony say's he's going to " defy " the Vatican. God, what heroism !. Truly a Priest to be proud of.
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Post by Los Leandros on Sept 12, 2011 10:53:02 GMT
Sorry, missing words from original " Subject " above - Approve of.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 12, 2011 11:20:57 GMT
The Irish edition of the SUNDAY TIMES had similar witterings from Fr Flannery on the front page (it did "balance" the story with comments by Bishop John McAreavy of Dromore, but those were inside the paper and after Fr Flannery had not only been given first shot at the reader but had got in a dismissive remark about McAreavy. Interestingly, I notice Flannery claimed that translating "pro multis" as "for many" is heretical in itself as distinct from open to a heretical reading (i.e. that Jesus died only for the elect, which is heresy; the real explanation is that He died for all - "for the many" would be a possible translation - and that the Sacrifice is only efficacious for those who choose to accept it. "For many" contains both these meanings - "for all" can be read in the orthodox sense or as implying that all will inevitably be saved). THis of course implies that the Latin Rite contained heresy for centuries (and indeed that the official Latin text of the Novus Ordo does so as well). When the point is made to him that the Gospel text says "for many" Flannery replies that since the Gospels are written in Greek and Jesus spoke Aramaic or Hebrew, we don't know the exact words He used. The Evangelist should be presumed to know Jesus' meaning better than Fr Flannery. Incidentally, I wonder what would have happened/did happen back in the day to a priest who publicly announced that he would not accept the NO and would say only the Tridentine Rite? HOw likely is it that Fr Flannery will get the same treatment?
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Post by losleandros on Sept 12, 2011 14:05:44 GMT
Absolutely right hibernicus. Fr. Flannery & gang make it extremely difficult to display ones Christian charity. They actually seem to believe that they are some kind of cutting edge/brave theologans. What's brave about licking up to the anti-Catholic media. At least Ian Paisley was honest about his anti-Catholicism.
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Post by brencel on Sept 12, 2011 15:35:08 GMT
Surely no one on this forum is “happy” with the new translation. Many will put up with it, yes it has some good points, but let no one forget the problems as highlighted by Rita Ferrone in the excerpts below: “There are many places in the new translation where the words simply don’t make sense in English. On the First Sunday of Advent, we pray that we may “run forth with righteous deeds.” What does that mean? Many expressions sound pompous: “profit our conversion,” “the sacrifice of conciliation,” “an oblation pleasing to your almighty power.” “Some prayer texts are simply bewildering, such as this one from Preface VIII for Sundays in Ordinary Time: For when your children were scattered afar by sin, through the Blood of your Son and the power of the Spirit, you gathered them again to yourself, that a people, formed as one by the unity of the Trinity, made the Body of Christ and the temple of the Holy Spirit, might, to the praise of your manifold wisdom, be manifest as the Church. What is the main point? It is hard to tell. We are wandering in a dense forest of theological and biblical allusions here. There are traps for the unwary, too. If the speaker is not careful to separate the first line from the second and join the second with the third, separating them from the first, he ends up suggesting that the Blood of Christ and the power of the Spirit are instrumental in scattering God’s children. Even read well, this prayer will likely lose all but its best-educated and most highly attentive hearers.” “In texts for oral proclamation, the length of sentences matters. When reading a text on paper, one can go back and examine it again. Not so for spoken prayers, especially those spoken on one particular day of the liturgical year, rather than those repeated throughout the year or liturgical season. A collect such as this one, which follows the Isaiah 54 reading in the Easter Vigil, offers a good example of what the new translation will bring us: Almighty, ever-living God, surpass for the honor of your name what you pledged to the patriarchs by reason of their faith and through sacred adoption increase the children of your promise so that what the saints of old never doubted would come to pass your Church may now see in great part fulfilled. That 53-word sentence makes sense if one has the leisure to study it and perhaps to draw a diagram. But the person in the pew does not have that luxury. She or he will hear this prayer once a year at most. An individual word or phrase may ring a bell. But the essential meaning of the prayer will be lost. As an act of oral communication, a text such as this cannot but fail for the vast majority of Catholics. Like so many of the newly translated prayers, it will come across as theo-babble, holy nonsense. Read the full article detailing additional problems: www.commonwealmagazine.org/it-doesn%E2%80%99t-sing
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Post by Los Leandros on Sept 12, 2011 16:15:05 GMT
The fact that the criticisms are coming from " Commonweal " & the usual suspects in Ireland - ACP, Gina Menzies, etc., makes the translation doubly welcome in my opinion. Anything that annoys these sources has to be good/authentic.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 12, 2011 16:50:11 GMT
The long prayers cited by Brencel above make clear and coherent sense to me. Remember we are not supposed to hear these prayers once and once only in our lives, but to hear them over and over again and to let their full implications sink in over time and with repeated hearings. Brencel's view assumes that liturgical language must be immediately and comprehensively understood by the most ignorant person present and that any complex "theological and biblical allusions" must be excluded because if some people 'get it' and others don't that is elitist and exclusivist. Language doesn't work like that - words have music- and to say it must work like that and only like that recalls those genteel provincials in the Victorian era putting cloths around the legs of the tables lest they disturb th balance of people's minds.
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Post by brencel on Sept 12, 2011 18:38:50 GMT
The fact that the criticisms are coming from " Commonweal " & the usual suspects in Ireland - ACP, Gina Menzies, etc., makes the translation doubly welcome in my opinion. Anything that annoys these sources has to be good/authentic. Attacking the source instead of the argument is a sure sign of weakness. Have you an argument?
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Post by brencel on Sept 12, 2011 18:45:39 GMT
The long prayers cited by Brencel above make clear and coherent sense to me. Remember we are not supposed to hear these prayers once and once only in our lives, but to hear them over and over again and to let their full implications sink in over time and with repeated hearings. Brencel's view assumes that liturgical language must be immediately and comprehensively understood by the most ignorant person present and that any complex "theological and biblical allusions" must be excluded because if some people 'get it' and others don't that is elitist and exclusivist. Language doesn't work like that - words have music- and to say it must work like that and only like that recalls those genteel provincials in the Victorian era putting cloths around the legs of the tables lest they disturb th balance of people's minds. People listening to the like of the excerpt below WILL have problems understanding it and when we consider children and teenagers…… “Some prayer texts are simply bewildering, such as this one from Preface VIII for Sundays in Ordinary Time: For when your children were scattered afar by sin, through the Blood of your Son and the power of the Spirit, you gathered them again to yourself, that a people, formed as one by the unity of the Trinity, made the Body of Christ and the temple of the Holy Spirit, might, to the praise of your manifold wisdom, be manifest as the Church. What is the main point? It is hard to tell. We are wandering in a dense forest of theological and biblical allusions here. There are traps for the unwary, too. If the speaker is not careful to separate the first line from the second and join the second with the third, separating them from the first, he ends up suggesting that the Blood of Christ and the power of the Spirit are instrumental in scattering God’s children. Even read well, this prayer will likely lose all but its best-educated and most highly attentive hearers.”
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Post by losleandros on Sept 12, 2011 20:08:35 GMT
brencel, the argument is self explanatory. The translation is excellent, sublime. To reiterate the fact that " Commonweal ", Fr. ( oop's sorry, Tony ) Flannery , Gina Menzies & the usual bores are in rebellion, makes it all the more sublime.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 12, 2011 21:32:49 GMT
I notice Brencel has not really answered my point - that we should not expect to "get it" all at once any more than we "get" the full meaning of the Bible the first time we read it. Is he really saying that there should be nothing in the Mass that children and teenagers cannot understand first time round. How funny that Joyce and Yeats attract such zealous fans who take delight in going over his works again and again, incantating them and drawing new layers of meaning from them as they reflect on their experience of life- but the ACP want God to explain himself in words of one syllable and use no concepts a teenager can't understand. Someone once spoke in parables which required thought and additional explanation to make them clear. Obviously unfit for the society of COMMONWEAL and the ACP.
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Post by brencel on Sept 12, 2011 22:22:27 GMT
I notice Brencel has not really answered my point - that we should not expect to "get it" all at once any more than we "get" the full meaning of the Bible the first time we read it. Is he really saying that there should be nothing in the Mass that children and teenagers cannot understand first time round. How funny that Joyce and Yeats attract such zealous fans who take delight in going over his works again and again, incantating them and drawing new layers of meaning from them as they reflect on their experience of life- but the ACP want God to explain himself in words of one syllable and use no concepts a teenager can't understand. Someone once spoke in parables which required thought and additional explanation to make them clear. Obviously unfit for the society of COMMONWEAL and the ACP. Hibernicus, are you implying that the Mass should be in parables? Personally I think we should leave them to the Gospels. The whole point of the Second Vatican Council permitting translations in the vernacular was to enable people to understand and to participate in what is going on during the Mass. Clearly, on that basis, the new translation is a step backwards. The English translation in use for the last 40 years is easier to understand than the new translation. In fact, any objective person would think that the language of the new translation is at least 40 years older than the translation it is replacing. Hibernicus, your likening the new translation to parables demonstrates my point exactly; the new translation is difficult to understand. This may be part of the idea of a parable, but should have no place in translating the Bible into English.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 12, 2011 23:33:52 GMT
The Mass is full of symbols and types which become apparent on repeated exposure (Listen to the Mass for the day regularly and the way in which, for example, Old Testament antiphons are drawn on for the lives of the saints, or the prophecies of Isaiah are applied to the coming of Jesus - or note how the Lent readings implicitly/explicitly parallel the Church going through Lent with the Israelites wandering in the wilderness and you will get the point.) It depends what you mean by understanding and participation. Your view seems to be that the congregation must be assumed to be idiots, that the text must be dumbed down to the level of the greatest idiot among them, and that nothing worthwhile is lost by so doing. The examples you give imply that a text cannot convey two ideas at once; the result of that (when the previous translation is compared with the Latin official text of the Novus Ordo) is that "difficult" concepts are quietly bowdlerised away. That's not translation, it's censorship. The point about the parables (and about the prophets and the Psalms) is that they are like delayed-release capsules, only releasing their full meaning through contemplation and repeated exposure to them. That is how the Mass is supposed to operate. Are you really saying a Bible translation should omit the parables? The new translation does have a certain degree of archaism, because the liturgy is supposed to have a certain timeless quality about it. It is not supposed to be of the moment and the moment only.
BTW connoisseurs of confusion should look in at the ACP blog. Soline Humbert has popped up to complain that the new translation wickedly uses "man" and "men" for all humanity, whereupon someone has pointed out that the old translation does exactly the same thing. (Of course her confusion is because so many priests quietly use "inclusive language" whether the text has it or not.
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Post by Los Leandros on Sept 13, 2011 8:29:16 GMT
It seems to me that in essence the ACP ( & the usual suspects, including those very committed Catholics in the Irish media, they're sudden interest in Catholic liturgy is touching, not to say suspect ) want to dumb down the beauty of the liturgy. They want it to conform to the demands of an irrational/ephemeral doctrinaire/intolerant feminism. Hibernicus makes a very good comparative point about poetry, & graduaslly uncovering the layers of meaning therein. I would'nt mind so much if the " liberals/feminists " were genuinely committed to beautiful liturgy, but they're sole motivation is political. Presumably Shakespeare should also be dumbed down because the language is out of kilter with current usage ( thank God ) & the ordinary plebs cant understand it. How patronising !.
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Post by brencel on Sept 16, 2011 16:17:10 GMT
hibernicus, Jesus told us to go out to the whole world and proclaim the Good News, not to make the Good News obscure and difficult to understand for the little children he loved. Pandering to the elite and scholarly is not proclaiming the Good News. It is strange to see people advocating a new Mass translation that is more difficult to understand than the readings. I can see why you compare the new Mass translation to the writings of Joyce and Yeats; both are studied and favoured by small select elites who have the time to study historic meanings, types, etc. However, when Jesus talked to the people, e.g. the Sermon on the Mount, it was clear and to the point so that all could understand. Not in ones wildest imagination could one imagine Jesus when talking to the people saying: “For when your children were scattered afar by sin, through the Blood of your Son and the power of the Spirit, you gathered them again to yourself, that a people, formed as one by the unity of the Trinity, made the Body of Christ and the temple of the Holy Spirit, might, to the praise of your manifold wisdom, be manifest as the Church.” This could have been translated properly and talk of symbols and types do not justify or excuse subjecting anyone to the above. The point about the parables (and about the prophets and the Psalms) is that they are like delayed-release capsules, only releasing their full meaning through contemplation and repeated exposure to them. That is how the Mass is supposed to operate. Are you really saying a Bible translation should omit the parables? The literal meaning and translation of the parables, prophets and psalms are easy to understand, unlike the new translation of the Mass; do not try to use the parables to justify obscuring what should be clear, the Mass. The new translation does have a certain degree of archaism, because the liturgy is supposed to have a certain timeless quality about it. You are entitled to your opinion, hibernicus. However, you can have "a certain timeless quality" by being in clear English. Archaic language makes the Mass look archaic, not timeless.
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