Mass text betrays Vatican II

by Graham Wilson, Cape Town

The odd, ungrammatical English in certain parts of the Mass now in use in South Africa is just the start of a complete re-translation of all of the Mass using this strange dialect of English.

No other country apart from our own has implemented these changes yet. Having seen the approved Eucharistic prayers that are to come, I am convinced that the consequences of this new fashion in liturgical translation are quite dire and far removed from what the Second Vatican Council wanted to achieve in its teaching on the reform of the liturgy.

Firstly, the dignity of the Mass in English is under threat because it is in grave danger of becoming a parody of its Latin counterpart. In their insistence on an absolutely literal translation of the Latin, the new generation of liturgical authorities have ditched the noble simplicity in the rites demanded by the Council. They have this odd idea that if the new English words sound old-fashioned or slightly peculiar, the people will regard them as some sort of “holy” language that is more suited to liturgical prayer than formal spoken English. Instead, the new English merely makes the Mass pompous and ridiculous in places.

The second threat strikes even deeper to the very heart of the Mass as the prayer of the worshipping community. It is the clear and certain teaching of the Council that any liturgical change must, before anything else, aim at achieving the full, active and conscious participation by everyone in worship. Any translation that does not enhance our participation is not in harmony with this teaching, is defective and fails as a prayer (see the critique of the new translation by Bishop Donald Trautman, the chairman of the US bishops’ liturgy commission: www.eriercd.org/pdf/translations.pdf).

The new translation fails for me because, sadly, it distances itself from me, using an English that is not mine, that to me as a first-language English speaker sounds unnatural, pompous, ostentatious and—saddest of all—phoney.