In the Nicene Creed we now recite at Sunday Mass, we say that Jesus Christ is consubstantial with the Father. Why the choice of this clumsy word? Surely, to say of one being with the Father or one in being with the Father better conveys the idea that the Father and Son are one God?

At the outset, let’s appreciate that it is the job of the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship to make certain that the new English translation of the original Latin texts of the liturgy accurately expresses the faith of the Catholic Church. The Congregation was not happy with the version we have been using for the past many years, considering it sloppy in places and too removed from the theological significance of the Latin terminology.

The Congregation must certainly be conscious of the fact that words can be interpreted in more ways than one, based on many centuries of knowledge about how heresies and errors arise when someone claims that the Church’s understanding of its own beliefs is erroneous. A swift glimpse of the early centuries reveals that heresies abounded about whether Jesus was truly God, since he was born of the Father and became human.

Heresies arose because ambiguous terms were applied to this big mystery and those who supported them claimed to be misunderstood by the Church authorities that condemned their errors. Remember that at this time theological terms were still undeveloped and imprecise.

At last, in 325, the Council of Nicaea declared that the Father and Son were of one substance, using the Greek term homoousion, which the Latin Church accepted as consubstantialis. This term was chosen from among others because it could refer to nothing less than Christ’s divinity. Of course, it is also true to say that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are consubstantial. The Latin text of the Nicene Creed has been recited in the Roman liturgy for centuries, keeping intact the canonised word consubstantialis.

Two dictionaries I looked in, the Concise Oxford Dictionary and Webster’s Universal Dictionary, define consubstantial as the three divine persons of the Trinity being of the same substance. Both accept the word as specific to theology. Perhaps the Congregation for Divine Worship wants to keep it that way, maybe fearing that any new way to express the concept might be misunderstood and neglect the word’s hallowed historical meaning.