U.S. bishops vote to push social teaching

National Catholic Reporter, July 3, 1998 by Patricia Lefevere

Bishop Sullivan of Brooklyn said he wondered whether Rome could distinguish between "mature collaboration" and "authority." He called the Vatican action a matter of "sheer incompetency" that undermines "the enormous work and skill of this conference."

Sullivan said the veto offends the American sense of fairness. "We're not going to impose U.S. democracy on the church. Everybody knows that. Yet there are guys here who think we have to defend the Holy See at every turn."

Sullivan saw the Vatican's intervention in the process as an affront to the U.S. episcopal conference and as "undermining the role of the local church."

For Auxiliary Bishop Emil Wcela of Rockville Centre, N.Y., the critical issues preceding the 1998 meeting were the legitimacy of a bishops' conference to oversee a translation and its competency to approve the translation. The fact that the U.S. bishops received no guidelines for the translation of biblical text for use in the liturgy until some five years after they had asked the Vatican to approve revised liturgical texts is "disappointing," he said.

Similar concerns were revealed in comments made about translations during the recent Asian Bishops Synod, he told NCR. But Wcela, a Biblical scholar who is a member of the bishops' Committee on Liturgy and on its Ad Hoc Committee on Review of Scripture Translations, said that most bishops are eager to move on and get the new lectionary out.

"It will not be everything we had hoped for, but a compromise is better than what we had," Wcela said.

The new lectionary incorporates a revised translation of the New Testament, available since 1986, and retains the 1970 New American Bible translation of the Old Testament, including the psalms.

In cases where the original text was not gender specific, certain words and phrases (such as "whoever" and "anyone") were used in previous translations approved by the bishops to achieve greater inclusivity. But Rome insisted on more literal translations of scriptural texts in preparing the revised edition of the lectionary.

While few bishops seemed delighted with the compromise and few were willing to talk about what had gone on in their closed door meetings prior to the June open session, most said they expected a new lectionary on their altars by Nov. 29.

When presenters of the bishops' paper on Catholic social teaching announced that a Spanish version of the text would be available within a few weeks, Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk of Cincinnati coyly posed what he termed "a friendly inquiry."

"Do we have conference principles to follow when we translate into Spanish?" The response came in loud laughter.