Lost in translation: the bishops, the Vatican & the English Liturgy

Commonweal, Dec 2, 2005 by John Wilkins

Meanwhile, Pope John Paul II was exerting his iron will over the church. The ace in Rome's hand was the ability to appoint almost all the bishops in the world. In this way national conference after national conference was deliberately shunted toward the conservative side. The tendency was to choose "safe" men. As the effects of the policy took hold in the United States, some bishops of the American conference, which had formerly been so supportive of ICEL, began to take their distance.

They tuned in to a growing sense of alarm that many Catholics no longer had a strong sense of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Surveys in the United States seemed to back this up, and the younger conservative American bishops began to point the finger at ICEL for allegedly underplaying the sense of the sacred. ICEL's more colloquial tone, they argued, was making congregations less respectful.

The revised missal with its much heightened style had been circulated in 1992 to the bishops' conferences that owned ICEL. At their own request, the bishops were voting on it in eight segments, to avoid a repeat of 1973 when they had been hit with two thousand pages at once. Most conferences accepted the revision by overwhelming majorities. Among the American bishops, though, there were some thirty who judged the translation of the Order of the Mass not sufficiently literal. When the American conference met in Chicago in 1995, this group was determined to reject the text. It was a tense, contentious discussion. The revised missal needed a two-thirds majority to pass; it scraped by with only seven votes to spare. Rome noticed.

Next to run into trouble was the interim translation of the Psalter, published in 1995, with its use of inclusive language. It was never voted on, but the bishops released it for study and experiment. It was widely adopted, especially for use in morning and evening prayer, by men and women religious and numbers of laypeople. In 1997, though, Cardinal Ratzinger requested that the imprimatur given by Baltimore's Cardinal William Keeler, president of the U.S. conference, should be withdrawn, and it was.

The clouds were now dark across the sky. In June 1998, the storm broke. ICEL's episcopal board was holding its annual meeting in Washington. They were anticipating the arrival of Cardinal Francis George, archbishop of Chicago, who was now the American representative on the board. Cardinal George was coming from Rome.

There was as usual a full agenda. The bishops had finished morning prayer and had just started their discussions when George arrived. As soon as the then-ICEL chairman, Bishop Maurice Taylor of Galloway, Scotland, had finished welcoming him, George asked that the order of the agenda be changed. He wanted immediate discussion of the relations between ICEL and the Vatican congregation. The bishops froze.

Bishop Taylor brokered a compromise. The agenda should be adhered to, he said, but provision would be made for the cardinal to address the meeting toward the end of the day. When the time came for Cardinal George to speak, in the late afternoon, he warned the participants that the commission was in danger. They were at a turning point. The principles that had governed ICEL's approach to translation had been rethought. Rome wanted a vernacular, he said, that was different from the vernacular of the contemporary marketplace, so as to lead worshipers into the nuances and deepest meanings of the texts.