Archbishop's web site Denver Catholic Register Parishes Catholic Pastoral Center
June 6, 2001
How the Latin Liturgy gets put into English
Unlike Sacred Scripture, translations are not `inspired'
By Cardinal Francis George, O.M.I.
Archbishop of Chicago
What follows is the first of a two-part series of columns. The column first ran in the Catholic New World newspaper in Chicago, Ill.
Translating is integral to our faith. Trying to translate God's will for us into our actions and behavior is the path to holiness. God's eternal Word was "translated" into human language in the incarnation, when God's only begotten Son took human flesh and a human name. Born of the Virgin Mary, he assumed human nature for us and for our salvation. Translation bridges gaps.
Hebrew and Greek are the human languages made sacred by their use in Holy Scripture, which is the written witness to God's self-revelation in human history. The books of the Old Testament, most in Hebrew and some in Greek, and the books of the New Testament, all in Greek, have been put into almost every other language on the face of the earth. A Scriptural translation is not inspired, as is the original text, and every translation is therefore judged, first of all, by its fidelity to the original. Along with fidelity to the original text, however, is the need for a translation to be understandable in the new language, the "receiver" language, as it is called. The duet between fidelity to the original language and comprehensibility in the receiver language is a song sung by every translator. Translation is a very exacting task, at the same time an art and a science.
Besides overseeing translations of Sacred Scripture to assure their fidelity to the Hebrew and Greek original texts, the Church also supervises translations of the liturgy. While the divinely inspired words of Holy Scripture bear witness to what God has done to create and save his people, the words of the liturgy bear witness to what the Church believes God has done and continues to do to sustain us in life and bring us to eternal life. The liturgical books are documents of the faith that enable us to worship in spirit and in truth. While not divinely inspired, the liturgical texts are fundamental witnesses to what Catholics believe. As documents expressing our faith, the liturgical books are given us by the Church and they are translated under the Church's supervision. For Catholics who belong to the Roman rite, the liturgical language is basically Latin, and translations of the liturgical books of the Roman rite are to be both faithful to the original Latin and comprehensible in the receiver language.
The exacting task of putting the Latin liturgical books of the Roman rite into English was begun right after the Second Vatican Council when the Bishops' Conferences of English-speaking countries set up the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL). The ICEL Board is made up of 11 bishops, one from each country where English is now a liturgical language. I am the representative of the United States bishops on that board. The board uses teams of translators and experts in various fields to do the work of translating, which is coordinated by a small administrative staff with an office in Washington, D.C. Because bishops are responsible for the worship of the Church, the work of translating is done under their supervision, and the results of the work are submitted for approval by each Bishops' Conference before being sent to the Holy See, which "recognizes" them as texts of the Roman rite in English.
On May 7, the Congregation for Divine Worship in Rome released a document which clarifies the ground rules for translating the Latin liturgical texts into other languages. This document was anticipated for several years because the instruction on translation given just after Vatican II was so broadly written that it didn't give a great deal of guidance. This was probably inevitable since the task of liturgical translation presents challenges that have become evident only in the effort undertaken to put the liturgy into English in the past thirty years. The first translations, still being used in the English liturgy, were done as quickly as possible after the Council and have been heavily criticized, even by ICEL itself, for not adequately capturing the Latin original. The new document presents guidelines for the "second generation" of translated liturgical books. It recognizes the need to be both faithful to the original and to be understandable in English, but it places first emphasis on fidelity to the Latin.
None of this would cause much consternation were it not for the fact that English has become something of a field for ideological warfare in the past 30 years. Recognizing that the language we speak shapes the way we think and the world in which we live, advertisers and politicians work to create phrases and words that influence people to buy products and make choices. As a public language, American English has self-censored many references to God in the past generation, or they have been deleted from public discourse by court order. Languages have developed differently in relation to historical and social circumstances. We are much more linguistically self-conscious now; yet language is more than the construct of any one generation or any single group. It has a life of its own and a nature proper to itself. It puts us in contact with people long dead. Linguistic manipulation, which severs these connections, is a first cousin to human engineering.
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