What Does The Prayer Really Say?
W D T P R S

What Does the Prayer Really Say? 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

I get many requests, mirabile dictu, about how to obtain our heroic tool of Latin clarity the Lewis & Short Dictionary. First, you can ask for it through a bookstore using the proper title: A Latin Dictionary Founded on Andrews’ edition of Freund’s Latin dictionary revised, enlarged, and in great part rewritten by Charlton T. Lewis, Ph.D. and. Charles Short, LL.D. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1879. On the spine of the well-bound volume is the title A LATIN DICTIONARY and under that LEWIS & SHORT. The ISBN is 0-19-864201-6. It is also available online. On the WDTPRS website and blog (www.wdtprs.com) I provide a direct link to buy it and other useful tools through amazon.com . The L&S bears the hefty price of the best $175 USA you will ever spend.

I got feedback from you readers about my annual jeremiad on blue vestments in Advent. Many of you remember the splendid parody song about Advent blue based on Veni, veni Emmanuel. Via the blogosphere, and also by e-mail, I got another parody this week, based on the Dies Irae which has to do with liturgical music. I will post the whole thing online, but here a few strophes from the beginning of “Dies Irae for liturgical music”:

Day of wrath, O Day of mourning!
Earth to ashes now returning!
Gather, by the millions, burning!
Cleansed at last by cataclysm
Butchered rhyme and battered rhythm,
Neopagan narcissism!
On that day, Lord, when thou comest,
And our dreadful hymnals thumbest,
Smite the ugliest and dumbest.
Smite them, Lord, yet of thy pity
Take their songsters to thy city:
Even Haugen, Haas, and Schutte.
Spare them on the stern condition
That they feel a true contrition
for the Worship III edition.
Doom them not to loss and ruin
While the darker storm is brewing!
They knew not what they were doing. …
Cantors who thought nothing grander
Than a sheaf of propaganda
Writ like office memoranda,
Raise them to thy room to bide in
Where their hearts and ears may widen
To the strains of Bach and Haydn.

Today’s so-called “Prayer over the gifts” was not in any edition of the Missale Romanum until the Novus Ordo. It was, however, found in the ancient Veronese Sacramentary.

SUPER OBLATA (2002MR)
Munera nostra, Domine, suscipe placatus,
quae sanctificando nobis, quaesumus,
salutaria fore concede.

We cannot know what any prayer really says unless we look at what the words mean. The odd looking fore is an irregular infinitive from the obsolete verb fuo which you are never going to see anywhere. Fore is found in your own well-bound edition of the Lewis & Short Dictionary under sum. Now you know why the perfect tense of sum is fui and why you sometimes see forem for the imperfect subjunctive. In any event, fore is equivalent to futurum esse which functions as a future infinitive of sum. Here is a note for you pro-lifers (therefore all of you) this fuo business is a cousin of the Greek phuo, “to beget”, whence comes the English word “fetus.”

Salutaria comes from the adjective salutaris meaning “of or belonging to well-being, healthful, wholesome, salutary, serviceable, beneficial, advantageous”. The L&S tells us that the neuter form salutare is “salvation, deliverance, health” in later Latin. Interestingly, when this word is in the neuter plural (as it is in our prayer today) there is a phrase in Latin bibere salutaria alicui… “to drink one’s health” or literally “to drink healths to someone”. I am sure you instantly called to mind a similar use of “healths” in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (I, iv) when in the famous “Queen Mab” speech Mercutio declares that the soldier dreams, inter alia, of “healths five fathom deep,” or else in Henry VIII when the King says to Cardinal Wolsey, “I have half a dozen healths to drink to these” (I, iv) or the infamous Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night (I, iii – who delighted the “groundlings”, who paid little and stood on the ground during the plays closet to the stage) asserts, “With drinking healths to my niece. I’ll drink to / her as long as there is a passage in my throat and drink in Illyria”, and maybe even Antony and Cleopatra when Pompey states, “Sit – and some wine! A health to Lepidus!” (I, ii). Wine and health are closely related in the ancient world. The Blessed Apostle St. Paul wrote to St. Timothy: “No longer drink only water, but take a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments” (1 Tim 5:23). Wine was often safer to drink than water in the ancient world. It was nearly always mixed with water to some extent. To drink uncut wine, called merum in Latin (from the adjective merus “unadulterated”, giving us the English word “mere”), was considered barbaric and sign of hedonism. Cicero (+43 BC) and others hurled that accusation at Marcus Antonius (+31 BC) who was renowned as a merum swiller. Catholics know the word merum from the mighty hymn of the Holy Thursday liturgy, Pange lingua gloriosi, by St. Thomas Aquinas (+1274): “fitque sanguis Christi merum... and the wine becomes the Blood of Christ”. In sacramental terms, there is a link between wine and health in the sense of salvation. During Holy Mass, we offer gifts of wine with water to become spiritual “healths” when changed at the consecration into the Blood of Christ. Sometimes it helps to use “archaic” or “literary” language to get at both the structure of the prayers and the content of the vocabulary.

BRUTALLY LITERAL TRANSLATION:
Having been appeased, O Lord, receive our gifts
which, by sanctifying, grant, we beg,
will be for us the means of salvation.

This Latin prayer’s structure is convoluted for our English minds. It is hard to get it into language that sounds right to our ears. First, the language of Latin prayers is quite formal and “courtly”. Also, the two imperatives (suscipe and concede) make this very tricky. In a bit of a departure from our usual pattern here in WDTPRS I offer now a smoother version that remains faithful to the Latin original while necessarily departing somewhat from its structure:

SOMEWHAT SMOOTHER VERSION:
O Lord, having been appeased, receive our gifts
and, we beg, grant that, by sanctifying them,
they will be for us the means of salvation.

The Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacrament (CDWDS) 2001 document Liturgiam authenticam says we should make use of the great literature of the language we are translating into when making choices about what to do with the Latin so as to make the translation rich and beautiful:

32. The translation should not restrict the full sense of the original text within narrower limits. To be avoided on this account are expressions characteristic of commercial publicity, political or ideological programs, passing fashions, and those which are subject to regional variations or ambiguities in meaning. Academic style manuals or similar works, since they sometimes give way to such tendencies, are not to be considered standards for liturgical translation. On the other hand, works that are commonly considered “classics” in a given vernacular language may prove useful in providing a suitable standard for its vocabulary and usage. (Emphasis added)

Since I mentioned Shakespeare above, and since I am waxing poetic today, and since Shakespeare clearly provides the gold standard for good, beautiful and elevated English which has perdured throughout the centuries, why not take LA seriously? Let’s try to put this into iambic pentameter and Elizabethan costume… er… vestments. Imagine yourself in a church with incense hanging in the air suffused by sun rays beaming through stained glass, the strains of an a cappella choir still fading:

A SORT OF SHAKESPEAREAN RENDITION:
Dramatis personae: Congregation and Priest Celebrans
CONGREGATION: (with active participation, fervently):
May Gód our Lórd accépt for praíse and Hís
Name’s fáme, the Sácrifíce thy hánds now raíse
for bóth our goód, and thát of Hóly Chúrch.
PRIEST: O Lórd, receíve our ófferíngs appeásed
and gránt, we bég, that bý their hállowing hére
they sháll for ús be hósts and sáving heálths.

Gentles all, I am not saying that all new translations must be rendered into some meter, or they must invoke the remembrance of things past. (I wonder what French liturgical prayers would sound like in Alexandrines or Italian in hendecasyllabic verses?) But in such a solemn moment as the consecration, indeed the whole of Holy Mass, should we not have language that serves to lift us above the daily and common way of speaking and, thereby, thinking? The gift placed upon the altar between the priest and God in the liturgical East are soon by their action going to be “Panem sanctum vitae aeternae et Calicem salutis perpetuae…(we offer) “the holy bread of life eternal and the chalice of unending salvation”!

ETERNAL LIFE! UNENDING SALVATION! Do these not call for something rather more exalted than what we have had to endure lo these thirty years and more? To wit:

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Lord,
receive our gifts.
Let our offerings make us holy
and bring us salvation.

Thud. ICEL’s translator gave up on this prayer and aimed low, dropping concepts. The Latin was probably beyond them. Be that as it may, I think the groundlings would have preferred something smarter, beautiful, and more accurate. It took me a few minutes to put this difficult Latin prayer, accurately and with a certain élan into Elizabethan iambic pentameter. How long is it going to take ICEL and their collective Excellencies in the English speaking conferences (read USCCB) to get off their paonazza wrapped posteriors so that the CDWDS can take a decision?

This photo simply screams for a caption contest.