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Fr. Z is Moderator of the Catholic Online Forum and the ASK FATHER Question Box. The WDTPRS columns appear weekly in The Wanderer. Fr. Z lives in Rome, though he is often in the USA. He is available for retreats and conferences. E-mail
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  • 2 April 2006

    Bishop Slattery again… better than ever

    CATEGORY: SESSIUNCULUM — Fr. John Zuhlsdorf @ 12:38 pm

    Bishop Slattery of Tulsa as posted a new contribution to his series on liturgical reform of his diocese.   This last piece resonated so much with what I have been writing for years that I must share it.  You can read the rest online (my emphasis):

    Not only may these issues seem superficial, but I am also aware that some may perceive me as being overly concerned with rubrics and the details of the liturgy, even to the point of missing the larger picture, judging my pastoral concerns as the preoccupation of a liturgical curmudgeon. But if I must defend myself, let me say that I insist on these points for the simple but profound reason that I am concerned lest our people be denied what is their proper inheritance, their birthright as Catholics, that is, the complete and correct understanding of the Mass as a real sacrifice by which they are given access to share in the unique, unrepeatable and all sufficient historic sacrifice of Christ on Calvary.

    Distractions, the loss of silence and the various liturgical imbalances of which I have spoken are all partly to blame for a whole generation of Catholics who have gradually lost their understanding that the Mass is the true Sacrifice of Christ. But these problems are not the only reason why Catholics no longer see that there is an intrinsic and necessary link between the Mass and their salvation. As critical as these problems are, even more critical to us as a diocese as we respond to the Synod’s call for a restoration of the Lord’s Day is recovering our sense of personal sin which many of us seem to have lost.

     

    • • • • • •

    5th Sunday of Ordinary Time: Super oblata (2)

    CATEGORY: 06 (2005/06): SUPER OBLATA (2), SESSIUNCULUM, WDTPRS — Fr. John Zuhlsdorf @ 10:27 am

    What Does the Prayer Really Say?  5th Sunday of Lent – Roman Station: Basilica of St. Peter in the Vatican

    ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2006

    The WDTPRS internet blog (www.wdtprs.com) has been developing nicely, though it is a lot of work.  I have been doing a mini-version of these weekly articles each day during Lent for the Collect.  It is interactive, also.  Some sharp people are chiming in with comments, many of them disagreements!  It is quite interesting.

    Some interesting feedback came this week from RM of VA (edited): “You are terrific in The Wanderer. … [O]ur Bishops …  won’t do anything about the abuses in the liturgy, conduct and demeanor at Mass, much less offer the ancient Mass on a wide and generous basis as directed by John Paul II’s Motu Proprio Ecclesia Dei.  How does one form their conscience about obedience to them?  There really seems to be compelling reasons for membership in the American Catholic Church (it is as easy as membership in the Protestant churches; altar girls, sloppy rubrics, greeting and meeting).  I want to belong to the Roman Catholic Church in America (RCIA) loyal to the Holy Father and, yes, I like my Mass to be solemn and holy and QUIET, and at the same each time, not subjected to the Zig Zigler personality of the priest. Even the EWTN crowd seems a little too ‘group hug and sing Cumbaya to me! Any thoughts??’  Sure, RM.  I think it is terribly ironic that the same week you wrote this to me, His Excellency Paul Loverde, Bishop of Arlington (VA), designated two places in that diocese for celebrations of Holy Mass with the 1962 Missale Romanum according to the dispositions of Ecclesia Dei.  The trade off is, however, that he extended permission for female service at the altar to parish churches. 

    Fr. DF has sent a nice message (somewhat edited): “I have enjoyed your articles for the last two years. Before I got my own subscription I’d read older copies from my brother but your column was too late to read. Now I’m hooked onto your column. … The opening comments of your column in The Wanderer (3/9/06) has finally moved me to this e-mail. Why?  In concelebrating with a given priest occasionally, I am still brought up when he responds to ‘And also with you’ with ‘Thank you!’  Another priest now deceased would always add the word ‘undue’ to the prayer for ‘all anxiety’ in the embolism. Small things! Yet they betray liturgical incompetence or ignorance.  My brother (72) and I (77) are priests… we were originally teachers: his field, Latin and Greek, mine Mathematics…. For decades he has complained about the ICEL translation and I agreed…. About 12 years ago, articles in Catholic World Report provoked me to look more closely at the ICEL translation. I did not like what I saw. Shortly after, the diocese asked if I would be willing to use the Tridentine rite for an Ecclesia Dei group. I’ve been doing so ever since, twice a month.  So you can see why I enjoy your writing. I just wish I had the expertise in Latin which you and my brother have.  So keep up the good works.”  Reverend Father, thanks for that.  Thanks also for your generous time with the people who, by their “legitimate aspirations” desire the use of the older form of Mass.  I think we have to brace ourselves for the fact that the new translation (if they EVER give it to us) will also be deficient in irritating ways.  There will continue to be priests who make it up as they go.  I often think that we ought simply all return to using mostly Latin and vernacular in some suitable occasions, which is what the Council Fathers intended.  But we have to work with what we have, and that work can be very good.

    This Sunday is First Passion Sunday in the older, traditional Roman calendar.   Liturgically speaking, the Church is dying to herself.  At the beginning of Lent we gave up decorations, instrumental music, the Gloria, the Alleluia, and use penitential purple.  From this Sunday onward, statues and images would traditionally be draped in purple, the Iudica me was not recited in the prayers before the altar, the Gloria Patri was not said after the Introit.  The Church was imposing a deeper liturgical “fast” in preparation for Easter.  Our senses of sight and hearing were being deprived. 

    SUPER OBLATA (2002MR):
    Exaudi nos, omnipotens Deus,
    et famulos tuos, quos fidei christianae eruditionibus imbuisti,
    huius sacrificii tribuas operatione mundari.

    Our prayer was not in the 1962 Missale Romanum.  The ancient Gelasian Sacramentary had it for the Secret of the 5th Sunday of Lent at the “scrutiny” Mass when catechumens were examined before conversion at the Vigil of Easter.  In the ancient version we would have heard quos fidei christiane primitiis inbuisti….

    The verb exaudio is a compound of ex- and audio (“to hear”) and means, according to the great Lewis & Short Dictionary, “to hear or perceive clearly.”   Some of you might not remember when litanies were sung more frequently.  We would sing “Christe, audi nos… Christe, exaudi nos…Christ, hear us… Christ, graciously hear us.”  We might also choose to say something like “harken/hearken” which is “to give respectful attention”.  Sound archaic to you?  In Liturgiam authenticam (LA), which established the norms for new translations, the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments laid down that there should be a sacral style, different from everyday speech.  Translators should consider traditions of the past when making word choices (cf. LA 47, 50 c, and esp. 27).  Purposeful archaizing would be very helpful in the new translations.

    A famulus or famula is a household servant or handmaid.  This marvelous word gives the priest a delightful tongue twister in the Roman Canon (First Eucharist Prayer) when he says (or sings, now, in the Novus Ordo) in genitive plural forms famulorum famularumque tuarum.   This was one of the words singled out in LA for special mention:

    53. Whenever a particular Latin term has a rich meaning that is difficult to render into a modern language (such as the words munus, famulus, consubstantialis, propitius, etc.) various solutions may be employed in the translations, whether the term be translated by a single vernacular word or by several, or by the coining of a new word, or perhaps by the adaptation or transcription of the same term into a language or alphabet that is different from the original text (cf. above, n. 21), or the use of an already existing word which may bear various meanings.

    Let’s give attention to eruditio, which is basically “an instructing, instruction.”  Erudio, the verb, is “to polish, educate, instruct, teach".  These are compounds of rudis, the adjective for “unwrought, untilled, unformed, unused, rough, raw, wild”.  Someone who is rudis is “rude, unpolished, uncultivated, unskilled, awkward, clumsy, ignorant”.  We are brought out of this state by being polished.    St. Augustine of Hippo (+430) wrote a work called De catechizandis rudibus, “Concerning the unformed who are to be catechized”.  One of the redactors of the prayers of the Novus Ordo, Antoine Dumas, O.S.B., who edited the dictionary of liturgical Latin we call Blaise, wrote that eruditio designates the “culture” of a Christian, his spiritual formation and instruction in the truths of the Faith through the rudimenta fidei, rudiments of the Faith.  When I was a working musician I recall how percussionists practiced their “rudiments”, the basic patterns that they needed to be able to beat out with nearly automatic precision.  Some Latin synonyms for eruditio are doctrina, disciplina, scientia, intellegentia, cognitio.   

    Imbuo means “to wet, moisten, dip, tinge, touch.”  By extension it comes to mean “to tinge, stain” and therefore “to inspire or impress early, to accustom, inure, initiate, instruct, imbue.”  Picture the thing being taught as leaving a mark on the person, a stain that becomes part of the person’s makeup, changing him.  Consider the stain wine leaves.  Anyone who has cleaned linen table cloths after a grand meal knows how troublesome this can be.  Perhaps some of the readers of WDTPRS have had the opportunity to crush grapes for wine in the ancient way: treading on them with the feet.  If one does this often and enough the feet are stained.  It is not uncommon to describe the effects of sin as a stain.  A word for “stain” in Latin is macula.  Thus, the Blessed Virgin Mary, sinless from the first moment of her existence by a singular grace, is Immaculata.  Something which is very clean by virtue of its being “unstained” is said to be “immaculate.”  In the Lenten hymn Attende, Domine we pray singing Ablue nostri maculas delicti… “Wash away the stains of our sin.”  We wish “to be cleansed” from the stains on our soul brought about by sin, which ruins the happy purity it received in baptism.  “To be cleansed” is the meaning of mundari which is the present passive infinitive of mundo “to make clean, to clean, cleanse” especially in later Latin in the spiritual sense. 

    An operatio is “a working, work, labor, operation” and also “a religious performance, service, or solemnity, a bringing of offerings.”  In the Latin Christian authors Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius (fl. early 3rd c. – in 6, 12) and Aurelius Clemens Prudentius (+ c. 405 in Psych. 573) it means “beneficence, charity.”  Remember that in the ancient Church offerings of money and food were brought forward and given to the bishop at the time of the offertory.  They were distributed to the poor through the service of the deacons and others who were instituted and consecrated in the different orders (consecrated virgins, widows, gravediggers, etc. – yes, gravediggers.).

    LITERAL TRANSLATION:
    Hearken to us, O God Almighty,
    and grant that Thy servants and handmaids, whom
    Thou hast imbued with the formative tenets of the Christian faith,
    be cleansed by the working of this sacrifice.

    ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
    Almighty God,
    may the sacrifice we offer
    take away the sins of those
    whom you enlighten with the Christian faith.

    The Latin version of the prayer provides purposeful hints in the vocabulary at the ancient Church’s practice of training catechumens during this time of Lent in preparation for their baptism at Easter.  In many places where RCIA classes are in full swing, these last Sundays of Lent are designated for the “scrutinizes” of candidates.  This is why the first time I worked on this prayer for WDTPRS in 2002 I chose to translate imbuo as “initiate”, a legitimate meaning of the verb, rather than a more apparent word like “imbue”.  St. Augustine used eruditio in connection with words like correptio and admonitio in the sense of combating misconduct with reproaches and correcting admonishments.   Another way of rendering the middle section of the prayer could be “whom Thou hast instructed by the admonishments of the Christian faith” which is redolent of Christian morals. 

    Translated in that way we are reminded that when we bring our gifts to the altar we must be, as good Christians, morally upright people and that the Sacrifice of Calvary, renewed on the altar, is how Christ obtained for us forgiveness of all our sins.  The ICEL prayer uses the word “enlighten” for imbuo which works for me, surprisingly.  ICEL leaves out entirely the concept of lessons, instructions or admonishments.  With the greater emphasis these days on the preparation for converts and reverts through a process like RCIA it strikes me that a more faithful adherence to the actual vocabulary of the Latin prayer will produce a far more evocative oration. 

    ORATIO SUPER POPULUM (2002MR):
    Benedic, Domine, plebem tuam,
    et concede, ut, quod, te inspirante, desiderat,
    te largiente perciperat.

    It is hard to put this into English and keep the singular plebs, which refers to God’s holy “people” (think of the word “plebiscite”).  Plebs is singular and it takes singular verbs: desideratperciperat. This underscores the unity we have.  It ought to say “concede that what it desires… it will experience…”, but that rings odd in our English ears.  In English “people” is happily both singular and plural, so I think it is fair to play with it a bit.  We must also contend with two ablative absolute constructions.

    LITERAL TRANSLATION:
    Bless, O Lord, Your people,
    and grant that what they desire, as You are inspiring them,
    they will experience, as You granting it to them.


    • • • • • •

    5th Sunday of Ordinary Time: Collect (2)

    CATEGORY: 05 (2004/05): COLLECT (2), SESSIUNCULUM, WDTPRS — Fr. John Zuhlsdorf @ 10:23 am

    What Does the Prayer Really Say?  5th Sunday of Lent – Station: St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican

    ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2005

    Some of your feedback.  About the article on Latin studies now online on the website of The Wanderer, Fr. SB writes: “I recently read your article about learning Latin.  A couple of years ago I began teaching my youngest son (I am a priest of the Orthodox Church) Latin and after two years of study he loves it and is progressing well.  We are already looking ahead to his university studies and the likelihood of continuing with Latin and Ancient Greek, perhaps in a program of Patristic Studies.  We both would like to spend time in Rome in a program in which Latin is also spoken.”  Thanks, Fr. SB.  I wish that priests of the Latin Church had your zeal!  I bet you don’t have to cope with “for many” in the translations of the consecration form for the Precious Blood during your Divine Liturgy!  From Canada JB writes (slightly edited): “I want to thank you so much for the time you take to do the ‘What Does The Prayer Really Say’ section; it is an inspiration for me to continue to study Latin during my seminary formation. I was wondering in addition to the Sundays of Lent if you could also do Ash Wednesday.”  Sure, JB!  Just write to the editor of The Wanderer and ask them to give me a whole page and I will be able to get everything in.  Seriously, there just isn’t room for everything I would like to do or everything I could write on just one Sunday prayer at a time.  This speaks to the richness of the prayers, the deficiency of the present translations, and the importance of fidelity to the Latin.  Great Scott!  Sometimes I could fill a whole column with feedback I get in a week’s time!  However, Ash Wednesday is a good suggestion: send me your version and let’s see what happens. 

    Traditionally this Sunday is called First Passion Sunday.  With the Novus Ordo we call Palm Sunday also Passion Sunday.  Today was the beginning of “Passiontide”.  It was also known as Iudica Sunday, from the first word of the Introit of Mass (from Ps 42/41) and sometimes Repus (from repositus analogous to absconditus or “hidden”) because this is the day when Crosses and other images in churches were veiled.  In the Church’s more traditional liturgy as of today the “Iudica” psalm was no longer said in the prayers at the foot of the altar and the Gloria Patri at the end of certain prayers was no longer said.   This pruning of the liturgy during Lent symbolizes how the Church experiences liturgical death before the feast of the Resurrection.   Regarding covering statues, here are the rules as least for the dioceses in the USACrosses in church may (not must!) be covered from the end of Mass for Saturday of the 4th Week of Lent until the end of the celebration of the Lord’s Passion on Good Friday. Images (including statues) in church may be covered from the end of the Mass for Saturday of the 4th Week of Lent until the beginning of the Easter Vigil.

    This is a wonderful custom and very meaningful.  We lose things during Lent.  Music and flowers, the word Alleluia, the statues and images are draped in purple.  After the Mass on Holy Thursday the Blessed Sacrament is removed to another place the altar is stripped, bells are no longer rung and are replaced with wooden noise makers.  On Good Friday there isn’t even a Mass and at the beginning of the Vigil we are deprived of light itself!  The Church gloriously springs to life again at the Vigil of Easter, in the dark of night when a single flame spreads to the hands of whole congregation.  This liturgical death of the Church reveals how Christ emptied Himself of His glory in order to save us from our sins and to teach us who we are.  If we can connect ourselves in heart and mind with the Church’s liturgy in which these sacred mysteries are re-presented, then by our active receptivity we become participants in the saving mysteries of Christ’s life, death and resurrection.  To begin this active receptivity we must be baptized members of the Church and be in the state of grace.

    Today’s Collect was not in previous editions of the Roman Missal.  It comes from the Liber Mozarabicus Sacramentorum.  The Mozarabic Rite, going back as far as the 6th c. is the second best attested Latin Catholic rite in terms of surviving documents.  The Mozarabic Rite was suppressed in 1085 except for in six parishes of Spain.  In 1500 a Mozarabic Missal with some elements integrated from the Roman Rite was published and then approved by Pope Julius II (+1513).  Francisco Card. Ximénez de Cisneros (+1517) erected a chapel in Toledo and a college of thirteen priests whose task it would be to use the Mozarabic Rite even after the reforms of the Council of Trent and the imposition of the Roman Rite. A new edition of the Missale Hispano-Mozarabicum was published in 1991 and Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass with the Mozarabic Missal in 1992 and 2000.  I was there in 1992 and it was an great experience.

    COLLECT - LATIN TEXT (2002MR):
    Quaesumus, Domine Deus noster,
    ut in illa caritate, qua Filius tuus
    diligens mundum morti se tradidit,
    inveniamur ipsi, te opitulante, alacriter ambulantes.

    The only word in the Collect which might catch your eye as being a little odd is opitulante in that ablative absolute construction.  Opitulor is a deponent verb meaning, “to bring aid; to help, aid, assist, succor.”   Alacriter is an adverb from alacer, and means “briskly, eagerly”.  Coming from alacer it has an element of cheerfulness to it.    Trado signifies “to give up, hand over, deliver, transmit, surrender, consign.

    LITERAL TRANSLATION:
    O Lord our God, we beg that,
    You assisting us, we ourselves may be found walking swiftly
    in that selfsame sacrificial love by which Your Son,
    loving the world, handed Himself over to death.

    In some respects our Lenten Collects are similar to those of Advent.  There are images of motion, of pilgrimage.  We are moving toward a great feast of the Church but we are more importantly moving definitely toward the mysteries they make present to us. 

    Taking a page from St. Augustine of Hippo (+430), we the baptized who are the Body of the Mystical Person of Christ, the Church, are on a journey with the Lord, the Head of the Church, toward Jerusalem: the Jerusalem of our own passion and the new Jerusalem of our Resurrection.  Christ made this journey so that we could make it and be saved in it.  In our liturgy the one, whole Mystical Christ is on a Lenten journey.  Each year in Lent Christ, in us, travels that road of the Passion, and we, in Him, travel the road marked out by Holy Mother Church and her duly ordained shepherds.  We must unite ourselves in heart, mind and will with the mysteries expressed in the liturgy.  Our passion, our road to Jerusalem, is in our examination of conscience and good confessions, our self-denial and works of mercy.

    ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
    Father, help us to be like Christ your Son,
    who loved the world and died for our salvation.
    Inspire us by his example, who lives and reigns….

    Commerical:  The relative value of some ICEL translations… $0.02.  A year’s gift subscription to The Wanderer… $50.  Helping a friend understand what the prayer really says… priceless.   

    It irritates me that phrases like Domine Deus noster are reduced in the lame-duck ICEL version to “Father” (NB: none of those three Latin words means “Father”, but you probably knew that…).  Of course we are not so dense that we can’t figure out that this Collect is addressed to the First Person of the Trinity, i.e., “the Father”.  How stupid do they think we are?   

    In the past I have taken the ICEL versions to task for the constant reliance on the word “help”, as in the quintessential parody of an ICEL prayer: “O God, you are so big.  Help us to be big like you.”  However, I used the word “assisting” in our WDTPRS version (cf. above – opitulor).  I could just as easily have use “helping”, as I did four years ago when we did this same prayer.  Therefore, we must make distinctions about the way WDTPRS uses “help” and the way ICEL usually uses it in their versions.   Please understand: I have no problem at all with the idea that God “helps” us.  What I want to avoid, and I am not convinced that the lame-duck ICEL prayers do, is suggest that we can really do what we are praying about on our own but it would be great if God would give us a hand now and then.  This is tantamount to the ancient heresy of Pelagianism.  I think sometimes the ICEL prayers are virtually Pelagian, or at least susceptible to a Pelagian interpretation.

    Brief scholion: What is Pelagianism?  Pelagianism, bitterly fought off by, among others, St. Augustine of Hippo in the 4th and 5th centuries, was a heretical belief that Original Sin did not wound human nature and that our will is capable of choosing good or evil with no help from God’s grace. This would mean that the sin of our first parents to “set a bad example” for humanity to follow, but Adam’s sin did not have the other consequences imputed to Original Sin (wounding of the intellect and will, etc.). For Pelagians, Jesus sets a good example which counteracts Adam’s bad example. We can choose to follow it and choose, on our own, with the help of Jesus’ perfect example.  Therefore, according to Pelagians, we humans retain full control and full responsibility for our own salvation.  Now read the ICEL version again.

    The Latin Collects avoid even the slightest tint of Pelagianism when talking about God’s “help.”  In today’s Latin Collect we read (in a starker version), “in that love by which your Son, loving the world, gave himself over to death.”  In the Latin we pray about caritas, charity, sacrificial love, which is in by us God’s free gift of grace.  Caritas is the theological virtue enabling us to love God for Himself and our neighbors as ourselves.  In the present ICEL version we want to be “inspired by his example.”  It seems to me that the ICEL prayer stops there and doesn’t take the next necessarily Catholic step.  Sure, Christ and His love is our perfect “example.”  But the Latin Collect connect us far more intimately with that love, to the extent that God’s “help” is actually God providing that we do all we do in a deep unity with Christ’s own love.  We are so much in unity with Him that we become Christ-like in our love.  His love lives and works in and through us.  It is ours and we are Its. That is more than an example for imitation. 

    Our Lenten discipline continues.  Persevere in prayer, fasting and almsgiving and, especially, in your full, active and conscious participation in the sacred mysteries of Holy Mass.


    • • • • • •

    5th Sunday of Ordinary Time: Post communion

    CATEGORY: 03 (2002/03): POST COMMUNION (1), SESSIUNCULUM, WDTPRS — Fr. John Zuhlsdorf @ 10:19 am

    What Does the Prayer Really Say? 5th Sunday of Lent (First Sunday in Passiontide) – Station: St. Peter in the Vatican

    Every once in a while I receive feedback from critics (usually people on a parish “worship committee” somewhere and sundry brainwashed clerics) suggesting that my weekly examination of discrepancies between the ICEL translations and the original Latin liturgical texts is overly picky. Indeed, some opine that our translations “really don’t make that much difference”, in the final analysis. What really makes a difference is that people are “gathering together, sharing, going forth in unity” blah blah blah. Yes, those things are important. But the reflective reader of WDTPRS will instantly respond that the way we pray has a reciprocal relationship with what we believe (lex orandi lex credendi). Change how we pray and what we believe will change. Similarly, what we believe shapes how we pray and even what we pray about, whether alone or “gathered”. Should anyone question if having better translations at Mass is really that important, consider this interesting item I ran across in my current deep background reading about a non-liturgical issue, the so-called “just war doctrine” (JWD).

    At the time of this writing, the warriors of a US led coalition are engaged in lethal combat in Iraq for the sake of freeing and oppressed people and restoring the “tranquility of order”. I am deeply concerned for them. I have told you readers of a young Marine captain for whom I ask your prayers. (Side note: you recall I gave him a rosary of knotted cords before he deployed. I just heard a story on the news about how one of the American POW’s now held in Iraq, the African-American woman, begged her mother to get her rosary to her before she deployed). These military servants of peace prosecute war so that among nations the fundamental rights of peoples (which is the foundational aim of legitimate government) may be fostered and guaranteed. As I listen to the debates about the moral justification for this war, I turn to the Church (as distinguished from her present prelates) for guidance and insight to help me sort through the issues. The JWD is the cornerstone of our Catholic, and indeed all well-informed reflection on the present war. What the Church has really said through the ages, and not what some people think the Church says, is therefore extremely important to us right now.

    What has this to do with translations? In George Wiegel’s exhaustive Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace (Oxford: OUP, 1987) I found a fascinating footnote about how a nuance in an early English translation of a Vatican II document profoundly influenced present American Catholic thought on the morality of war and peace. Weigel describes the influence the Council’s final document on the Church and the modern world Gaudium et spes (GS) on the Church’s teaching concerning peace and war. At one point he focuses GS 80 and its English translations. One was prepared by Joseph Gallagher in The Documents of Vatican II, Walter Abbot and Joseph Gallagher, eds. (New York: America Press, 1966) and the other by Austin Flannery in Vatican II: The Conciliar and Post-Conciliar Documents, Austin Flannery, general ed. (Northport: Costello Publishing Co,. 1975).

    The context is the presentation of the Council Fathers’ view in GS is that this age of ours constitutes “an hour of supreme crisis” (GS 77). The problems of interdependence between nations and the development of weapons of mass destruction have made the problem of war more urgent now than ever before. War and peace can thus no longer be a matter of consideration merely for statesmen and experts, but rather it is a matter for “each person”, now under a moral obligation to be devoted “with renewed dedication to the reality of peace.” Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is not simply the balance of power between enemies. It cannot be forced by dictatorship. It is, rather, “an enterprise of justice” (GS 78). This is discernable from the natural law. It is a Gospel imperative.

    The original Latin of the sentence in GS 80 that interests us is: Quae omnia nos cogunt ut de bello examen mente omnino nova instituamus. Flannery renders this as: “All these factors force us to undertake a completely fresh appraisal of war” (p. 989 – emphasis added). The key phrase here is nova omnino mente. Gallagher says: “with an entirely new attitude.” Flannery’s version is, arguably, a bit more accurate in that mens is presented as an intellectual exercise and careful consideration, etc. There is a significant difference between “a completely fresh appraisal” and “entirely different attitude”. But it was Gallagher’s phrase “