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

I had a good question in the ASK FATHER Question box about confession. Here it is:

Kind AND Number (confession)

AFQB - The ASK FATHER Question Box: Liturgy, Music & The Seven Sacraments: Kind AND Number (confession)

By Anonymous on Thursday, August 03, 2006

I’ve often heard priests say that when going to confession it’s important to confess sin both in kind and number. I recently went to confession though to a priest who told me at the beginning of the confession that he’s "not the kind of priest who wants to hear the number or frequency" and just to confess the sin. I didn’t know what to do. This seemed contrary to what the Church teaches and what I’ve been told in the past. Is it official teaching of the Church to confess sin both in kind and number, and if so, where can I find some references to this? How can a priest understand the gravity of the sin if he doesn’t know the frequency?

By Fr. J.T. Zuhlsdorf on Friday, August 04, 2006

You are absolutely correct in your understanding that mortal sins are to be confessed, to the best of one’s ability, in both kind and number. This is very important and it is the ordinary way in which we are to make every auricular confession.

Emergencies can be different, but even after the emergency is over, we are still obliged to make a full confession in both kind and number.

In the 1983 Code of Canon Law we read:

Canon 988 – §1. A member of the Christian faithful is obliged to confess in kind and number all serious sins committed after baptism and not yet directly remitted through the keys of the Church nor acknowledged in individual confession, for which one is conscious after diligent examination of conscience.
§2. It is to be recommended to the Christian faithful that venial sins also be confessed.

The Council of Trent stated pretty clearly that

"To obtain the saving remedy of the sacrament of penance, according to the plan of our merciful God, the faithful must confess to a priest each and every grave sin that they remember after a diligent examination of conscience" (cf. sess. XIV de poenitentia cc. 7-8: COD 712).

Remember that each sacrament has both matter and form. The matter of the sacrament of penance is the telling of sins. While we are not obliged to include all sorts of circumstantial information surrounding the sins, we do need to indicate number and/or frequency, by number can change the severity of the sin and indicate to the confessor (and yourself) where your principle problems are.

Sometimes it will happen that your memory is not clear about the number of times you committed a sin. Just do your best, in that case. Even when your memory is faulty, if you do your best the sins you don’t remember or confess (through no fault of your own) are also indirectly remitted.

So, this priest was ABSOLUTELY WRONG to suggest that you do not need to confess sins also in number/frequency. As a matter of fact, he suggested that you violate the Church’s law in this matter. Confession is a matter of spiritual life or death. You don’t messed around with confession.

Finally, there is nothing so bad that we can do that God cannot forgive. So, confess EVERYTHING!

The confessional is not the rack. The confessional is a tribunal in which you are at the same time the prosecutor and the accused. The priest acts, in the person of Christ, as judge who exercises God’s loving mercy. The confessional is an operating table on which our Savior, with your cooperation, acts as the Physician of your soul and heals your ills. Both these images, though on the surface seemingly stern or intimidating, lead through on the other side to blessed blessed relief.

There is nothing so fine as making a good confession, for it leads to the good reception of Holy Communion in the state of grace.

Fr. Z

In The Tablet article, Bishop Arthur Roche, chairman of ICEL makes excellent and thought provoking comments. Here is another excerpt:

Some people assume that liturgical language should be comfortably predictable: it should not shock. That assumption was not shared by the compilers of the post-conciliar Latin Missale Romanum. Following them, ICEL has not been afraid to introduce an element of surprise into the prayers we are offering. What is surprising eventually becomes familiar, while retaining the vividness that initially caused surprise.

Many of us could name a piece of music that shocked us when we first heard it and that, as it has become familiar, has continued to enrich our experience. Liturgical texts have a long life. We want the landscape of the Missal to have some colour, some peaks and some troughs, not to be the dull monochrome desert across which we currently traverse year by year. To use a different metaphor, the Missal is a jewel-box, not a deep freezer.

YES! The language of prayer should not be entirely commonplace. I cannot be hitched to the way people talk in normal circumstances. Even in the best circumstances and environments, wherein people are well educated and genteel, above average "common" parlance would not be good for liturgical prayer. But today … with our informality and vulgarity… UGH. The horror….

Also, His Excellency makes the good point that liturgical language should fascinate and dazzle, captivate and bemuse, attract and make you focus. A jewelry box is a good description for this as is a deep freeze for its opposite: in my freezer I have stacks of things in white paper and things sealed in bags and containers. There is nothing exciting going on in The Sabine Farm’s freezer, I can tell you. Things get exciting only when stuff gets thawed out and the work at the stove begins. Everything needs to be "unpacked" before it is useful and delightful. That is what WDTPRS has been doing all this time: dragging the content of the Latin prayers out of the deep freeze (= the lame-duck ICEL version) and doing some serious cooking with it. Running the risk of mixing metaphors wildly, when you are working with the Latin content, every plate on your table can be a jewel.

In the article in the Tablet Bishop Arthur Roche of Leeds, chairman of ICEL, gets into what a prayer for Easter really says.  Here is the bit from the article (my emphasis and comments):

Whatever is said about Liturgiam Authenticam by its critics, it has served us well as a key to unlock the treasury of the Missal [Sound like a familiar objective?]. We have been surprised and delighted by the riches that a careful attention to forms of prayer has revealed to us.

For example, we have translated the Prayer after Communion for Easter Day like this:

With unfailing love and care, O God,
watch over your Church,
so that, renewed by the paschal mysteries,
she may reach the bright glory of the
Resurrection.

[This is how WDTPRS did it in a slavishly literal version not intended for liturgical use:

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
Look to Thy Church, O God, with unending dutiful good will,
so that, having been renewed by means of the paschal sacramental mysteries,
it may attain to the glory of the resurrection.

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Father of love,
watch over your Church
and bring us to the glory of the resurrection
promised by this Easter sacrament.

I like the use of "she" for the Church in new ICEL version.  Now back to the article….]

Notice first that, whereas our current texts often begin with an address to God ("O Lord" or "O God" or simply "Lord"), we have delayed mentioning the divine title until a little later in the prayer as the Latin does. This seems to give prayers a less peremptory, more courteous tone.

Secondly, whereas in English a word or phrase that qualifies a verb usually comes after the verb, we have followed the Latin in putting it before. A more natural English word order would be "so that she may reach the bright glory of the Resurrection renewed by the paschal mysteries", but this ends the prayer on a diminuendo whereas our proposed version ends on a climax with the word "resurrection". Frequently the Latin prayers will end on a note of hope, naming what we look forward to either in this world or the next. We have judged it worthwhile to follow this pattern even though it often involves using constructions such as parentheses (like "renewed by the paschal mysteries" in this text) that may offer a certain challenge to the one who proclaims it.

We are constantly concerned with the issue of register. A register is a subset of a language suitable to a particular context: I would use one register to address Parliament and a different one to speak to a class of young children. Early in the process, we proposed that towards the end of Eucharistic Prayer 1 (the Roman Canon) the priest should say: "To us sinners also … deign to grant some share and fellowship with your holy apostles and martyrs." "Deign" was greeted with howls of derision from all sides [dopes!]: it was thought to belong to too formal a register for the liturgy. So we tried a much more colloquial version, "please grant some share and fellowship". This was judged too informal. So we finally settled on "be pleased to grant …" which seems to fall between the two.  [I like "deign".]

The prayers of the Roman Rite use many expressions of courtesy in addressing God. To find the appropriate polite form for an occasion is not easy: ask yourself what you would say if you unexpectedly met the Queen, for instance. The liturgical texts that we currently use omit many deprecatory expressions found in the Latin original. We are restoring them, and in doing so trying to forge a new register of courteous address to God. Like any new register, it will need to be learnt.  [Huzzah!  I say ye "yay" Arthur Roche!]

In The Tablet His Excellency Archbishop Roche, chairman of ICEL, has an interesting piece describing the status quaesitionis. It is good to pause occasionaly and make a review of where you are. There are many good bits in the article. I found this to be one of the most intriguing:

The originator of the idea of dynamic equivalence, Eugene Nida, himself ceased to use it in his later writings. In insisting on the importance of linguistic form and its interdependence with content, Liturgiam Authenticam takes account of recent work in linguistics. It must have been a difficult document to write, for it is always difficult – some would say impossible – to write about language prescriptively and well. But something needed to be said, for the current texts we use simply do not hand on the tradition of prayer that we find in the Latin Missal.

Whatever is said about Liturgiam Authenticam by its critics, it has served us well as a key to unlock the treasury of the Missal. We have been surprised and delighted by the riches that a careful attention to forms of prayer has revealed to us.

This reminds of how prestigious liturgists such as Jungmann and Bouyer repediated early claims about Mass being celebrated versus populum. What damage was done in the meantime!

Who is Eugene Nida?

Dr. Nida received a Bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, in Greek from the University of California Los Angeles in 1936. He received his Master’s degree in Greek New Testament from the University of Southern California and his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan.

In 1943 he married Althea Sprague. The couple remained married until Althea Sprague Nida’s death in 1993. In 1997 Dr. Nida married Dr. Elena Fernadez, a translator and interpreter.

Dr. Nida retired in the early 1980’s and currently lives in Brussels, Belgium.

[edit]

Career

In 1943 Dr. Nida began his career with the American Bible Society (ABS), working as a linguist. Nida was quickly promoted to Associate Secretary for Versions, he then worked as Executive Secretary for Translations until his retirement.

Dr. Nida was instrumental in engineering the joint effort between the Vatican and the United Bible Societies (UBS) to produce cross-denominational Bibles in translations across the globe. This work was begun in 1968 and carried on in accordance with Dr. Nida’s translation principle of Functional Equivalence.

[edit]

Translation & Linguistic Theories

Eugene Nida has been a pioneer in the fields of Translation Theory and Linguistics.

His Ph.D. dissertation "A Synopsis of English Syntax" was the first full-scale analysis of a major language according to the "immediate "constituent" theory.

His most notable and most controversial contribution to Translation Theory is Dynamic Equivalence, also known as Functional Equivalence. This approach to translation aims to reproduce the intention of the original text in the translation, rather than reproducing the actual words of the original.

Nida also developed the "componential analysis" technique which split words into their components to help determine equivalence in translation (i.e. bachelor = male + unmarried). This is, perhaps, not the best example of the technique, though it is the most well known.

An online review of a one of Nida’s books states, "While he never served as a translator himself, he was dedicated to understanding the problems of translation as a linguist and anthropologist."