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

What Does the Prayer Really Say?  5^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in February 2005 

A Correction: In last week’s column, a zealous copy editor changed the Latin title of the Sacramentarium Veronense (correct) to Veronese (incorrect), probably on the model of the English version of the title, Veronese Sacramentary.   This happens occasionally.

Feedback from readers: Commentary arrives from FJK via e-mail (edited): “Your words are devastating: We have to be realistic about the situation we face in the Church. Like it or not, the Novus Ordo is NOT going away. Neither is the vulgar vernacular. ...We must improve the state of the Church all around and foster improvements gradually. – Write kind letters to the men in the pointed hats, and pray. – But who can live so long, as already I am looking toward age 90?! … Why must we be forced on Sundays to bear such agony as the novel theology and banal translations? … Why have the bishops been seeking to destroy our liturgy and our Church? ... Thank you for all that I can read from you. ... Please continue to give us glimmers of hope and courage.”  I’ll try, FJK, for as long as I am allowed.  JR writes, via e-mail: “I carelessly tossed out The Wanderer from a few weeks ago when you had a story on the front page about using Latin in the liturgy or the study of Latin.  Is it possible for you to email me that column?  I look forward to your wonderful column each week and find it very inspirational.”  “Carelessly”?  I’ll say!  But never fear, JR.  There were enough requests for the column that it has been put on the website of The Wanderer:  (http://thewandererpress.com/a12-30-2004.htm).

Those of you who are internet savvy might use the search engine Google.  The fabled “Diogenes” of the internet site Catholic World News and the magazine Catholic World Report made an interesting observation online which I share with you here (edited): “You all know how Google Roulette works. You go to Google’s translation engine …, and type any English sentence into the text box (let’s use, ‘Beam me up, Scotty’). Then you select, say, English-to-French from the options menu and hit TRANSLATE. This gives you rayonnez-moi vers le haut de scotty. You copy this and paste rayonnez moi vers le haut de scotty back into the text box, and select French-to-English this time. You get back ‘Radiate me to the top of Scotty.’ I think that’s how ICEL got started.”  Thanks, Diogenes, for the chortle.

When we translate prayers, we must hold in gentle tension the obligation to translate the Latin pure and simple and, on the other hand, to find out what the contexts and sources were along with the actual meaning of the words in those contexts.  I am of the opinion that the Latin must be respected.  While we are obliged to consult the source texts the prayers are based on, we ought not go too far afield.  In these WDTPRS articles we can play around a bit, taking cues from dictionaries and Scriptures, the Fathers of the Church, Church documents, literature and even current events if we want.  But those who must translate the prayers for a new liturgical version must stick closely to the Latin translating what the prayers really say.  His Eminence Joseph Card. Ratzinger argues this also in his book in God Is Near Us: The Eucharist, The Heart of Life (Ignatius Press, 2003, cf. pp. 37-8, n. 10).  The language of the Latin Church’s liturgy is Latin, not some other language (i.e., Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek).  The Latin must be respected.  If the Church wants to say something other than what the Latin text says, she will change the Latin.  

COLLECT - LATIN TEXT (2002MR):
Familiam tuam, quaesumus, Domine, continua pietate custodi,
ut, quae in sola spe gratiae caelestis innititur,
tua semper protectione muniatur.

This Collect was in the pre-Conciliar 1962MR, the so-called “Tridentine” Missal, for the 5th Sunday after Epiphany.  Let us see the Google… er um… ICEL version we will hear on Sunday in our parish churches and then immediately our slavishly literal WDTPRS version.

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Father,
watch over your family
and keep us safe in your care,
for all our hope is in you.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
Guard your family, we beseech you, O Lord, with continual mercy,
so that that (family) which is propping itself up upon the sole hope of heavenly grace
may always be defended by your protection.

Custodio means “to watch, protect, keep, defend, guard.”  It is common in military language.  Innitor, a deponent verb, means “to lean or rest upon, to support one’s self by any thing.”   Innitor also has military overtones. The thorough and replete Lewis & Short Dictionary provides examples from Caesar and Livy describing soldiers leaning on their spears and shields (e.g., scutis innixi ... “leaning upon their shields” cf. Caesar, De bello Gallico 2.27).   Munio is a similarly military term for walling up something up, putting in a state of defense, fortifying so as to guard.  Are you sensing a theme?  We need a closer look.

Pietas, which gives us the English word “piety”, we have seen before in the last few years but it bears review.  L&S says pietas is “dutiful conduct toward the gods, one’s parents, relatives, benefactors, country, etc., sense of duty.”  It furthermore describes pietas in Jerome’s Vulgate in both Old and New Testament as “conscientiousness, scrupulousness regarding love and duty toward God.”  The heart of pietas is “duty.”  Pietas is also one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit (cf. CCC 733-36; Isaiah 11:2), by which we are duly affectionate and grateful toward our parents, relatives and country, as well as to all men living insofar as they belong to God or are godly, and especially to the saints.  In loose or common parlance, “piety” indicates fulfilling the duties of religion.  Sometimes “pious” is used in a negative way, as when people take aim at external displays of religious dutifulness as opposed to what they is “genuine” practice (cf. Luke 18:9-14).  However, when we speak of the pietas of God, we are generally referring to His mercy toward us.

When we truly grasp the words in today’s prayer we find rich imagery of contrasting images.  On the one hand we see a family and on the other a group of dutiful soldiers leaning on their shields or spears, these being for us “the sole hope of heavenly grace”!  In fact, we Catholics are both a family, children of a common Father, and a Church Militant, the Body of Christ which is a corps (French for “body” from Latin corpus) marching in this vale of tears towards our heavenly fatherland.  Many of us were confirmed by bishops as “soldiers of Christ” and given a blow on the cheek as a reminder of what suffering we might face as Christians: not the first time we have suffered at the hands of bishops, perhaps, and maybe not the last.   

By our baptism we are integrated in Christ’s Mystical Body, indeed His Person, the Church. We are given the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit.  Through the sacramental graces that flow from baptism and confirmation, nourished by the Eucharist and healed and strengthened with the other sacraments, we are capable of facing the challenges of daily life and face down the attacks of hell.  We ought rather desire to die like soldiers rather than sin in the manner of those who have no gratitude toward God or sense of duty toward Him.  In today’s prayer we beg the protection and provisions Christ our King and commander can give us soldiers while on the march.  We need a proper attitude of obedience toward God, our ultimate superior, dutifulness our earthly parents, our heavenly home and our earthly country, our heavenly brothers and sisters the saints and our earthly siblings and relatives, our heavenly patrons and worldly benefactors, and so forth.  

This is also what it means to belong to a family: there is both a profound interconnection between the members but also an inequality – children are no less members of the family than parents, but they are dependent they are not the equals of their parents. Our prayer gives us an image that runs very much contrary to the prevailing values of the last few decades, a period in which the military has been denigrated and the family as a coherent recognizable unit has been systematically broken down.  The Latin prayers often reflect the Church’s profound awareness of our lack of equality with God.  The prayers are radically hierarchical, just as God’s design reveals hierarchy and order.  Compare this with prevailing societal norms.  Nowadays individual soldiers might be praised but the military is still being looked at by the intelligentsia with suspicion.  Rights of individual people are validated, but the family as a unit is under severe attack.   

In both the military and in a family (and the Church) there must be order.  Yet, children today can take their parents to court for disciplining them.  In some places parents are forbidden their rights to protect children who can obtain contraception or even abortions through schools without parental notification.  Discipline is dissolving.  And yet that very discipline is precisely the protection needed by troops on the march, children in growing up, the flocks of the Church from their pastors, from their commanders so they can attain their goal.   Parents, officers and shepherds must fulfill their own roles with pietas also, religious and sacred duty.  Holy Mother Church has maintained this Collect for centuries now in this exact period of the year (5thSunday after Pentecost and 5th Sunday of Ordinary Time).  She holds these petitions up to God because the concern constituent elements of who we are.  The Church is not afraid to combine images of family and soldiering, the symbiotic exchange of duty, obedience and protection.

Please keep something in mind: the prayer suggests to me a meaning which is founded on the possible military nuances of the vocabulary.  It is also possible to emphasize the familial dimension and say, “Watch over your family, …with continual religious dutifulness,…” invoking more something like the image of a father or mother checking into the bedrooms of their children while they sleep, listening in the night for sounds of distress or need.  Perhaps putting the military element in relief helps us to claim both sets of images.  These choices are not easy friends.  Every time you make a choice in translating, you are going to lose something.  Therefore, pray daily for our bishops and those in charge of translating the Latin texts.  It is not an easy job.   They must make truly difficult decisions, knowing full well that with every choice something important will be lost for someone.  However, lest we be smug about the “olden days”, this applied equally to translations in pre-Conciliar hand missals used now by those attending Holy Mass celebrated according to the older books.  Something is always lost in translation.

What Does the Prayer Really Say?  5th Sunday of Ordinary Time

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2007

We have seen in the last few weeks another call from “the Chair” of the USCCB’s BCL (Bishops Committee on Liturgy) to keep the new translation being prepared “unchallenging” enough that it would raise neither eyebrows nor interest in the content of the prayer.  Can’t we just avoid all the hard words?  Timely, therefore, was an e-mail from APS lampooning the passé ICEL approach of the bad old days.  What if the old ICEL team had gotten their hands on Shakespeare?  APS sent a letter of an expert of the International Commission for English in Shakespeare, Dr. Hannibal Bugatti, about the new version of Romeo and Juliet, renamed Juliet and Romeo for obvious reasons.  Here are few samples.  What to do, for example, with Romeo’s description of Juliet as he gazes at her on the balcony:

“O! she doth teach the torches to burn bright
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear;
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.”

This is a complex passage, presenting many problems: the implication that brightness is better than darkness, for example, the appallingly irrelevant mention of someone’s race, the use of rich as a term of admiration, when another guiding principle is “a preferential option for the poor,” and so on.

The ICES text reads:

“Look, everyone!
She is teaching the torches
to be more truly themselves,
like an affordable-by-everyone paste
costume jewel accessory kit, hung
on the ear of anyone (man or woman)
of any ethnic origin.”

There will even be a new ending for the play, more suited to cultural needs.  Surely there would be some resistance from traditionalists.  Dr. Bugatti has a response:

Again, we can predict howls of anguish from one or two extreme conservatives, and one has been rash enough to print and distribute a defamatory article which claims that these endings betray the text. It is important to emphasize a number of points. The first is that the original ending will remain available (in the new translation) though we suspect few animators will, in practice, choose to use it. The second is that this is a return to an older literary tradition, and therefore more authentic to the nature of drama in itself. The third is that the over-riding principle must be what the people demand, and the experts are agreed that these endings are the ones that the people will demand, once they have got used to them.

“The Chair” is constantly asserting that you are all now so used to the lame duck ICEL version of the Creed that can’t possibly handle hearing “for you and for many” in the consecration or “consubstantial” in the Creed.  You might even leave the Church if you have to endure that!

Moving along to this week’s “Prayer after Communion” let’s start with a quiz.  

Q: What do the following verses have in common?  Rom 12:5; 1 Cor 10:17; 1 Cor 11:28; John 15:16; John 17:11 and 21.

Do you recall my fictitious description of a liturgical expert at the time of the post-Conciliar reform of the Missale Romanum?  There he was, in his little room filled with books and papers, cutting and snipping bits and pieces together to form the new prayers of the Novus Ordo (cf. my piece last year on the Super Oblata for the 27th Sunday of Ordinary Time).  Today’s prayer is a perfect example of the scissors and paste method.  This and my identifying many of our Sunday prayers provoked questions among readers  about how many of the prayers from the older, pre-Conciliar Missale Romanum actually made it into the Novus Ordo.   I found a useful, if tendentious, booklet by Anthony Cekada, The Prayers of the Modern Mass (Rockford: TAN Books and Publishers, 1991).  This is what Cekada claims (p. 9):

Above we quoted a statement from Father Guy Oury that the Missal of Paul VI contains three-quarters of the Missal of St. Pius V.  Surely such a statement would be accurate if the revisers had – as advertised – merely “touched up” and “enriched” the orations here and there.
The statistics, however, tell a different story: The traditional Missal contains 1182 orations.  About 760 of those were dropped entirely.  Of the approximately 36% which remained, the revisers altered over half of them before introducing them into the new Missal.  Thus, only some 17% of the orations from the old Missal made it untouched into the new Missal.
Even this paltry percentage may be greatly reduced.  The first figure of 1182 orations reflects only individual texts in the traditional Missal – it does not take into account the many times these texts were repeated in toto in several different Masses celebrated at various points during the liturgical year.
    However one may compute it, the bulk of the traditional orations simply disappeared under the revisers’ busy blue pencils.  In terms of numbers and statistics alone, therefore, the contents of Paul VI’s Missal represent a radical break with the Church’s liturgical tradition.

Cekada calculated that “about 425 of the old orations were used in the 1970 Missal.  Of those 425, approximately 225 were changed in some way, and approximately 200 were left untouched” (p. 34 n. 15).

Without further ado let’s move directly to this week’s quilted

POST COMMUNION (2002 Missale Romanum):
Deus, qui nos de uno pane et de uno calice
participes esse voluisti,
da nobis, quaesumus, ita vivere, ut, unum in Christo effecti,
fructum afferamus pro mundi salute gaudentes.

This puts a whole new spin on the concept of a “prayer quilt”.  This prayer is, obviously, new to the Novus Ordo of 1970 and subsequent editions.  It is a patchwork of biblical phrases.  Here are the citations from the older form of the Vulgate.  I urge you to look them up in your Bible.

•    Rom 12:5: ita multi unum corpus sumus in Christo singuli autem alter alterius membra
•    1 Cor 10:17: quoniam unus panis unum corpus multi sumus omnes quidem de uno pane participamur
•    1 Cor 11:28: probet autem se ipsum homo et sic de pane illo edat et de calice bibat
•    John 15:16: non vos me elegistis sed ego elegi vos et posui vos ut eatis et fructum adferatis et fructus vester maneat ut quodcumque petieritis Patrem in nomine meo det vobis
•    John 17:11: et iam non sum in mundo et hii in mundo sunt et ego ad te venio Pater sancte serva eos in nomine tuo quos dedisti mihi ut sint unum sicut et nos
•    John 17:21: ut omnes unum sint sicut tu Pater in me et ego in te ut et ipsi in nobis unum sint ut mundus credat quia tu me misisti

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
God our Father,
you give us a share in the one bread and the one cup
and make us one in Christ.
Help us to bring your salvation and joy
to all the world.

In 2002 the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments harshly rejected ICEL’s translation of the second edition of the Missale Romanum.   One of the more stinging criticisms was that ICEL inelegantly referred to sacred vessels with language more befitting “kitchenware”, to wit “cup” rather than the more sacral (read: “hard word”) “chalice”.   

The meticulous The Lewis & Short Latin Dictionary helps with this affero, which is basically, “to bring, take, carry or convey a thing to a place (of portable things, while adducere denotes the leading or conducting of men, animals, etc.)”.  It also is used for “to bring, bear, or carry a thing, as news, to report, announce, inform, publish.  Thus, it signifies concepts such as “occasion, impart, allege, adduce” and (in classical Latin rarely) “to bring forth as a product, to yield, bear, produce” so as “to bear fruit” (cf. John 15:16, above).  Participo is “to share; viz., to cause to partake of, to impart; and also, to partake of, participate in” and it can be constructed with the preposition de.  L&S cites the Vulgate 1 Cor 10:15-17 (also cited above): “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ (communicatio sanguinis Christi)?  The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ (participatio corporis Domini)?  Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread (de uno pane participamur)” RSV.
 
LITERAL TRANSLATION:  
O God, who desired that we be participants
of the one bread and one chalice,
grant us, we beg, so to live that, having been made one in Christ,
we, rejoicing, may bear fruit for the salvation of the world.

Holy Communion is both an outward sign and an interior cause of our union with Christ, as members of His Mystical Body the Church.  During the Last Supper, Christ prayed to the Father before instituting the sacraments of the Eucharist and Holy Orders.  Then He went out to His Passion and Sacrifice.  He prayed: “…that they may all be one (ut omnes unum sint).  As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us (ut et ipsi in nobis unum sint)….  The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one (ut sint unum sicut nos unum sumus), I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one (ut sint consummati in unum), so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (cf. John 17:20-23 RSV).   This passage is vital to the Church’s efforts for a real dialog with non-Catholic Christians, an authentic ecumenism.  The late Holy Father John Paul II wrote an encyclical on this entitled Ut unum sint.   

The phrase in the RSV version of John reads “that they may be completely one” or as the Vulgate puts it “ut sint consummati in unum”.  The late-Latin verb consummo means “to sum up” and “to make perfect, to complete, bring to the highest perfection.” We describe someone as a “consummate gentleman” or a completed sacramental marriage bond as having been “consummated”.  Do not confuse consummo and consumo, “to consume, devour”, as in “to consume a Sacred Host”.   A wordsmith would connect our being consummate Christians consuming Communion.  

In the meantime, for the sake of Christ’s prayer and will for us, consider your dealings with your neighbor.  Perhaps your example and invitation may lead to a real oneness with Christ so that we may all be one at last in Christ.

What Does the Prayer Really Say?  5th Sunday of Ordinary Time

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2006

Once upon a time, papal documents were composed in Latin.   The Pope would either write them himself or provide points which his Latin secretaries would then draft and polish.   For example, when Leo XIII (+1903) wrote his milestone Rerum novarum (1891) the composition was entirely in Latin.  The notebooks from its composition reveal great care to create a clear and elegant text.  Nearly everything, with notable exceptions like Pius XI’s Mit brennender Sorge (1937), was composed in Latin until the time of Paul VI and the Second Vatican Council when tremendous pressure was placed on the Holy See to produce translations in various languages.  It was necessary to correct the slapdash versions issued by journalists and others who were at times engaging in misinformation.  The speed at which the texts were expected forced a shift from composition in Latin to the vernacular.  It is easier to write in one’s native tongue, obviously, and so documents got longer – and not always clearer.  Under the pressure to get the texts out, the quality of texts and translations diminished.  The exponentially increasing speed of the media creates problems. 

In this light, Pope Benedict in this year’s Message for World Day for Social Communication said, “Daily we are reminded that immediacy of communication does not necessarily translate into the building of cooperation and communion in society”.  
Accurate translations are difficult to produce.  They are extremely hard to produce with both accuracy and speed.  Translation was a factor in the delayed release of the Pope Benedict’s first encyclical Deus caritas est (DCE).  While it was downplayed in the 25 January press conference for the release of the encyclical, Pope Benedict himself had stated during a general audience with a wistful “finally” that, in part, translation difficulties delayed its publication.  Holy Father wrote in German, working probably with the collaboration of others at Castel Gandolfo, the summer residence, from September onward.  While the first part is vintage Ratzinger, some think the second part was based on an unfinished work of the late Pope John Paul II.  The Latin translators in the Secretariat of State would have preferred to work directly from the German original (which sure makes sense) but they were instead constrained use an Italian translation.  However, the Italian text was in some ways not up to par and so a redrafting was necessary.  In addition, there were those in the halls of power who made observations about content.  Thus, the encyclical itself went through a revision and there were delays.  

Here is another thorny problem with translations.  The final, official version of any document of the Holy See must be in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, the authoritative instrument of promulgation.  When a document is initially released in its various language versions, Latin in the newspaper L’Osservatore Romano and usually also English, German, Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese, it is then subject to reaction and feedback from the world.  When the official version, the second Latin version appears in the Acta the Latin is usually different from the first version.  However, nobody ever retranslates the previously released vernacular versions!   So, usually when people are quoting a text, they are quoting something issued long before the real text is issued in the Acta after changes were made.  The Latin version of Deus caritas est (DCE) is available on the Vatican’s website and L’Osservatore published it on its front page even though on the night before, on the L’Osservatore website, the preview of the front page showed it in Italian.  Someone must have made some phones calls!  As far as I know, the Latin won’t be published in booklet form, that is, until the Acta.

What about the English translation of DCE?  One odd phrase got my attention.  In DCE 3: “… doesn’t the Church, with all her commandments and prohibitions, turn to bitterness the most precious thing in life? Doesn’t she blow the whistle just when the joy which is the Creator’s gift offers us a happiness which is itself a certain foretaste of the Divine?”  Ehem… “Blow the whistle?”  At first we might think this is sports imagery.  The Italian says “innalza forse cartelli di divieto… raise perhaps forbidden signs…” which to the incautious might sound like a reference to a soccer referee holding up a penalty card.   But the referee’s card is a “cartellino”, not a “cartello” of a certain color, not a “cartello di divieto”.  Is it traffic imagery?  In German, which is what Benedict wrote in, we read, “Stellt sie nicht gerade da Verbotstafeln auf… Doesn’t she put up forbidden signs precisely there…”.  A “Verbotstafel” could be a traffic sign, a non-smoking sign or other indication.   It’s generic.  In Latin we have the same thing, “Nonne fortasse nuntios prohibitionis attollit Ecclesia ibi omnino…”  You might have expected here a neuter plural nuntia prohibitionis, since a nuntius is usually the bearer of the news.  However, nuntius, i can also mean, “command, order, injunction”.  So, “blow the whistle”?   I wonder where those ICEL translators wound up after all.
 
SUPER OBLATA (2002MR)
Domine Deus noster
qui has potius creaturas
ad fragilitatis nostrae subsidium condidisti,
tribue, quaesumus,
ut etiam aeternitatis nobis fiant sacramentum.

This prayer was in the 1962MR during Passiontide and in the Veronese Sacramentary in the month of September in amongst prayers suggesting fasting (admonitio ieiunii).  One wonders if the people who put together the 1970MR sensed the need to salvage something of the ancient tradition of preparatory Sundays before Lent (e.g. Septuagesima).  There is a touch of military imagery in this prayer through words like subsidium and sacramentum (originally meaning an oath taken by soldiers).

We need to look at vocabulary in order to understand what the prayer really says.  Our worthy The Lewis & Short Latin Dictionary shows potius is from the rarely declined potis, “able, capable; possible.”  We often see the comparative form potior, which is “preferred, better, preferable” and in the superlative potissimus (declinable) and thus the comparative adverbial form potius signifying “rather, preferably, more.”  Potissime and potissimum are superlatives for “chiefly, principally, especially, in preference to all others, above all, most of all.”  Potius is imbedded in has…creaturas which helps us to determine that it means “above all” or perhaps “above or in preference to all others.”  The verb subsideo gives us the substantive subsidium originally meaning, “the troops stationed in reserve in the third line of battle (behind the principes), the line of reserve, reserve-ranks, triarii.”  By extension it also means “support, assistance, aid, help, protection.”  Condo, cóndere, condidi, cónditum gives us “to bring, lay or put together” in the sense of “establish, build, construct, compose, describe” and, strangely, “hide”.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
O Lord our God,
who made these creatures above all others
unto a support of our frailty,
grant, we beseech Thee,
that they may become for us the sacrament also of eternity.

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Lord our God,
may the bread and wine
you give us for our nourishment on earth
become the sacrament of our eternal life.

ICEL decided to break down hae creaturae… “these creatures” into bread and wine.   I can understand why they did that, but I think it usurps both our intellect and imagination.  Furthermore, there is rich material for preaching and teaching in the word and concept “creature”, which is used in the Latin liturgical tradition for something about to be sanctified.  For example, in the pre-Conciliar Rituale Romanum, the source for various sacramental rites and blessings, there is the rite for blessing holy water.  As in the rite for baptism, water was to be infused with salt.  Both the salt and water had to be exorcised first.  So, the priest would solemnly speak directly to the salt as if it were a living thing, making signs of the Cross, “Thou creature of salt, I purge thee of all evil by the living + God, by the true + God, by the holy + God…  Be thou a purified salt for the health of believers, giving soundness of body and soul to all who use thee.  In whatever place thou art sprinkled, may phantoms and wickedness, and Satan’s cunning be banished.  And let every unclean spirit be repulsed by Him Who shall come to judge the living and the dead, and the world by fire.”   To exorcize the water the priest prayed, “Thou creature of water, I purge thee of evil….  Mayest thou be empowered to drive forth (the envious foe) and exile him together with his fallen angels….”  In the newer, post-Conciliar Missale Romanum, in an Appendix containing the rite for blessing water sprinkled during the penitential rite of Holy Mass, the priest still calls water creatura, but he no longer exorcizes it or speaks to it directly.  

This image of the thing to be blessed as a living creature was once common. For example, on the feast of St. John the Evangelist there was a special blessing for wine: “…Bless, + O Lord, this creature draught that it might be a helpful medicine to all who drink it.”   On Epiphany the priest could bless gold, incense and myrrh, first exorcizing them and calling them all “creatures.”   The creature oil was always exorcized and blessed.  Just as a living person had to be exorcised before being baptized, so too anything intended for God and His special sanctification.  The more important and precious a thing was, the greater the need for it to be pure at its offering.  God then sanctifies and takes it apart from ordinary things unto His own.  Consequently, the bread and wine being prepared at the offertory of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass are of great importance.   They will be taken by God to be transformed into Jesus Christ Himself.   One can understand why in the reforms of the liturgy greater emphasis was placed on the offertory procession, restoring ancient practice of bring things from our daily life to the altar for their sanctification.

Water, salt, oil, bread and wine… these are simple things from daily life.  They are simple but of profound, even critical, importance.  We cannot live without them.  In the holy rites of the Catholic Church we would speak directly to the things to be consecrated as if they were living things, so intimately were they bound together with how God supports our very lives.   Our Blessed Lord during His earthly life instituted the seven sacraments we enjoy today.  Knowing that we are human creatures and not angelic creatures, he gave us outward signs with these sacraments so that we could understand when the invisible and interior reality was being conferred.  He thus took simple, but vastly important created things from our ordinary lives and raised them to a new sacramental reality.  Even the need to tell our troubles to a friend, so common but so important for our well-being, he raised to a sacrament.  The longing of a man and woman to be together, instituted as a holy union from the beginning of our race, was elevated making of the very bodies of the spouse something new and holy.  The struggle at the end of life or when we are in mortal peril was taken by Christ and given back to us as a sacrament and the daily and common yet life-supporting substance oil was his vehicle for giving us grace.

A word like creatura, given a decent and beautiful translation and some sensible and timely liturgical catechesis, can create a sense of wonder about what is happening during the Eucharistic Prayer.  It reminds us that we too are creatures, made in the image and likeness of God.  Today’s Super oblata through the word creatura indicates that we are being drawn in to a hallowed nexus of the creaturely with the Creator.  The solemn language of the moment drapes, as it were, the altar and its appointments, the priest/mediator, and particularly (potius) the creatures of the bread and wine to be consecrated, with a mysterious cloak, reminiscent of the cloud that would descend upon the mountain and the tent when YAWEH God would speak face to face with Moses.

In our liturgical prayers we need to have a sacral style, removed from daily language.  They must be beautiful, evocative, striking and solemn.  Is that what the translators and the bishops are going to provide for us?

I am grateful to those of you who have recently made contributions using the donation button.

I have been receiving various missives from the author of the "Tridentine" Battle Hymn I posted about in another entry.  Each of these missives has been offering revisions of the Hymn.  Each of them has been promising that they were the final, the finished, the last revision.  The author has made use of many of your comments on the previous version.  (Don’t let it go to your head.) 

His scriptis, I present the final, the finished, the last revision I will have to post (UPDATED again on 5 February).  Enjoy!

I will ask you participants to post your translations.  Then we will have a little poll about which is the best.

Hymnus proelii pro Missa Tridentina

1.
Surrectura ex ruina
versus tabernaculum
spiret Missa Tridentina
ad firmandum populum.

Lupos ovium in pelle
vincimus Rosario.

Mediatrix, Co-Redemptrix,
virgo Dei Genitrix,
mater, iuva nos,
mater, iuva nos!

2.
Sancte Pater, pastor Sancti,
Sacrum duc Imperium;
gregi da desideranti
sacrum ritum traditum!

Vaticanos canes cave
adulantes ambitu!

Navis clave, clavis, fave;
Sancta, Sancto Spiritu
eum firma Tu,
eum firma Tu!

3.
Re divina celebrata
ori nostro sacerdos
Corpus ex Immaculata
det, cum Eo iungens nos!

Teneamus pie manus!
Ipsum tangi non est mos!

Mater, infirmorum salus,
sacra Ei nostrum os
atque totos nos,
atque totos nos!

Okay…. start preparing those translations!