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

According to the Secretum meum mihi blog, the paper ABC Color of Asunción, the president of the bishops conference of Paraguay, H.E. Mons. Ignacio Gogorza stated that the bishops meeting at Aparecida in "unanimously accepted the idea of the Vatican" about the Motu Proprio:

"Gogorza said that the bishops who were in Aparecida unanimously accepted the idea of the Vatican"

 Gogorza dijo que los obispos que estaban en Aparecida aceptaron por unanimidad la idea del Vaticano y la actual forma de celebrar la misa en los distintos idiomas. Aclaró que no se cambiará la liturgia, y que si en Paraguay hay un grupo que quiere celebrar la misa de esa forma, podrá hacerlo.

Our dear ultra-progressivist America magazine, run by Jesuits for the left, have an article on the pro multis controversy.  At least this is still a controversy to the author: on planets that spin in the normal direction this is a done deal.  Anyway, here is the piece, with my emphases and comments.

The Good Word
A Blog on Scripture and Preaching (contributors)

Authentic Liturgy
Posted At : June 6, 2007 10:46 AM
Related Categories: Chris Chatteris

Well, is it ‘for many’ or ‘for all’? Even here on the Southern tip of Africa, where the number of Catholic mother tongue English speakers is minuscule, it’s also a hot topic. Our local Catholic paper has been running a muscular correspondence between prelates, liturgists and pew-sitters. Here too a core issue is the alleged Latinisation of English. 

Might Italians also react badly if some Anglo-Saxons tried to anglicise their lovely Romance tongue? Or even Celts: consider the Scottish comedian, Billy Connolly’s tale about how he’s walking happily down a street in his native Glasgow, feeling quite at home, when he’s approached by men in saffron robes with shaven heads chanting ‘Hare Krishna’. ‘And they try to tell me that I’ve got a problem!’ expostulates Connolly.  [What a stupid analogy.]

Vox Clara seems to suggest unclear voices. No translation is perfect, but is it implied that a transcendental expression of Catholic truth exists, and that it happens to be in Latin?  [I think this fellow is doubly confused.   First, the norms were established by the Congregation for Divine Worship in the document Liturgiam authenticam.  Vox Clara is a committee established as a liaison between the CDW and ICEL and conferences of bishops.  Second, the norms don’t aim at a "transcendental" approach, only an accurate approach.]

Apart from the philosophical and theological objections to this, it’s rather a patronising way to deal with a language which has been a vessel and conduit for Christianity for quite some time now, and which today delivers vastly more theological discourse, and liturgical prayer than Latin. How many people think or pray in Latin these days?  [So what?  Being the texts are originally in Latin and we need to have what the texts express.]

I imagine we’ve been here before. As koine Greek gave way to vulgar Latin, for the sake of the wider mission of the Church, Latin is now giving way to English and Spanish for the same reason. I wonder if some Greek speakers wanted to Hellenise the Latin as the Latinists now feel the need to Latinise English. ‘My dear fellow; how can you possibly adequately translate the word logos into anything except, well, logos?!’

Can we ask the Latinisers to take English a little more seriously? Perhaps. During the apartheid era I visited a ‘coloured’ Catholic diocese where the mother tongue is Afrikaans, ‘the language of the oppressor’, a sentiment I then shared. When I attended the Eucharist in Afrikaans, my negative perception collapsed dramatically. Here was clear Catholic faith and piety, intense, prayerful, and faithful, ‘sanctifying’ a despised language.  [Again, so what?]

What further evidence beyond the Incarnation and Pentecost do we need to be convinced that in Christ all languages are sacred and therefore to be trusted?  [It isn’t a matter of trust.  No one is saying that we can’t pray in English.  We are going to be asked, however, to pray what the prayer really says for a change.  And another thing: English isn’t made up exclusively of words with Anglo-Saxon roots.]

Chris Chatteris, S.J.

I have not checked out this claim yet.

As you remember, the official English text at the time of the document’s release was loaded with terrible translation errors.  They were NOT just mistakes. They were pretty clearly motivated by something other than what Pope Benedict was thinking.

Perhaps some of you can start digging into this question.  Let’s see if we can verify some changes.

Here are links to some entries in this blog on the Exhortation and its translation:

ALERT: An exhortation TO ARMS!!

Who’s guarding the guards?

A serious problem in Sacramentum caritatis 23

John L. Allen, Jr., the ubiquitous fair-minded former Rome correspondent for the lefty National Catholic Reporter in his weekly flash as a very good piece on, get this… why Pope Pius XII ought to be beatified immediately.

A significant block in the Catholic church, including much of its senior leadership, has a strong conviction that Pius XII is a saint and should be formally recognized as such;

In other sectors of opinion, including much of the Jewish world, there is an equally strong conviction that Pius XII failed in his moral responsibilities during the Holocaust;

No new evidence, or new historical perspective, is likely to alter those convictions;

The primary force keeping this debate alive in the media, and making it a source of turbulence in Catholic-Jewish relations, is the question of possible sainthood.

Assuming those four premises are accurate, it seems to follow that there are only two ways out: Either Catholicism renounces sainthood for Pius XII, or we get it over with. Since the former is unlikely, the latter may be the best available option—and the sooner, the better. The alternative is allowing an endless cycle of point/counter-point exchanges to coarsen conversation and harden feelings.

Remember that in May the Congregation for Causes of Saints presented their decree super virtutibus for Servant of God Eugenio Pacelli.  The Holy Father has yet to approve it.

There is a note available about the upcoming letter to Chinese Catholics, to be issued in a matter of days. 

The text will be published in booklet format.  Translation problems caused the delay, which is understandable given the great difficulty in putting any Western language, with its particular concepts, into comprehensible Chinese.

Here is the poorly written Italian piece from ADKRONOS.

Citta’ del Vaticano, 7 giu . – (Adnkronos) – E’ questione ormai di giorni per la pubblicazione della lettera del Papa indirizzata alla Chiesa e ai fedeli cinesi. E’ quanto apprende l’ADNKRONOS da fonti vaticane. Il testo sara’ pubblicato sotto forma di libretto, mentre un certo ritardo nella sua uscita e’ stato dovuto almeno in parte a problemi di traduzione, alla volonta’ insomma che ogni particolare fosse curato con estrema attenzione. Fra i punti qualificanti che la missiva dovrebbe contenere c’e’ quello riguardante un’apertura della Santa Sede al dialogo con la Chiesa ufficiale di Pechino, e in tal senso, dato che quest’ultima si trova sotto il controllo del governo, verrebbe di fatto manifestata una volonta’ concreta di dialogo con le autorita’ del regime cinese.

This is… well… fantastic!

Check out this story and gadget.

In a nutshell, a fellow made a computer keyboard from portable manual typewriter.

My wife suffers from repetive stress problems in her fingers and wrists. Sometime in October we were talking about different keyboards on the market for people such as herself. In the course of the conversation she mentioned that she finds old-fashioned mechanical typewriters much easier on her fingers because they offer gradual resistance rather than the feeling of moving through air then hitting a wall, like most computer keyboards. Ah-hah, I think to myself! At last I know what I will give her for Christmas. The first weekend after Halloween I went out and found an old Smith-Corona and got to work.

The short how-to is thus: in a regular keyboard, each keypress completes a circuit. There’s a little circuit board in there and I mapped all the connections from one terminal to another. This was then replicated inside the typewriter by wires going from the circuit board to strips of adhesive lamé, which contact their counterparts when a key is pressed.