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

I have a guest at the Sabine Farm at the moment, an erudite priest friend with whom I can actually work directly in Latin as we discuss interesting topics.

This morning our conversation drifted over our morning post-Mass coffee to various versions of the Psalter found in sundry editions of the book priests have to read ever day, that is either the older Breviarium Romanum or the present Liturgia Horarum.

I began dragging volumes from the Sabine bookshelves and, as we read, we found some interesting variations through history.

Priests who pay attention to what version of the prayers they must say to fulfill their obligation will sometimes debate among themselves the merits and drawbacks of different breviaries and their psalters.  Some abhor the Pius XII version of the psalms approved for liturgical use in 1945 and which were published in the Breviarium Romanum.  Some swear by it, because the Latin is better in many ways.

The history of psalters is horrendously complex, but a few comments can help you sort through what follows.

Around 383 St. Jerome was in Rome working for Pope Damasus.  He did a revision of an old Latin psalter, (perhaps "Jerome I") from a text pre-dating the LXX (Septuagint – a later Greek version of the Old Testament).  We don’t know much about this version.  But when Damasus died in 384, Jerome went to the Holy Land.  In 390 he revised an old Latin psalter in light of a Hebrew text that had diacritical marks.  This version of the psalter is now called the "Gallican", (Gallicanum or perhaps "Jerome II") because it seems that Alcuin got hold of it and put it in his Bible in the 9th c.  A bit later, Jerome would make another version based on Hebrew, working with the help of Aquila and Symmachus (Iuxta Hebraeos – perhaps "Jerome III").

Then there is the Roman Psalter, used, obviously, in Rome.  It is older than the Gallican Psalter.  Some think that this was the psaltar revised in Rome by Jerome, but that probably isn’t the case.  This Roman Psalter is related to a psalter from Milan and to a Mozarabic Psalter.  The Milanese psalter is what St. Augustine used in N. Africa, though he touched up his version a bit. The most complete manuscripts of the old Roman is probably in a line of English manuscripts, which suggests that this is the version brought to England when St. Gregory the Great sent missionaries.

The Council of Trent had commanded a unified version of the Bible, the Vulgata which after various redactions, resulted in in 1592, in an edition we call the Sisto-Clementine, after the Popes who promulgated it.  Sixtus V put out an edition in 1590 and Clement VIII redid it in 1592, ‘93, and ‘98). This was used in the Church as its official text until 1969 when the New Vulgate was released by Paul VI. Pius X had established a commission to revise the Sisto-Clementine Vulgate.  An exception, however, came in 1945 when Pius XII replaced the psalms in the Sisto-Clementine with a new version, translated directly from Hebrew in a more "classical style" of Latin.

The New-Vulgate has gained status among scholars (the comments of H.E. Bishop Trautman) especially when it substituted the old Sisto-Clementine in the bilingual Greek-Latin edition of "Nestle-Aland".  Also, the University of Navarre uses it in their editions of books of the Bible.  The Congregation for Divine Worship issued the Liturgia Horarum in 1971, reissued in the second edition in 1986 (the current edition).  The Benedictine monk at Solesmes use the Neo-Vulgate Psalter.

Effectively, the version used by the Fathers of the Church was generally some form of the Vetus Latina, the "Roman" Psalter which comes to us in the branch from Milan.

In any event, this morning over coffee Father made his argument in favor of the Pius XII psalms with a comparison of Psalm 1 (a good place to start).

One has to balance elements like rhythm and euphony (essential when you pronounce or sing the prayer) and style with meaning/content.  The concreteness, or lack, of images, is something to consider. 


I grant this will be more interesting to those of you who know Latin.   But at the Sabine Farm, we know Latin… at least this morning.

Have a look: