With respect to your statement below:
We are in total agreement concerning the difficulty of translating (Forgetting the Greek for the moment. After all the Latin is the official language of the RCC and certainly the Latin version, footnotes and all, must be understood by the RCC.) from a dead language to one which is constantly changing.
I would like to add the following. While Latin is a dead language for commerce, law, and in general, I think it is wise that the Catholic Church still retains Latin as the official language, as oppose to modern languages, precisely because of the last part of your statement. English and modern languages are practical, in that they evolve, but for Theology and Doctrine, that is a dangerous thing. So, given that Latin was used my the Western Fathers starting in the 3rd century, moving away from Greek, words that meant what they meant in antiquity still mean the same today, so doctrinal meaning is not comprimised by the evolution of the meaning of words. Just take for example the word “gay’ and see how it has evolved since WWII.
So I would say that the Pope Benedict, who is fluent in Latin, and the late Pope John Paul II, and Theologians in Rome and around the Catholic world do/did understand the meaning of the English text and how it relates to the Latin text original. The confusion can arrive when the Latin text are translated into English. For the record, the Catholic Church in the English speaking world has been debating Liturgical translations since the Missal of Pope Paul VI was first published in 1970.
Regards
What many see as a defect in Latin—a “dead” language—is actually its virtue. Being unused, it is static and solid.
The Aquinas being quoted here (from Opusc 57) was originally in Latin as well. It would be interesting to see the original Latin, to compare it to the Greek of Peter and the French (or Latin?) of Cauvin.