Changes at the top of ICEL herald new approaches on liturgy

The outgoing chairman of the commission responsible for translating liturgical texts from Latin into English has spoken out “as a duty of conscience” against what he describes as a “pillorying” of the commission’s bishops and staff over many years. Bishop Maurice Taylor of Galloway in Scotland, who has stood down as chairman of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) after five years, together with its American executive secretary, Dr John Page, says the impression given by ICEL’s critics is “mistaken and untrue” and that “ICEL staff do not deserve to be pilloried as they have been”.

In his statement, entitled “Truth, honesty and justice” (full text on p.26), Bishop Taylor says that Dr Page, who worked as ICEL’s executive secretary for 22 years before announcing his retirement in May, has “borne the brunt” of attacks “in correspondence, official and unofficial, in articles published in several countries, in internet and other media”. Bishop Taylor says he wants to “lay to rest” any “lingering questions” there might be over Dr Page’s faithfulness and integrity. Praising him for his competence, integrity, patience and churchmanship, Bishop Taylor said his “service of the Church over nearly three decades of work in and for ICEL” had been “exemplary”.

Bishop Taylor and Dr Page have been replaced by two Englishmen. The new chairman is Bishop Arthur Roche, newly appointed coadjutor of Leeds, who chairs the Liturgy Committee of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales. The new executive secretary is Fr Bruce Harbert, a priest of the archdiocese of Birmingham who has been a regular critic of ICEL translations since the early 1990s. Fr Harbert takes up his full-time appointment in Washington DC on 9 September.

The appointments have been seen as reflecting the Vatican’s longstanding attempts to introduce a more “faithful” English translation of the Roman rite according to the principles laid down in the document Liturgiam Authenticam, which attacks the principle of “dynamic equivalence” long adhered to by ICEL. Dynamic equivalence was endorsed by the 1969 document Comme le prévoit, issued by the consilium for the implementation of Vatican II’s constitution on the liturgy, which has been the dominant line followed in the English-speaking world. The understanding of the process of translation contained in the document allows for a non-literal approach in order to respect the idioms and structure of the target language, and also justifies inclusive language, for example rendering qui propter nos homines et propter nostram salutem in the Creed as “for us and for our salvation” rather than “for us men and for our salvation”. But the Congregation for Divine Worship and Sacraments (CDW) has for years criticised this style as vulnerable to doctrinal errors and political correctness.

The decision by Dr Page to step down was an act of “self-sacrifice” on his part, Bishop Taylor told The Tablet on Tuesday. “He was saying, ‘If my going is going to help to ease the tension, then I’m happy to go’.” The disputes over ICEL translations had become “somewhat personalised” in recent years, Bishop Taylor went on, adding that the repeated attacks on Dr Page have been “not at all a pleasant experience”. The bishop, who is 76 and has cancer, said the attacks were objectionable not because they expressed disagreement over translations, but because they implied disobedience and lack of fidelity to the Church. He said he regretted that fellow bishops had not done more to “defend ICEL from false accusations from wherever they came”.

The often vituperative attacks have been led by conservative groups, especially in the United States. Fr Joseph Fessio’s Ignatius Press, Mother Angelica’s EWTN network, and publications such as The Wanderer and Adoremus, have over the years identified John Page and ICEL as a symbol of everything they loathe – feminism, modernism, and inculturation. Crusaders are urged to “police” liturgies in search of aberrations, and to notify Vatican personnel who ask bishops to look into the complaints. These groups, some of which are opposed to the vernacular Mass, often have the ear of high-ranking Vatican officials.

ICEL was formed in 1963 during the Second Vatican Council by bishops of the world’s English-speaking countries to provide common English liturgical texts for use in all those countries. ICEL’s executive secretary co-ordinates the work of teams of scholars around the world, under the supervision of the episcopal board, which is made up of 11 bishops, one from each of the bishops’ conferences that sponsor ICEL. Other conferences are associate members – conferences where English is a second or third language – bringing to 26 the total number of conferences served by ICEL. Its office is in Washington DC, where a permanent staff and a consultants’ committee do most of the translation and development of texts. The board must review and approve all translations before proposing them to the bishops’ conferences. No text can be used in a country until it is approved by the national bishops’ conference and confirmed by the Holy See.

Bishops’ conferences are technically free to adopt the ICEL texts or not and to make changes in them to reflect the way English is spoken in their countries. But in recent years Rome has blocked approval of a large number of translations. The new attitude reflects a shift away from Comme le prévoit, and a criticism of ICEL’s philosophy of “inculturation”, accusing it of lack of fidelity to the original Latin and for resisting a “sacred style” of liturgical speech. The Congregation for Divine Worship and Sacraments (CDW), which is headed by the hard-line Chilean cardinal Jorge Medina Estévez, has made it clear it prefers a more literal fidelity to the Latin as the best guarantee of doctrinal accuracy. The CDW has also criticised the use of inclusive language and avoiding male references to individuals or groups of individuals when the group may include women, preferring “sons of God” to “children of God”.

Two years ago Cardinal Medina, concerned at ICEL’s “undue autonomy”, intervened to redraft ICEL’s statutes with a demand that the CDW should have a veto over ICEL appointments and that ICEL should cease to produce original texts and restrict itself to translations (The Tablet, 8 and 29 January 2000). In April that year, the CDW’s secretary, Archbishop Pio Tamburrino, wrote to the then chairman of ICEL, Bishop Taylor, to complain that ICEL’s approved translation of the psalter was “doctrinally flawed” and a “danger to the faith” (The Tablet, 15 April 2000). But the CDW’s moves were resisted by the English-speaking bishops’ conferences. Many bishops and liturgists argued that the proposed constitutions violated the spirit of episcopal collegiality and ecclesial inculturation of Vatican II (The Tablet, 1 April, 6 and 13 May 2000).

In May last year, the CDW issued Liturgiam Authenticam, a set of guidelines on liturgical translation into English which the congregation said superseded Comme le prévoit. The instruction, which was issued without consulting or informing the ICEL chairman, Bishop Taylor, accused the commission of excessively free translation, political correctness and a failure to observe due process – complaints that were strongly denied by Bishop Taylor. Liturgiam Authenticam reaffirmed that translations from the Latin should be “faithful” to the Latin original, and made clear that Vatican approval must be sought at every stage of the process of translation, editing and adaptation of the texts. It said it wanted to avoid wording “that the Catholic faithful would confuse with a manner of speech of non-Catholic ecclesial communities of other religions”, confusions which led to “confusion or discomfort”. The document was applauded by longstanding critics of dynamic equivalence such as Fr Joseph Fessio of the conservative Ignatius Press, who has been instrumental in persuading Rome to reject many of the liturgical translations which US bishops had approved. But the document was strongly deplored by advocates of inculturation as inconsistent with Vatican II principles.

The determination of the CDW to wrest the reins of English translation from the English-speaking bishops’ conferences became clear in April this year, when it announced the creation of an oversight committee of 12 bishops from nine English-speaking countries.

The Vox Clara Commission, under the chairmanship of Archbishop George Pell of Sydney, a long-time critic of inclusive language, includes cardinals Francis George of Chicago and Cormac Murphy-O’Connor of Westminster, as well as a number of Asian and African bishops. But exactly what Vox Clara is for – and how its role is defined in relation to ICEL’s – is not yet clear: the CDW’s statement on Vox Clara’s first meeting on 22-24 April did not say if the committee would have any direct role in translating texts or simply would assist the congregation in reviewing texts forwarded to the Vatican for confirmation (The Tablet, 27 April). At the close of their meeting, Pope John Paul thanked the committee members for their willingness “to assist the Holy See in expediting the revision and recognitio” – formal confirmation – of the vernacular translations of the third edition of the Roman Missal, which was released in March. But he did not say how this would be achieved. Fr Keith Pecklers SJ, professor of liturgy at Rome’s Liturgical Institute, warned in April that “if this committee bypasses ICEL, then it raises questions, particularly about collegiality – not just because ICEL was founded by the bishops’ conferences, but also because the bishops vote for the members of the ICEL episcopal board”.

While there is no formal role for the commission in choosing John Page’s successor, The Tablet has learned that Vox Clara was influential in securing the new executive secretary. One of its members, Archbishop Peter Kwasi Sarpong of Ghana, said last month that Vox Clara had been “asked to look for people to step in at ICEL” and that Vox Clara members would prefer a non-American because of a perception that translation has been “dominated” by Americans. Vox Clara members were encouraged to bring their weight to bear on the bishops’ conferences before ICEL’s meeting in late July in Ottawa, Canada – a meeting described by insiders as exceptionally tense.

The new executive secretary, Fr Bruce Harbert, who is 59, is a former Anglican who was for a time lecturer in English language at Merton College, Oxford. He studied in Rome at the English College, and was later chaplain to the University of Sussex and lecturer in dogmatic theology at St Mary’s College, Oscott. In the early 1980s he worked for ICEL as a translator and a reviser on the new Missal.

Fr Harbert told The Tablet that ICEL “has not sufficiently sought the collaboration of bishops in elaborating translations, and bishops have not always been as active as they might have been in collaborating with ICEL”. Rather than wrest control of English-language translations from the bishops, he said, “Liturgiam Authenticam restores control to the bishops, reminding them that they have responsibility for revision”. It was wrong, he said, “to think of Vox Clara as one football team and ICEL as another” for “both organisations are served by scholars who want to respect the Roman rite”. He said while the role of Vox Clara was “unclear”, “its establishment is a sign of concern that we need a faithful translation of the Roman rite”. Asked to respond to Bishop Taylor’s criticism of the “pillorying” of John Page, Fr Harbert said: “I would be with Bishop Taylor on that. John Page has taken a lot of stick. I have had differences with ICEL about its texts but they are very courteous people and I think they’ve suffered a lot.”

Asked why ICEL had become a hotbed of bitter division, Fr Harbert said: “English plays in a large part of the world the role that Latin played a thousand years ago. That’s why the Holy See is concerned to have a faithful English translation – because so many speakers of minority languages who don’t have Latin experts use the English text as a basis. That’s a concern.”

He said he applauded Rome’s efforts to secure a more “elevated” translation of the Roman rite. “The world of the Roman rite is not the world of the popular culture of today, and that’s something that Romano Guardini said back in 1918 in his book The Spirit of the Liturgy. The question is, to what extent do we move in the direction of inculturation and to what extent do we allow ourselves to be guided by the principle of fidelity? It’s like walking down a road between two pavements: one is called fidelity, the other is called usability, user-friendliness, intelligibility, or inculturation, or something like that.”

He said people now favoured “a translation that recalls the original, and that reproduces the characteristics of the original”. In English liturgy that meant having “a syntactic pattern that recalls the pattern of the original, that moves the reader towards the original rather than the original towards the reader”. He said translations could be “faithful” without necessarily becoming more “remote”. English had both Latin and Anglo-Saxon words, and the “native language option” was always available.

Asked if ICEL’s objective of approving the new missal by 2005 was feasible, he said: “I’m certainly not going to promise that.” While there was much good in the 1998 missal from which Rome had withheld approval, “it needs looking at”.

Rembert Weakland, the liturgy expert who was Archbishop of Milwaukee until he retired in June this year, told The Tablet that the new appointments are “part of a pattern to reverse Comme le prévoit and to introduce a kind of literalism in accord with Liturgiam Authenticam which will be much less gender-inclusive”. He said it was not clear that an attempt to create a “sacred language” could be successful. “Such a language cannot be imposed, sociologically. With it comes an often oratorical tone, which does not sound authentic.”

Sr Kathleen Hughes, RSCJ provincial in the United States who served for 19 years on ICEL’s various subcommittees, said she regretted the swing towards a “hieratic” language and away from the principles of Comme le prévoit, which she described as being “true to the best of contemporary linguistic scholarship”. Language which enabled “full and conscious participation” was to be preferred over “fidelity to literal meaning”, she told The Tablet. The language used of God should be “appropriate formal discourse” rather than “a special sacral language remote from ordinary language”. She said the swing against inclusive language “breaks my heart”. It was “astonishing”, she went on, “that when all the major style books insist on inclusive language, when commentators and newscasters and all the media around us are bending over backwards to use inclusive language, that we should revert to ‘man’, ‘men’ and ‘mankind’”.

Bishop Taylor said Fr Harbert’s was “a good appointment – he’s got the qualities necessary. It’s good to have a nonAmerican.” He said a “more benign attitude” on the part of the Vatican to a new chairman and executive secretary would cause the long-delayed missal to be more swiftly approved. But he said the question remained whether the new English missal, reflecting Liturgiam Authenticam , would be more faithful “word for word” or whether it would “capture the sense of the Latin and express it in the best way possible”.

Despite the “pillorying” of ICEL, Bishop Taylor said it had been a “great honour and privilege to be at the heart of the commission that was trying to provide the best possible English prayers for English-speaking peoples”. Now he was retiring, he added, “the Lord will bring peace into my life that there hasn’t been”.

So, after all this, “pro multis” really does mean “for many”, but, because of “dynamic equivalence”, it has been translated into “for all.”

I think I’ve got it now.

If Waekland is against it; it's got to be good for the Church.

BTW, How did "Et cum spiritu tuo?" [sp?] ever get translated into "And also with you" rather than directly "And with your spirit"? Hope this is one change. (I am already saying it while everyone else says the other.) Guess that's the rebel in me.

But the document was strongly deplored by advocates of inculturation as inconsistent with Vatican II principles.

I would love to see these advocates actually quote something from Vatican II that they find conflicts with this document. As always, these types waive their hands and chant about the “spirit of Vatican II” but when you ask for a quote, they can never seem to find one. But really, “it’s in there somewhere!” they insist. Hooey. Vatican II seems to me to actually prefer that Latin be retained for the majority of the liturgy, I certainly don’t recall anything supporting these adherents views.

Vox Clara members would prefer a non-American because of a perception that translation has been “dominated” by Americans.

LOL. That sure seems to be a prudent preference.

The Tablet comes from the "progressive" end of the Catholic spectrum -- as if you couldn't tell.

By progressive you mean Protestant?

So, after all this, “pro multis” really does mean “for many”, but, because of “dynamic equivalence”, it has been translated into “for all.”

I think I missed this in the text :)

You think "pro multis" is incorrectly translated as "for all?"

(I am already saying it while everyone else says the other.)

As a refusnik teenager, I started reciting the Latin responses (silently, to myself) precisely because I thought the English was so insipid and dishonest. Now it's an old habit. Dare I hope that even at this late date the liturgy may be Englished into something solemn, dignified, elevated, and faithful? Oremus.

My classical Latin dictionary has multis in the substantive as "the many". It literally means "many", but it also certainly has an aspect of humanity-at-large about it, much like Greek hoi polloi, also literally "the many".

I think "for the many" or "for the multitude" would be about as close as you can get in English.

Again I'll shamelessly plug the Anglican use as an example of what liturgical English could be--and this from someone who has no connection to it.

Dare I hope that even at this late date the liturgy may be Englished into something solemn, dignified, elevated, and faithful?

And perhaps it might have, had the legitimate liturgical movement predating Vatican II been allowed to develop properly.

Vernacular Low Mass was celebrated in France and Germany since about World War II, as part of a very limited indult.

I can't see why this indult couldn't simply have been extended, rather than having to shred the Traditional Mass.

Dare I hope that even at this late date the liturgy may be Englished into something solemn, dignified, elevated, and faithful?

Physician, heal thyself! :-)

(The word is "Anglicised.")

Again I'll shamelessly plug the Anglican use as an example of what liturgical English could be--and this from someone who has no connection to it.

I like it, but I like this better. ;)

The often vituperative attacks have been led by conservative groups, especially in the United States. Fr Joseph Fessio’s Ignatius Press, Mother Angelica’s EWTN network...

Yeah, that evil Father Fessio and wicked Mother Angelica. This comment gives a pretty fair idea of how good this news really is!

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