An Open Letter to the Church Renouncing My Service on I.C.E.L.

An Open Letter to the Church Renouncing my Service on I.C.E.L.
Father Stephen Somerville, STL.

1 – I am a priest who for over ten years collaborated in a work that became a notable harm to the Catholic Faith. I wish now to apologize before God and the Church and to renounce decisively my personal sharing in that damaging project. I am speaking of the official work of translating the new post-Vatican II Latin liturgy into the English language, when I was a member of the Advisory Board of the International Commission on English Liturgy (I.C.E.L.).

2 – I am a priest of the Archdiocese of Toronto, Canada, ordained in 1956. Fascinated by the Liturgy from early youth, I was singled out in 1964 to represent Canada on the newly constituted I.C.E.L. as a member of the Advisory Board. At 33 its youngest member, and awkwardly aware of my shortcomings in liturgiology and related disciplines, I soon felt perplexity before the bold mistranslations confidently proposed and pressed by the everstrengthening radical/progressive element in our group. I felt but could not articulate the wrongness of so many of our committee’s renderings.

3 – Let me illustrate briefly with a few examples. To the frequent greeting by the priest, The Lord be with you, the people traditionally answered, and with your (Thy) spirit: in Latin, Et cum spiritu tuo. But I.C.E.L. rewrote the answer: And also with you. This, besides having an overall trite sound, has added a redundant word, also. Worse, it has suppressed the word spirit which reminds us that we human beings have a spiritual soul. Furthermore, it has stopped the echo of four (inspired) uses of with your spirit in St. Paul’s letters.

4 – In the I confess of the penitential rite, I.C.E.L. eliminated the threefold through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault, and substituted one feeble through my own fault. This is another nail in the coffin of the sense of sin.

5 – Before Communion, we pray Lord I am not worthy that thou shouldst (you should) enter under my roof. I.C.E.L. changed this to ... not worthy to receive you. We loose the roof metaphor, clear echo of the Gospel (Matth. 8:8), and a vivid, concrete image for a child.

6 – I.C.E.L.’s changes amounted to true devastation especially in the oration prayers of the Mass. The Collect or Opening Prayer for Ordinary Sunday 21 will exemplify the damage. The Latin prayer, strictly translated, runs thus: O God, who make the minds of the faithful to be of one will, grant to your peoples (grace) to love that which you command and to desire that which you promise, so that, amidst worldly variety, our hearts may there be fixed where true joys are found.

7 – Here is the I.C.E.L. version, in use since 1973: Father, help us to seek the values that will bring us lasting joy in this changing world. In our desire for what you promise, make us one in mind and heart.

8 – Now a few comments: To call God Father is not customary in the Liturgy, except Our Father in the Lord’s prayer. Help us to seek implies that we could do this alone (Pelagian heresy) but would like some aid from God. Jesus teaches, without Me you can do nothing. The Latin prays grant (to us), not just help us. I.C.E.L.’s values suggests that secular buzzword, “values” that are currently popular, or politically correct, or changing from person to person, place to place. Lasting joy in this changing world, is impossible. In our desire presumes we already have the desire, but the Latin humbly prays for this. What you promise omits “what you (God) command”, thus weakening our sense of duty. Make us one in mind (and heart) is a new sentence, and appears as the main petition, yet not in coherence with what went before. The Latin rather teaches that uniting our minds is a constant work of God, to be achieved by our pondering his commandments and promises. Clearly, I.C.E.L. has written a new prayer. Does all this criticism matter? Profoundly! The Liturgy is our law of praying (lex orandi), and it forms our law of believing (lex credendi). If I.C.E.L. has changed our liturgy, it will change our faith. We see signs of this change and loss of faith all around us.

9 – The foregoing instances of weakening the Latin Catholic Liturgy prayers must suffice. There are certainly THOUSANDS OF MISTRANSLATIONS in the accumulated work of I.C.E.L. As the work progressed I became a more and more articulate critic. My term of office on the Advisory Board ended voluntarily about 1973, and I was named Member Emeritus and Consultant. As of this writing I renounce any lingering reality of this status.

10 – The I.C.E.L. labours were far from being all negative. I remember with appreciation the rich brotherly sharing, the growing fund of church knowledge, the Catholic presence in Rome and London and elswhere, the assisting at a day-session of Vatican II Council, the encounters with distinguished Christian personalities, and more besides. I gratefully acknowledge two fellow members of I.C.E.L. who saw then, so much more clearly than I, the right translating way to follow: the late Professor Herbert Finberg, and Fr. James Quinn S.J. of Edinburgh. Not for these positive features and persons do I renounce my I.C.E.L. past, but for the corrosion of Catholic Faith and of reverence to which I.C.E.L.’s work has contributed. And for this corrosion, however slight my personal part in it, I humbly and sincerely apologize to God and to Holy Church.

11 – Having just mentioned in passing the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), I now come to identify my other reason for renouncing my translating work on I.C.E.L. It is an even more serious and delicate matter. In the past year (from mid 2001), I have come to know with respect and admiration many traditional Catholics. These, being persons who have decided to return to pre-Vatican II Catholic Mass and Liturgy, and being distinct from “conservative” Catholics (those trying to retouch and improve the Novus Ordo Mass and Sacraments of post-Vatican II), these Traditionals, I say, have taught me a grave lesson. They brought to me a large number of published books and essays. These demonstrated cumulatively, in both scholarly and popular fashion, that the Second Vatican Council was early commandeered and manipulated and infected by modernist, liberalist, and protestantizing persons and ideas. These writings show further that the new liturgy produced by the Vatican “Concilium” group, under the late Archbishop A. Bugnini, was similarly infected. Especially the New Mass is problematic. It waters down the doctrine that the Eucharist is a true Sacrifice, not just a memorial. It weakens the truth of the Real Presence of Christ’s victim Body and Blood by demoting the Tabernacle to a corner, by reduced signs of reverence around the Consecration, by giving Communion in the hand, often of women, by cheapering the sacred vessels, by having used six Protestant experts (who disbelieve the Real Presence) in the preparation of the new rite, by encouraging the use of sacro-pop music with guitars, instead of Gregorian chant, and by still further novelties.

12 – Such a litany of defects suggests that many modern Masses are sacrilegious, and some could well be invalid. They certainly are less Catholic, and less apt to sustain Catholic Faith.

13 – Who are the authors of these published critiques of the Conciliar Church? Of the many names, let a few be noted as articulate, sober evaluators of the Council: Atila Sinka Guimaeres (In the Murky Waters of Vatican II), Romano Amerio (Iota Unum: A Study of the Changes in the Catholic Church in the 20th Century), Michael Davies (various books and booklets, TAN Books), and Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, one the Council Fathers, who worked on the preparatory schemas for discussions, and has written many readable essays on Council and Mass (cf Angelus Press).

14 – Among traditional Catholics, the late Archbishop Lefebvre stands out because he founded the Society of St Pius X (SSPX), a strong society of priests (including six seminaries to date) for the celebration of the traditional Catholic liturgy. Many Catholics who are aware of this may share the opinion that he was excommunicated and that his followers are in schism. There are however solid authorities (including Cardinal Ratzinger, the top theologian in the Vatican) who hold that this is not so. SSPX declares itself fully Roman Catholic, recognizing Pope John Paul II while respectfully maintaining certain serious reservations.

15 – I thank the kindly reader for persevering with me thus far. Let it be clear that it is FOR THE FAITH that I am renouncing my association with I.C.E.L. and the changes in the Liturgy. It is FOR THE FAITH that one must recover Catholic liturgical tradition. It is not a matter of mere nostalgia or recoiling before bad taste.

16 – Dear non-traditional Catholic Reader, do not lightly put aside this letter. It is addressed to you, who must know that only the true Faith can save you, that eternal salvation depends on holy and grace-filled sacraments as preserved under Christ by His faithful Church. Pursue these grave questions with prayer and by serious reading, especially in the publications of the Society of St Pius X.

17 – Peace be with you. May Jesus and Mary grant to us all a Blessed Return and a Faithful Perseverance in our true Catholic home.

You seem to forget a few details on the saintly Bishop de Castro Mayer who appears to have fallen prey to the schism at the end.

If I am incorrect, please correct my recollection of the history. Bishop de Castro Mayer of Campos, Brazil, had been bishop there for twenty five or more years and had passed the age of 75. De Castro Mayer had not taken to the barricades with flags flying, attacking the pope, the papacy, the Vatican, the Curia, the new Mass. He simply pled that there were no priests in his diocese willing to say the Novus Ordo. John Paul II was, in fact, rather fond of de Castro Mayer who certainly gave JP II no trouble on the issue of the late 1970s and early 1980s in Latin America which was not the Tridentine Mass but Liberation Theology and the crushing of same. It was only during the period of post-assassination attempt disability that the termites in the Vatican offices (not all Vatican authorities, mind you, but the bad guys) caused the retirement of de Castro Mayer and the appointment of a particularly militantly bad successor while the pope was inexcusably busy recovering to some extent from his gunshot wounds including a near-fatal gut shot from which he has never truly recovered.

I do not operate under the questionable assumption that popes have no authority over liturgy or to suppress whatever liturgies they see fit to suppress so long as the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass continues in some valid form. The prudential error of Pius V's Quo Primum was to presume to bind all of his successors to the Tridentine Mass and to excommunicate anyone who tampered with it in any way. I got my copy from Fr. DePauw's Chapel on the day when Albino Luciani was elected as Pope John Paul I. It struck me then and now as ultra vires in that respect, i.e. that Pius V could not bind on such matters. Note that Pius V himself then proceeded to allow the survival of the Dominicans' Ambrosian Rite (Pius V was himself a Dominican). The obvious purpose of Quo Primum was to take about 500 different Mass rubrics, and unify most of them according to their utterly orthodox and ancient common elements to ward off creeping reformationism as part of the Counterreformation launched at Trent and to suppress whatever had to be suppressed because of ambiguity. There were, doubtless, howls of protest from the now anonymous folk who objected to the sending of their comfy old slippers out for resoling at the order of the pope. They are now gone and have been long forgotten with the rest which is the normal fate of such as they.

What then happened to poor de Castro Mayer? Well, for one thing, he began to forget his manners. He came to Holy Apostles Seminary (for late vocations) in Cromwell, Connecticut to participate in ordinations there without first even notifying much less obtaining the permission of the Bishop of Norwich in whose diocese that seminary was located, nor did he notify much less obtain permission of Archbishop John Whealon, the metropolitan of the region including the Norwich diocese. This was a serious breach of courtesy at the very least. The used food smacked into the air-conditioning supply and Whealon, ordinarily a very suave and placid man, blew his top in public and acted to guarantee no repeat performances by Holy Apostles. He also gave de Castro Mayer a public rebuke for meddling in a diocese not even in his own country.

Subsequently, as I understand it, de Castro Mayer was in attendance at the infamous illicit consecration of the Lefebvrite four bishops who, along with Lefebvre were excommunicated then and there. De Castro Mayer then wrote to the pope in candor and honesty and said that it would only make sense to excomunicate him too since he was there. The suggestion was granted. Are you proud that Lefebvre allowed and encouraged the endangerment of the salvation of that wonderful old Brazilian bishop? This was neither loyalty to Lefebvre nor faithfulness to whatever you may imagine tradition to be. This was one more aspect of Lefebvre's moral arrogance and reckless indiffererence to the salvation of a fellow bishop in extreme old age. This piece of work angers me more than anything else about Lefebvre. It was probably not his most serious sin but it was his meanest sin at the possible expense of a far better man.

De Castro Mayer was such a shepherd to his flock that communism would have had much difficulty sheep rustling in Campos. Let us not get carried away, however, by crediting de Castro Mayer with saving Latin America single-handedly. There were plenty of others. Dario Cardinal Castrillon de Hoyos comes immediately to mind as Secretary of CELAM.

BTW, you may denigrate my efforts but I think it is far better to have successfully negotited those two Masses very early on than to spend thirty years braying in the wilderness in service to the dead Lefebvre. You are free to disagree. This is, after all, America.

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