Michael Davies
In the second half of his exposure of the ICEL betrayal, Michael Davies proves, by citing the evidence of eminent scholars, that the Latin texts of the New Mass have been mutilated beyond recognition in a systematic attempt to dilute or remove references to Catholic Eucharistic teaching which is unacceptable to Protestant sects.
There is no doubt that the late Douglas Woodruff was among the most erudite Catholic laymen in the English-speaking world. As Editor of The Tablet, he wrote a justly celebrated editorial entitled Lingua Deserta in the issue of 2 December 1967. The ICEL translation of the Canon was permitted for experimental use in England and Wales from Advent of that year. Mr. Woodruff stated that this ICEL translation was so deplorable that: "It may well be that supporters of both the Latin and the vernacular use will find themselves, for the first time in their lives, united on realizing that they are both betrayed by the version of the Canon that is now being proposed." He referred to a critique of the ICEL Canon in the same issue by Professor Finberg, an outstanding British Latinist and a member of the ICEL committee: "Professor Finberg is measured and moderate in his criticism of this translation, but the effect is devastating. By implication, he was in a small minority on the Committee, but to be in a small minority is often the case of those who are in the right." Douglas Woodruff then expressed his opinion in the most forthright terms:
It passes comprehension that the bishops of this country should have accepted, even provisionally, this so-called translation of the Canon which is shortly to be heard in our churches. Nobody who studies it line by line with the original can fail to notice that it is a prime example of that "desacralization" against which the Pope has warned the Church.
The ancient and venerable text of the Roman Canon has been mutilated beyond recognition. The ruling idea seems to have been to see how much could be cut out on any pretext or none. This is certainly not what Rome had in mind when it demanded a version "without mutilations or simplifications of any kind."
"The ancient and venerable text of the Roman Canon has been mutilated beyond recognition"—this is the opinion of a scholar of such eminence that the entire hierarchy of England and Wales assembled to concelebrate a Requiem Mass for him when he died in 1978.
Reference has already been made to the editorial in the 9 November 1979 issue of The Universe which condemned the dilution of important doctrinal teaching in the ICEL translation.1 This editorial evoked a furious reaction from the liturgical establishment, and the Editor, Christopher Monckton, was challenged to substantiate the charges made in his editorial. Those who made the challenge quickly regretted doing so as Mr. Monckton, who is a Latin scholar, was immediately able to offer a list of 400 errors to anyone requesting it. As a result of frequent complaints from his readers concerning the ICEL translation he had done his own research which he summarized in a lecture to the Association for English Worship, which has been referred to above. This lecture was subsequently published in the November 1979 issue of Faith Magazine. What struck me most in reading Mr. Monckton's analysis is that the motivating force which he detected behind the translations was precisely the same motivating force which I detected behind the official Latin version of the New Mass, i.e., a tendency to minimize the liturgical expression of Catholic Eucharistic teaching which was not acceptable to Protestants. (I should make it clear that Mr. Monckton is quite satisfied with the Latin version and his strictures concern only the translation.) What we are faced with, then, in the ICEL translation is the dilution of doctrine which had already been greatly minimized in the Latin text. The principal source of specific sacrificial terminology in the New Mass is the Roman Canon, which explains why the ICEL translators mutilated it beyond recognition. All the reader needs to do to prove this for himself is to compare the ICEL travesty of the Roman Canon with the literal translation in any pre-conciliar people's Missal.
Mr. Monckton notes that the 400 errors which he detected in the ICEL version of the Ordinary are frequently errors of omission:
It is immediately obvious on examination of the list that more than half the errors on it are errors of omission: words, phrases, sentences, and sometimes whole paragraphs are left out. By contrast, very few additions have been made: and one or two of these insertions have no small significance.
The perpetration of as many as 400 errors cannot be put down either to accident or carelessness on the part of the translators.
He has no difficulty in establishing a calculated policy behind what he stigmatizes as "a conspiracy of errors":
The errors display a common theme which reveals the intentions of the translators. That theme is the dilution or removal of allusions and references to those doctrines of the Mass which are specifically and peculiarly Catholic . . . The thoroughness and determination with which those teachings which distinguish Catholic beliefs from those of other Christians have been removed is demonstrated by many minor omissions which are often repeated.
Unfortunately, for reasons of space, it is not possible to reproduce the 400 errors detected by Mr. Monckton and so a few of the more serious examples will have to suffice. He writes:
In the new rite there are some unequivocal references to the sacrificial victim:
"Hostiam puram, hostiam sanctam, hostiam immaculatam, Panem sanctum vitae aeternae."
This reference occurs in Canon I. It plainly identifies the Sacrificial Victim with the Bread of Life, and it means:
"A pure Victim, a holy Victim, an unblemished Victim, the holy Bread of eternal life."
It is translated thus:
"This holy and perfect sacrifice: the Bread of Life."
The word hostia, which means "a sacrificial victim," is translated simply as "sacrifice." Hostia can be used metonymically to mean "sacrifice," but its primary meaning is "sacrificial victim." The ICEL translators nearly always render "hostia" as "sacrifice" because "sacrifice" can mean nothing more than a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving as opposed to the Sacrifice of Christ, the living Victim.
In Canon I, however, there is a point at which the words sacrificium (a sacrifice) and hostia (a victim) occur side by side: "sanctum sacrificium, immaculatam hostiam." The translators were faced with a dilemma: they did not want to translate hostiam as "Victim" but its proximity to sacrificium prevented them from adopting their usual course of translating it was "sacrifice." They therefore left the whole phrase out...
The following prayer occurs in Canon IV:
"Concede benignus omnibus qui ex hoc uno pane participabunt et calice, ut, in unum corpus a Sancto Spiritu congregati, in Christo hostia viva perficiantur, ad laudem gloriae tuae."
This prayer means:
"Graciously grant to all who will share in this one Bread and Cup that, brought together in one body by the Holy Spirit, they may be made perfect in Christ, the living Victim, to the praise of Your glory."
ICEL translates it as follows:
"By your Holy Spirit, gather all who share this bread and wine into the body of Christ, a living sacrifice of praise."
The word order has been seriously altered; the construction is wrong; several words and phrases have been omitted; the word hostia is again translated as "sacrifice." In this manner a reference to Christ, the living Victim, is destroyed and the Sacrifice of His Body and Blood is turned into a "sacrifice of praise." The consequence is a grave distortion of the Church's teaching.
The word hostia is translated correctly as "Victim" only in Canon III.
Only three more examples of the serious errors in the ICEL/ICET version of the Ordinary of the New Mass will be examined here. The first, the mistranslation of pro multis, has caused considerable controversy and will be examined in some detail in an addendum to this appendix. The ICET Creed, which translates Credo as "we believe," is most reprehensible for its translation of the phrase consubstantialem Patri as "of one being with the Father." As I have shown elsewhere, the word consubstantial (homousion in Greek) has been a touchstone of orthodoxy since the Council of Nicea. Consubstantial is one of the test words, if not the test word of our Faith. Any translation of the Nicene Creed which does not include the word "substance" should arouse immediate suspicion among true Catholics. This was the one word which the Arians could not use without renouncing their heresy. The semi-Arians coined a word homoiousion, "of like substance." This could be interpreted in an orthodox sense, i.e., exactly alike, or in an unorthodox sense, i.e., like but not identical. It was rejected by true Catholics not simply because it was ambiguous but because any attempt to substitute any term whatsoever for the homo ousion of Nicea was considered to denote an heretical intent. For this reason the term was taken over from the Greek and incorporated into the Latin Creeds. This was stated expressly in the Creed adopted by the Eleventh Council of Toledo in 675:
We also believe Him to be of one substance with the Father, and He is therefore called homoousios with the Father, that is of the same substance with the Father. For the Greek word homos means "same" and ousia means "substance," and together they signify having the same substance.
Pope St. Damasus (366-384) anathematized all who refused to use the term "consubstantial."
It is of the utmost significance that the ICET justified its translation of consubstantialem Patri as "of one being with the Father" in the following terms:
The term homoousios is difficult to translate, but "being" seems preferable to either "nature" or "essence" in a statement which tries to express the unity of the Godhead. Many consultants agreed that "being" came nearest to the Greek philosophical term, even in its etymology. The argument of the sentence is that, because the Son is not made but begotten, he shares the same kind of being as the Father. (My emphasis.)
One of Britain's most respected theologians provided me with the following comment on this explanation:
The statement "he shares the same kind of being as the Father" is a clear affirmation of semi-Arianism, the heresy which said that the Son did not have the one same substance as the Father (homoousios) but had the same kind of substance as the Father (homoiousios). It is not Catholic to say that the Son "shares the same kind of substance (being) as the Father."
The Preface to Eucharistic Prayer IV contains a straightforward affirmation, not of semi-Arianism but of Arianism: "Father in heaven, it is right that we should give you thanks and glory: you alone are God, living and true." This could be a stanza from one of the hymns which Arius used to propagate his heresy.
What this appendix should have made clear is that the faithful in English-speaking countries are not simply denied the opportunity of assisting at the Mass of St. Pius V, they are not even able to assist at the Mass of Pope Paul VI except in the few places where it is celebrated in Latin, more numerous in England than in the U.S.A. What they are offered is best described as "the McManus Rite" for, with its four hundred errors in translation, some of which have serious doctrinal implications, it is no more than a travesty of the official Latin text of the Novus Ordo Missae which, in itself, involves a serious dilution of authentic Catholic teaching.
Let the final word upon the McManus Rite be given to Archbishop R. J. Dwyer, writing in The National Catholic Register of 2 March 1975. He described it as:
The inept, puerile, semi-literate translation which has been foisted upon us by the ICEL—the International Committee for English in the Liturgy—a body of men possessed of all the worst characteristics of a self-perpetuating bureaucracy, which has done an immeasurable disservice to the entire English-speaking Catholic world. The work has been marked by an almost complete lack of literary sense, a crass insensitivity to the poetry of the language and, even worse, by a most unscholarly freedom in the rendering of the texts, amounting at times, to actual misrepresentation.
In a recent scathing article the redoubtable William F. Buckky, Jr., tells us he is practicing Yoga at Mass on Sundays, so as to "develop the power to tune out of everything I hear, while attempting . . . to commune with my Maker, and ask Him to forgive me my own sins, and implore Him, second, not to forgive the people who ruined the Mass." With which thorough un-Christian sentiment we are in noisy agreement.
What can be done? Likely nothing, at least for the foreseeable time ahead. The ICEL rides high, immune to criticism, contemptuous of it, and the bishops of the English-speaking world seem in no way disposed to take action on the issue.
Nor should it be thought that the members of the Liturgy Club feel they have come to the end of the road. In 1979 they only just failed to persuade the bishops of America to start revising the translation with a view to removing "sexist language" such as "Pray, brethren" and "for all men." The idea that the "sexist" nature of "for all men" could be overcome by translating pro multis as "for many" does not appear to have been considered.
1. This editorial may appear inconsistent with other quotations from The Universe which I have cited in this and other books. The explanation is that a new editor was appointed in 1979 and, although most certainly not a traditionalist, he is an orthodox Catholic and a journalist of integrity who has attempted to make the paper more objective.