Comments for Strangers in a Strange Land, Part Two at http://www.thecatholicthing.org , comment 1 to 12 out of 12 comments http://www.thecatholicthing.org Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:17:11 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/strangers-in-a-strange-land-part-two.html#comment-9280 @Achilles: As part of turning the other cheek, it is a distinct pleasure to hear from you! Merry Christmas! - Manfred Fri, 23 Dec 2011 05:43:51 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/strangers-in-a-strange-land-part-two.html#comment-9278 In order to make a plant grow more vigorously, one prunes the branches. - Patrick Thu, 22 Dec 2011 16:02:16 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/strangers-in-a-strange-land-part-two.html#comment-9277 PD, You are quite correct. What little inside information I have suggests that the committee members believed that the locution "you who" was to be avoided. I actually made the suggestion that an old-fashioned personal use of the relative pronoun "that" would solve both problems at once: "You that take away the sins of the world." Actually, "who take away the sins of the world" would be perfectly fine, without the "you" to precede it, but people are so grammatically ignorant these days, they might think we were asking a question.... - Tony Esolen Thu, 22 Dec 2011 12:26:17 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/strangers-in-a-strange-land-part-two.html#comment-9276 Manfred, you must be unable to hear but for the din of self-congratulation. Your comment about "voting with their feet" you would encourage disobedience while claiming to be obedient, you speak with phrases of power, not Truth. Fr. Schall in his new book talks about the future and history and this might be helpful to you: “If what we think is “past” did not actually happen or was different from what took place, we are dealing with ideology not reality.” You, Manfred speak in the phrases of an ideologue- - Achilles Thu, 22 Dec 2011 11:35:15 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/strangers-in-a-strange-land-part-two.html#comment-9275 @Scaevola: Before you respond to other bloggers, you may wish to secure an education. The new translation? You may want to locate a 1962 Missal and read the English text which accompanies the Latin. The 2011 translation almost COPIES THE 1962 MISSAL WORD FOR WORD. My point: the Church has known for CENTURIES what the correct translation has been. The obvious question: WHY WAS IT EVER CHANGED? Now I know you are much more informed of the facts than Brunero Gherardini and Roberto de Mattei, but why don't you Google their letter and read it before you challenge anyone? Thank you. - Manfred Thu, 22 Dec 2011 09:39:15 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/strangers-in-a-strange-land-part-two.html#comment-9273 @MikeS. I don't think that the point of the article was to state that linguistic, translational problems are the core cause of All That's Wrong With The Church (which is really to say All That's Wrong With Humanity). It was just to point out that our new translation of the Mass is a more accurate and thus more poetic and better translation than the old. And I think Dr Esolen did that quite well. @Manfred oh, never mind. Obedience to the Church is paramount. This includes what may seem to our eyes a stupid and poorly-written liturgy, for like so many other apparent stupid decisions of God in our salvation history "it seemed good to the Holy Spirit" and to the hierarchy under His guidance and inspiration. Let's not forget that Christ Himself lost many followers by telling them to eat His flesh. Count your blessings instead, and thank God for a translation of His liturgy that better fits His liturgy--that shows the underlying glory of the Latin text. By the way, when was the last time you heard of Protestants using a Latin liturgy? - Scaevola Thu, 22 Dec 2011 07:40:16 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/strangers-in-a-strange-land-part-two.html#comment-9272 May I, with due respect, disagree? The "translation" of God's actions in the world, as a Burning Bush or as a Child in a Manger or anything else, into words, is infinitely more "flattening" and removed from direct experience than any of the subsequent translations of scripture into any vernacular could possibly be, yet somehow we soldier on. The ongoing crisis of the Church owes far more to the improper actions of the Church in the world, (especially an apparently vast multi generational descent into secret sexual deviance) than it does to any infelicity of language or ceremony. Our problems are not primarily linguistic; the solutions to our problems are not primarily linguistic either. We need God's grace in order to mend our actions far more than we need to mend our words. Our problem is not faulty ritual; it is our hearts that are most flawed. - MikeS. Thu, 22 Dec 2011 06:25:04 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/strangers-in-a-strange-land-part-two.html#comment-9271 Great article! One thing, though, stands out to me after several years of Latin class: Should not "qui tolis peccata mundi" be translated as "who take away the sins of the world," rather than "you take away the sins of the world"? As far as I understand, this should be an appositive for the purpose of addressing the Lamb of God, rather than telling the Lamb what He does (which He already knows!), such that the whole phrase should be, "Lamb of God, Who take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us..." - P.D. Thu, 22 Dec 2011 05:56:41 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/strangers-in-a-strange-land-part-two.html#comment-9270 Poetry points to the ineffable. Prose is a painted surface. Street jargon is - as noted - the worn out poetry of everyday use from which the sheen of strangeness has been abraded. We live in a time of surfaces, in which we like to pretend that the paint we apply is all there is and one color is as good as any other. We trivialize the transcendental with a thin coat of prose lite and then, when the trivial fails to hold our attention, we turn sullenly to our worldly pursuits. In a man-centered world, there is no place for strangeness and it is often observed that familiarity breeds contempt. - Other Joe Thu, 22 Dec 2011 04:24:20 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/strangers-in-a-strange-land-part-two.html#comment-9269 While your essay, Dr. Esolen, is well thought out and very well written, it concerns a liturgy which 50-80 brilliant Italian scholars, both religious and lay, have just described in their joint letter TO THE POPE as a Protestant liturgy. In fact, they are challenging the entire Council and it's aftermath and they are requesting (politely demanding?) that the Pope set up a Magisterial Commission to study and to determine, with the full authoriy of the Magisterium, what "teachings", if any, the Council imposed. Two notable signatories of this letter are Msgr. Gherardini and Roberto de Mattei. The SSPX just handed back the Preamble the CDF handed them on 9/14, unsigned. Bright Catholics are voting with their feet. I have been in a FSSP parish (yes, we are no longer just a chapel) for years as have my grown children, as we no longer had the patience to deal with liturgical fraud. While I pray that B XVI lives for many years, I also pray that he is succeeded by Pius XIII, as all the Popes (beginning with Pius IX who took the name Pius were known for their orthodoxy in the face of Modernism. - Manfred Thu, 22 Dec 2011 03:58:20 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/strangers-in-a-strange-land-part-two.html#comment-9268 Thank you, Dr. Esolen, for another tour de force. I recalled at the outset of my reading the roughness of St. Mark's Greek and the Aramaic form of St. Matthew's Gospel and wondered how the article would work out. And you are right: the depths of Holy Scripture's languages, images, metaphors, and turns of phrase, and the architectonic wonder of the Roman Rite, were obliterated in the modern translations, almost as if the the operating principle behind them were "flat, ugly, and prosaic is better, because it is more authentic." That principle emptied the churches, in a way parallel to the emptying of the mainline Protestant churches during the same period: once religion turns away from calling us to greater depths and higher levels of living, what is the point of it? Religion that ceases to transform is false religion. Protestantism ran out of gas as it turned away from the truths of Sacred Scripture accessible to its exegetes, pastors, and faithful laity, and what's left of it is little more than the leftist political activism which promises transformation without personal conversion: a real dead-end, and a nightmare for those whom that activism attempts to force to change. The Church's faithful find that her liturgy still does transform, because it is animated by the Spirit of Christ, however muffled that Spirit may be in forms that obscure His presence, and because, ex opero operante, the sacraments have their own efficacy, on the promise of Christ himself, quite apart from the worthiness, or, in this case, the tastelessness of this or that priest or this or that translations committee. During the nineteenth century the Anglo-Catholic parishes of the Church of England were packed: the beauty and the pageantry with which the service of Holy Communion was celebrated, and the glory of the language, told working-class people who packed the churches that there was more to life, more to which to aspire, more for which to hope, than the banal, intramundane promises of glory that the gods of this world promise or can ever hope to deliver. And until the Council, the pages of the conversion stories are replete with accounts of awe and wonder at the august majesty with which the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was offered, even - especially? -in the humblest of parishes. My own conversion occurred in the early 90s, and it was not because of the Church's liturgy but rather because of the unity of truth in the Church's teachings and because of some rather extraordinary graces by means of which I was given to see past the banality of those earlier translations of the Novus Ordo to the realities toward which the liturgy points. I was blessed to have benefited from a rather rigorous education and an innate passion and drive to know the Truth that sets one free. But it was also a case of echoing the words of St. Peter: after having traversed the right wing of Protestantism through the wastelands of mainline Protestantism, there was one place, and only one, left for me to go in my search for truth: the Church that always proclaims the fullness of the Truth that she alone possesses, however clear or obscure in her liturgy and teaching documents her presentation of that Truth may be. It is my hope that the new -- correct -- translation of the Novus Ordo will bring many to the Church: many Catholics back, and many outside the fold in. For while the changes appear to be small and few in number, the entire tone of the Mass has been changed from a celebration of "the community" to the worship of Almighty God, and the quieting down of the congregations during Mass is truly a wonder to behold. We would have gotten much farther down the road had the American bishops used the RSV-CE, which does retain much of the strangeness of language that causes wonder and reflection upon the contemplation of Sacred Scripture; but alas, whilst the USCCB owns the copyright to the NAB, those days are far off. Still, we are in much better shape than we have been in for a long time. Thank you again for a beautiful reflection. - Dave Thu, 22 Dec 2011 02:02:25 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/strangers-in-a-strange-land-part-two.html#comment-9266 Like the former translations, this piece is not at all dreary. It brightened a decidedly dark and wintery morning. Merry Christmas. - Ars Artium Thu, 22 Dec 2011 01:59:01 +0100