Our Lady of Victory Parish

Many of us are creatures of habit, and don’t like change very much. In fact, I grew up, as I’m sure many of you did, with the old adage my dad would repeat on many an occasion, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” Of course, the areas where we least like change tend to be in our traditional things that bind us together: weddings, family get togethers, high school football games, and the like.

Above all as Catholics, we don’t like changes to the Mass, which has bound us together as a people for 2,000 years! We especially don’t like change when it is sprung on us unexpectedly, and tend to be a little more tolerant of it when we feel we have been adequately prepared for it. For all of these reasons, I wanted to talk about a change that is coming to the Mass in the not-too-distant future across the U.S. and all of the English-speaking world: an updated English translation of our current Mass.

 

As a very brief capsule history explaining the background, many of you remember living through the period when the Mass texts were changed around the world, shortly after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. At this time, most places also started translating all or part of the new Latin Mass texts into the local language for the first time, so that the Mass was celebrated in French in France, German in Germany, English in the U.S. etc. (The technical term was that Mass was celebrated in “the vernacular” language).

Where did hese Mass translations come from? There was, and still is, one standard Latin translation of the new Mass, from which the bishops of all nations and their assistants derived their translation. For various historical reasons which I don’t have space to get into here, the English translation of the Mass was quite rushed, and was not very accurate. The English-speaking bishops at the time noted that they would come back to the issue of revising the translation “later.” Almost 40 years “later,” and partly at the request of the Vatican, they have finally begun work on that revised translation.