10 years into the translation of the Mass

 I realized this morning that we have been using the current Mass translation for 10 years now (the anniversary date will be November 27).  How has the "new" translation worked out?

I may not be the best person to recount the history of how our current translation came about, but in brief: for centuries before Vatican II, Roman Catholics worshipped in Latin.  The Council Fathers of Vatican II, as part of a broader liturgical reform, permitted mass to be celebrated in vernacular languages, a permission which nations and language groups around the world enthusiastically embraced.  

Before the 1960s had ended, and before the larger liturgical reform was fully baked, an English translation had been introduced at the parish which I attended as a child.  This was replaced in the early 1970s by a new translation, composed by an agency called the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL), a joint effort of the world's English-speaking bishops' conferences.  The new translation was contained in a liturgical book called the Sacramentary, which was the instruction manual, script, field guide and cookbook for the liturgical reform which was initiated by Vatican II.

The translation contained in the Sacramentary was used in the US until 2011, so it is the translation which I'd heard and spoken nearly all of my life.  Little or nothing changed for us in the pews during those decades.  

But during those same years, a series of drawn out, bitter and exhausting conflicts were being fought over translations. Much of that war, which hasn't ended yet, was fought behind closed doors in the Holy See, episcopal conferences and ICEL.  But occasionally it spilled into print, and then onto television screens tuned into EWTN, and then, with the advent of the Internet, into bytes.  The conflict pitted church conservatives against church liberals.  Church conservatives wanted to "reform the reform", which meant different things to different people but which always seemed to require tearing up the Sacramentary and starting over again with a different translation.  Church liberals wanted to push the boundaries of Catholic liturgies to serve a variety of theological and social goals and causes, and wished to alter and supplement the liturgical texts pursuant to those goals.  For a critical period during the 1990s and 2000s, the conservatives gained the upper hand in Rome, imposing new translation rules and incidentally ending the careers of some people who had faithfully served the church as translators.  An English translation produced with much faith, labor and talent during the 1990s actually was rejected by the Holy See during this period and never made it into the pews.  

Under conservative translation rules and oversight (and not a few unilateral "corrections" to translations by Roman officials), the English speaking church came up with yet another translation, which eventually achieved approval and is the translation we have been using now for the past 10 years.

The promulgation of the current translation wasn't controversy-free.  Many people who serve the church were bitterly opposed to its being used.  Ten years into its use, it appears to me that their opposition is largely unabated.  And fueling their opposition, Pope Francis promulgated a new set of translation rules a few years ago which supersedes the previous "conservative" translation approach and endows with papal authority some of the translation principles favored by more liberal advocates.  So a decade into this current translation, it is, in a sense, already obsolete!

In my view, the experience of the new translation has been different for different stakeholders.  Here is my take on three of those stakeholder groups:

• The people in the pews have adapted to the new translation pretty well.  It took a few months to get used to new phrases like "... and with your Spirit" and "... Lord, God of hosts", and then everyone seemed to be fine.  For people my age and older, quite a bit of it was deja vu, because some of those "new" phrases were used in that first, interim translation we used during the 1960s and early 1970s.  If one buys the notion that the Catholic Church consists of the entire People of God (rather than just the clergy and the formal institutional structure), then it would seem difficult not to rate the new translation a success, because, for most people, it seems to have worked just fine, and I suspect that most people rarely think about it these days.
• Priests, on the whole, were opposed - some vehemently so - to the new translation when it was first rolled out.  I don't find it difficult to sympathize with them: they speak (or chant) much more of the text of the mass than the people in the pews do.  They also must lead a greater number of liturgies (by several magnitudes) than most laypersons attend, so they are much more immersed in the difficulties of the new translation.  They are the ones who bear the burden of uttering the multisyllabic, Latinate words and the long, complex sentences.  For many priests in the US, English is not their first language, and asking someone who is somewhat less than perfectly fluent to proclaim a line like "May he ... make you heirs to an eternal inheritance" (this from the final blessing during Easter Season) seems almost an act of unkindness.  When this translation was rolled out a decade ago, many of the grumpiest complaints and most colorful denunciations came from priests.  Still, I haven't heard a priest kvetch about the translation in a while, so maybe they have accommodated themselves to it.   
• Music ministers are another group who were asked to make a lot of changes to accommodate the new translation.  Mass settings which had been used for 20 years or more had to be retired, or reworked by their composers to fit the new texts of prayers and acclamations.  "Lord God of power and might" became "Lord, God of hosts", which meant that composers had to make several counts, or entire measures, disappear.  On the other hand, "We worship you, we give you thanks, we praise you for your glory" sprouted into "We praise you, we bless you, we adore you, we glorify you, we give you thanks for your great glory", which gave composers many more syllables and words to fit into their musical schema.  An entire Memorial Acclamation, "Christ has died / Christ is risen / Christ will come again" was put out to pasture (or sent to the glue factory), as it doesn't exist in the Latin editio typica.  Saying goodbye to pieces of music which one has sung or played for a quarter of a century can be like burying a friend.  Using our parish's music ministry as a point of reference: it took our choir members, cantors and musicians several years to reach a critical mass of new musical repertoire. In recent years, it has grown more comfortable.  After 10 years, a piece of music may start to take on some of the characteristics of an old friend.