The apostolate of the laity derives from their Christian vocation and the Church can never be without it. … Our own times require of the laity no less zeal: in fact, modern conditions demand that their apostolate be broadened and intensified.

APOSTOLICAM ACTUOSITATEM November 18, 1965

 Today at the Vigil Mass, we were provided with the first of six inserts in our parish bulletin, providing direction pertinent to the upcoming introduction of the new translation of the Roman Missal.  Many of us have long awaited the coming of this translation.  It is no so much that the present translation is flawed, though it is.  Absolute perfection can probably never be achieved.  However, its tastelessness (as opposed to elegance), commonness (as opposed to particularity), and secularity (as opposed to sacredness) made it prone to treating the Mass as if it were a mere community gathering, rather than a re-presentation of the Sacrifice of Calvary.  All it took was a soupçon of pop psychology, and a pinch of the so-called “spirit” of Vatican II, and it could be easily arranged to make contemplation, transcendence, and the numinous strangers to the gathering.  The music didn’t help, but that’s another story.  Neither did the translation of Holy Scripture in the Lectionary, and that is a bigger story.  We can have Mass without that music (and I rather wish we more often did), but we must have the lectionary, and there is only one.  Let us hope it is the next thing addressed in restoring the Mass to where the Holy Father would clearly have it.

Today, as we received the reassuring information that rectification in one area is on the way, we also received a reminder of how badly rectification is also needed in the Lectionary.  Consider this passage from the beginning of the First Reading:

Seek the Lord while he is still to be found,
call to him while he is still near.
Let the wicked man abandon his way,
the evil man his thoughts.
Let him turn back to the Lord who will take pity on him,
[Isaiah 55]

That passage is from a link on our Archdiocesan website to the reading.  The reading is from the Jerusalem Bible, and presumably it is deemed to be a worthy rendering by the Archdiocesan authorities.  So, with that rendering available, what did we receive at Mass from the Lectionary?  This:

Seek the Lord while he is still to be found,
call to him while he is still near.
Let the wicked person abandon their way,
and the unrighteous person their thoughts.
Let that person return to the Lord that He may have mercy on them.

When I was preparing to take my Ontario Grade 13 departmental English exam (when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I grant you), I was told that three major errors in grammar would result in my receiving a failing grade.  Let’s see what we were given:

“Wicked person” is singular; “their” is plural – that’s one.

“Unrighteous person” is singular; “their” is (still) plural – that’s two.

“That person” is singular; “them” is plural – that’s three.

Now for heaven’s sake – literally!  This is Holy Scripture, a part of the Deposit of the Faith, preserved and reverenced from the earliest times when it was composed.  How can it be that it is subjected this treatment, and presented to the faithful in a form that cannot pass muster with a high school examiner?  Is this the care, attention, and reverence called for in handling and presenting this gift from God?

Many questions arise.  What replaced care and reverence and led to this horrible deformation of something sacred? Who did this? Who is responsible for letting it happen?  Let those questions pass.  It is time – it is past time – to put this right.  Deformities are being corrected in the liturgy.  Some were egregious, from a theological perspective.  In the “orate fratres” the priest is called upon to pray that his sacrifice and the people’s may be acceptable to God.  This is proper.  The priest, in persona Christi, presents one sacrifice, and the people present another.  But the translation being rectified ignored, improperly, this distinction, and spoke in English of “our” sacrifice, as if there were but one shared sacrifice.  Something was deemed to be more important that theological faithfulness, and we were served up this tainted portion, for years.  If this distinction could be so blatantly blurred, is it any wonder that, not infrequently, celebrants gave communion to extraordinary ministers in the same manner they shared it with concelebrating priests?

The errors in the translation of the liturgy are being addressed, and the influences of irrelevant, irreverent, and caustic temporal considerations are being purged.  Let us hope that the view from the pew will reveal that the same attention has been paid to the English lectionary in Canada, and soon.  Considerations from the secular culture and pop psychology have clearly proven to be as bad for the Lectionary as were the teachings of Charles Taze Russell on the formulation of the New World Translation of the Bible.  I know the national Church can do better!