ROME – The words you hear at Mass will be changing in the years to come, says a new Vatican instruction. They'll be a more literal translation of the Latin.

After decades of translations to the vernacular that attempted to capture the sense, rather than the literal meaning, of the originals, the Holy See's May 7 document calls for a “new era” of liturgical translation.

It's the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments’ most specific and wide-ranging instruction on the subject in nearly 40 years.

“It's been a long time coming,” Chicago Cardinal Francis George told the Register. A member of the board of bishops who oversee English-language liturgical translators, Cardinal George said the difficulty of translation “has been a 10-year conversation.”

Authentic Liturgy (Liturgiam Authenticam) was prepared by the Congregation for Divine Worship at the specific request of Pope John Paul II. It rejects inclusive language and promotes a direct rendering of original texts.

Specific changes will include avoiding forced “inclusive” language that isn't gender specific, and returning the first words of the creed from “We believe” to the more literal “I believe.” The response to “Peace be with you” will also be changed, from the current “And also with you” to the more literal “And with your spirit.”

“Translations must be freed from exaggerated dependence on modern modes of expression and in general from psychologizing language,” said a Vatican press release announcing the document.

Authentic Liturgy also calls for stricter oversight of the so-called mixed commissions that have been responsible for translating liturgical texts since the Second Vatican Council.

Set up jointly by the bishops of countries that share a common tongue, mixed commissions produce translations that must then be approved by the Holy See. During the past decade, the Vatican has refused to grant approval for several translations produced by the commission that is responsible for translating liturgical texts into English, and approved others only after having insisted on substantial modifications.

The work of the translation body, known as the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL), will now be required to obtain a nihil obstat from the Congregation for Divine Worship “prior to taking up their duties.” ICEL will also be required to bring its statues into conformity with the new document within two years.

The Pope's directive followed many years of dispute over the quality of translations produced by bodies such as ICEL, which had been entrusted after Vatican II with the task of rendering original Latin texts into the vernacular.

Authentic Liturgy comes nearly four years after Pope John Paul II asked congregation prefect Cardinal Jorge Medina Estévez to compose a document on translation for use by the universal Church.

Regarding ICEL's future, Cardinal George said its provisional constitution, written up last year at the request of the Congregation for Divine Worship, will have to be “recast in light of this new document from Rome.”

Controversy

Not everyone views Authentic Liturgy as an organic development of the Church's prior statements on the liturgy.

John Page, executive secretary of ICEL, said the document “does seem to bring up a judgment of the decisions of bishops’ conferences and the [the Second Vatican] Council and the Concilium,” the body set up by the Council to make the transition into the vernacular.

“The very first instructions that came out were in a very different period of the reform,” Page said.

“This one speaks about a new era. It seems to continue in the direction of giving the Roman authorities greater say.…[It] seems to be moving more toward strengthening the authority of the congregation at the expense of the authority of the bishops’ conference.”

But the director of the U.S. bishops’ committee on liturgy disputed the contention that the document undercuts the authority of the bishops’ conference.

Father James Maroney told the Register that the Second Vatican Council fathers “themselves determined that it would be episcopal conferences that would be charged with the approval of liturgical translations. That has not changed.”

He called Authentic Liturgy the “latest expression” of Vatican II.

On the matter of inclusive language, Page defended translation principles used by ICEL in the past. “Certainly ICEL has made an effort to use language that is inclusive of men and women insofar as that can be done. The question there is, is that the living language?”

The new document says, “Many languages have nouns and pronouns capable of referring to both the masculine and the feminine in a single term. The abandonment of these terms under pressure of criticism on ideological or other grounds is not always wise or necessary nor is it an inevitable part of linguistic development.”

Said Page, “There is a stage in which [inclusive language] might have initiated in an ideological way, but it became more mainstream. It now seems to have moved with the actual cultural use of the language beyond an ideological program.”

But Father Maroney said that there is another principle at stake.

Often, a method of making language inclusive “prevents the hearer from fully appreciating the substance of the original text,” he said.

“The entire work is translation, and any technique that fails to translate precisely and completely what is contained in the source text is not appropriate.”

Reactions

Msgr. Francis Mannion, director of the newly created Liturgical Institute at the University of St. Mary of the Lake in Chicago, welcomed Authentic Liturgy as a “comprehensive and well-rounded presentation of translation principles.”

He called it the fruit of translating experience and “as much a self-correction on the part of the Holy See as a rebuke to the wider Church.”

“I think it's a very respectful document, very prudently stated,” Msgr. Mannion told the Register. “One shouldn't view this dispute as being between the Holy See and the rest of the Church. The period since Vatican II has been a period of intense change and the Church had very little experience to fall back on in the whole matter of vernacularization of the liturgy. I would say this document could only come now.”

The fundamental issue resolved by Authentic Liturgy, Msgr. Mannion said, is whether liturgical documents translated literally have the ability to speak across cultures. The answer to that question, emphatically stated in the new document, he said, is that a literal translation of the Roman rite is not done “at the expense of inculturation, but rather, is itself an instrument of inculturation.”

When will these changes in the Church's prayers be put into effect? He said the man in the pew will have to wait.

“It will be some time,” Msgr. Mannion said. “Translations have to be approved and no pastor has a right to translate on his own. We tend to live in a world of committees.”

But what is certain is that they will change — to something like they were meant to be all along.

“The challenge here is to teach the Catholic people to speak the language of the Roman liturgy rather than to have the Roman liturgy translated into their language,” Msgr. Mannion added.

Church's liturgical language into the vernacular in a way which is immediately accessible to the people,” he said, “we are not serving them because they are not getting the Roman liturgy; they are getting an adaptation of it.”