Totally beside the point

I watched a video on line which showed a priest reciting the consecration prayer of the Mass in the new English translation that Anglophone Catholics worldwide will be using a year from now. All in all, sounded fine to me. A bit more formal and sacral than the current version, but hardly arcane if you are a Catholic*. I sometimes had the impression that the 1970's translation was written for non-believers aged 12 who had no religious frame of reference. Made it sound like a kindergarten lesson sometimes.

Anyway, one plus and one minus. In the second Canon, which is based on the oldest known consecration prayer (third or fourth century AD), there is a phrase which is beautiful in Latin but challenging in English: Spiritus tui rore sanctifica. Sanctify (them) by the dew (rore) of your Spirit. The translators have chosen "make holy these gifts by sending down your Spirit upon them like the dewfall." A decent way to handle something that would be awkward in a literal translation.

Old guard Boomers who hate the new translation on principle complained about how odd and unusual "like the dewfall" would sound to "contemporary" ears. Some alert traditionalist wags pointed out that no one seemed to mind the phrase back in the very cool 70's when it was part of Cat Stevens' wildly popular Morning Has Broken , a song not unfamiliar in "contemporary" Catholic liturgies. Heh. I often had reason to compare the obsessive dumbing down of religious language among Catholic progressives with the sometimes very poetically challenging language of popular music.

I note, however, that rore is omitted in French, Spanish, Italian and German translations.

And the minus is a literal translation. In a prayer for the Pope and the local Bishop et omni clero. Here it is simply a matter of sound. The English word for clero is clergy. It is an ugly sounding word: kler-jee. Congee and bungee are like it. I would have preferred spelling out who is meant by omni clero as "all the bishops, priests and deacons."

BTW, the Germans already have this: die Gemeinschaft der Bischöfe, unsere Priester und Diakone, alle, die zum Dienst in der Kirche bestellt sind.

As I said, totally beside the point here at Ex Cathedra.

* I mean, this is a 2000 year old ritual designed to assimilate bread and wine into the reality of the Risen Christ in the form of a bloodless sacrifice...you can hardly expect it to be obvious.