The Feast of the Baptism of the Lord

This feast did not occur in the Roman Rite before Vatican II. When it was introduced into the 1970 Missal, a new Collect was composed which, like many of the newly-written prayers in our Missal, lacks the conciseness and simplicity of the older tradition. Its seven lines contain no fewer than three participial phrases - a challenge to the translator.

The alternative Collect is simpler and much more ancient, being found already in the Gelasian Sacramentary. In the official translation, the third and fourth lines contain a curious thought:

grant, we pray, that we may be inwardly transformed
through him whom we recognize as outwardly like ourselves.

Line 4 seems to imply that Christ, though outwardly like ourselves, is inwardly unlike us. This seems to me to veer towards the heresy of Apollinarianism, which holds that Christ had no human soul. Orthodox Christianity understands that Christ is 'like us in all things but sin' (Hebrews 4,15). 

The revisers have misunderstood the Latin. In fact it prays that our outward Christian profession may be matched by our inner lives. The problem, as so often in this translation, arises from incorrect placing of an adverb. It easy to mend with the help of the Morecambe Principle:

grant, we pray, that we may be inwardly transformed
through him whom we recognize outwardly as like ourselves.

January 5 Prayer after Communion

One criticism of the official translation of the Missal that one often hears is that it is 'clunky' - that is, clumsy in its language. There are several reasons, but a major one - the major one, I would say - is that the revisers seem not to have understood how adverbs and adverbial expressions behave in English. They put them in the wrong place. A clear example is today's Prayer after Communion, in which we are asked to pray

that, through the working of this mystery,
our offences may be cleansed
and our just desires fulfilled.

move 'through the working of this mystery' from its current place to the end of the prayer, and I think you will find it far less clunky. This is because the normal position for a non-modal adverb or adverbial phrase in English is after the verb that it modifies.

The modification that I propose follows the 'Morecambe principle', named after the comedian Eric Morecambe who, when accused of playing the wrong notes on a piano, retorted that he had played the right notes, but in the wrong order.

If you adopt this change, you may also wish to change 'through the working' to 'by the working' so as to avoid having two occurrences of 'through' in consecutive lines.

I'm back

I stopped writing this blog nearly three years ago because I couldn't find time to achieve the level of coverage that I had been aiming at.
Now that the official translation has been in use for 5 years, it seems a good idea to start again but less ambitiously. I'll post when I come across something in the Missal that seems worthy of comment - that leaves me with plenty of material.
I would also like to hear comments from other people, and so I have (I hope successfully) opened the blog to comments.