Collect for the Nineteenth Sunday of the Year

Almighty ever-living God,

whom, taught by the Holy Spirit,

we dare to call our Father,

bring, we pray, to perfection in our hearts

the spirit of adoption as your sons and daughters . . .

Today’s Collect follows the letters of Saint Paul (Rom 8,23, Gal 4,5, Eph 1,5) in using the concept of adoption to illustrate what happens when we are baptized. It is because God has adopted us that we are able to call him ‘Father’. This change is so awe-inspiring that we speak of ‘daring’ to address God as our Father, both in today’s Collect and during Mass as we prepare for the distribution of Holy Communion.

The Rite of Christian Baptism requires us to teach the Lord’s Prayer, the ‘Our Father’, only in the very last phase of candidates’ instruction, so that it is not until they are baptized and are about to receive the Eucharist that they address God as ‘Father’.

Unfortunately, this ancient discipline is widely ignored. I have found myself in classrooms where a high proportion of the pupils profess non-Christian religions.but everybody joins in the ‘Our Father’!

Two recent Gospels

 A couple of weeks ago we celebrated Trinity Sunday. The Gospel of that day in the Roman Rite is the ending of Mark’s Gospel  I was surprised to hear in the official translation ‘ . . . make disciples of all nations; baptise them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’. In modern English, if we say that we are doing something ‘in the name’ of somebody, we mean that we are doing it with their authority or in their place. Is this what the biblical text means? Looking at the Greek original, I noticed that it does not say ‘in the name’ (en toi onomati) but ‘into the name’ (eis to onoma). 

To enter into a name is to enter a family. Hence, after baptism, but not before, we are able to address God as our Father.

Last Sunday, the liturgical tenth Sunday of the Year, we heard from the Gospel of Mark that Jesus ‘went home’ with his disciples, and that his relatives came looking for him. Did Jesus have a home? Did he live with his mother, and perhaps with others?  This passage of Mark’s gospel is puzzling. But the Greek original says nothing of Jesus’ home. It simply says that he went into ‘a house’.

Let us hope that the new official translation of the Lectionary, soon to be available, will be more faithful to the original texts.

A victim of the Roman Canon

A correspondent raised with me some reservations concerning the official translation of paragraph 92 of the Roman Canon, and I thought I would record my reflections here. The Latin text is:

offerimus praeclarae maiestati tuae

de tuis donis ac datis

hostiam puram

hostiam sanctam,

hostiam immaculatam,

Panem sanctum vitae aeternae

et Calicem salutis perpetuae.

And the official English version:

. . . we, your servants and your holy people,

offer to your glorious majesty

from the gifts that you have given us,

this pure victim,

this holy victim,

this spotless victim,

the holy Bread of eternal Life

and the Chalice of everlasting salvation. 

We use the English word victim only to refer to animates, that is, to humans or animals. But Latin hostia can also refer to inanimates. For instance, an Advent collect refers to devotionis nostrae hostia, officially translated as 'the sacrifice of our worship'. A well-known version of O Salutaris Hostia as 'O saving Victim' may have suggested that 'victim' be used in the passage under discussion, but here, the Blessed Sacrament being spoken of as 'bread' and 'chalice', two inanimates, I suggest that 'sacrifice' would be a preferable translation. Moreover, the use of 'this' has no counterpart in the original. If we were to omit it in translation, instead of the repetitive insistence of the current version, we should have a paragraph that builds steadily to a conclusion and to the full revelation of its meaning:

. . . we, your servants and your holy people,

offer to your glorious majesty

from the gifts that you have given us,

a pure sacrifice,

a holy sacrifice,

a spotless sacrifice,

the holy Bread of eternal Life

and the Chalice of everlasting salvation.