“Proclaimability” Is Not A Virtue.

The English UK Lectionary is being 'updated'. I've said for years that the 'Spirit of VII' introduced a permanent revolution into the Church to keep people off base and in doubt about what the Faith really is.

From Mundabor's Blog

The lectionary for the UK is being “renewed” starting from Advent. It has, allegedly, been revised with the help of the Catholic Truth Society. The CTS used to be very Catholic, but these days you never know.

The idea is that, with the new translation, the Scripture should be more proclaimable.

I did not know Scripture had to be proclaimable. Proclaimability is not a virtue. We are not talking about slogans to promote cookies, or shampoos. The treasure of Scripture is in the truths it reveals, and in the values it proposes. It is a very Protestant thinking that the vehicle (the language, the translation) used to convey those truths and those values should be constantly updated to keep pace with the changes in spoken language or, more probably, the loss of literacy and general dumbification of the population. On the contrary, there is value in words remaining the same and reinforcing the sense of immutability, of timeless truths.

In fact, the Church Herself used Latin as the only official Bible language centuries after Latin ceased to be spoken, and it can be safely said that Latin was, in most of Christianity, never spoken (the most used language inside the Roman Empire, the lingua franca of commerce and private interchange, was actually a simplified version of the complex, formal Greek language, which simplified version was called koine’. Words like “eleison” (written all together), actually appear to be words from the koine’, rather than the formal Greek “eleis on”, with the Omega for the genitive plural, “of us”). In fact, the Mass was originally in the koine’, but switched very rapidly to Latin, a language used internationally more for military and state than for private communications.

Why did the Church, in Her wisdom, do that? It cannot only have been because a dead language is useful to “fix” theological concepts. Had it been so, there would have been “proclaimable” translations of Scripture at Mass (and likely, the whole Mass would have remained in the koine’ version), whilst the theologians kept basing themselves exclusively on Latin texts. No, the issue here is that “Proclaimability” was never a value, it was never of interest. In fact, that you even know the language of the Mass was never of interest. Proclaima…what?

On the contrary: if you change the language used to express truth, it become natural for many faithful to associate this to the possibility that truth itself changes, same as when that unspeakable ass changes the words of the Our Father.

The “ageing” of even the vernacular language is, in fact, a positive phenomenon, as with the sense of immutability comes the special character of the expression. Expressions like “my cup runneth over” acquire a beauty of their own if they are left unaltered. In fact, you might say that, in that way, they even become more “proclaimable” exactly because of their specific, distinctive language.

In short: this is wrong. It might be that the intentions were not bad (and one might have his doubts), but the end result is, in my eyes, damaging.

There is so much to recover in Catholicism that it would be better to focus on using the immense patrimony that we have, rather than trying to dumbify it down to the level of the modern audience.