The Art of Pastoral Translation at the Service of Communion
by Archbishop Allen Vigneron
Archbishop Allen Vigneron is the new Archbishop of Detroit, appointed January 5, installed January 28, 2009. A member of the Bishops’ Committee for Divine Worship, he has served as Bishop of Oakland since 2003. Before his appointment to Oakland, he was auxiliary bishop in Detroit (1996-2003). In 1994, he became rector/president of Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, and had served in the Administrative Section of the Vatican Secretariat of State.
Following is the keynote address presented by then-Bishop Vigneron at the Gateway Liturgical Conference held November 7-8, 2008, in St. Louis, published here with his kind permission.
Dear Brothers and Sisters — All Beloved as Members in the one Body of Christ Our High-Priest:
I want to express my gratitude for being invited to participate in this year’s Gateway Liturgical Conference.
As part of my prefatory remarks, I ask your indulgence in letting me recall a memory from my adolescence which I bring to this conference. It was in August 1964 that I together with several other high school seminarians traveled by car from Detroit to St. Louis in order to come to Kiel Auditorium for the National Liturgical Week. Among the memories that remain fresh after all those years are these: 1) Being present as Monsignor Martin Hellriegel led the holy Sacrifice of the Mass with a dignity that gave no place for pretense; 2) Hearing the great hymn “For All the Saints” for the first time, and immediately intuiting that it was an expression of music beyond time; and 3) Being caught up in the noble simplicity of that liturgical rite so that I was confident I was experiencing the visible disclosure of the invisible Mystery.
That first visit of mine to a liturgical conference here in St. Louis came some months before the Second Vatican Council was concluded. From those days until now — over forty years later — all of us in the Church have been caught up in the work the Council set for us of renewing the liturgical life of the People of God. With the sort of naïveté that is only proper to adolescence, I did not suspect that more than four full decades later we would still be at it; and least of all did I suspect that I would be here in St. Louis again, focused on this same noble aim — only now addressing you as a member of the College of Bishops.
2. About Liturgiam authenticam and This Conference
The particular focus for our session today is the implementation of Liturgiam authenticam (hereafter LA), a document from the Congregation for Divine Worship “on the use of vernacular languages in the publication of the books of the Roman Liturgy”. Issued on March 28, 2001, LA identifies itself as The Fifth Instruction “For the Right Implementation of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council”. And so, you see, it clearly comes to us from the Holy See as an important guidepost about a significant matter: about how to translate the texts of the Roman Liturgy in the vernacular, so that we can achieve the renewal of the liturgy called for by the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council.
In an address Cardinal Avery Dulles made to the November 2001 meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Cardinal offered what I consider to be a very insightful analysis of the basic end or finality of LA. He said that
“the central purpose of the Instruction [was] to assure the integral transmission of Revelation through the translation of scriptural and liturgical texts”.He pointed out that LA seeks to achieve this aim “by its dual emphasis on literal accuracy and on language conducive to reverence”.
By insisting on accuracy in translating liturgical texts, LA safeguards, as Cardinal Dulles notes, the content of faith, fides quae creditur; by stressing the sacral mode of expression in the language of liturgical translations — what we could call the “reverential diction” of the translations — LA seeks to safeguard the attitude of faith, fides qua creditur. By both of these moves, according to the Instruction, the vernacular texts of the liturgy will advance rather than hinder the basic end or telos of the liturgy: that is, the communication of the divine realities made present to us through God’s acts of revelation and appropriated by our acts of faith.
Link (here) to the full address
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