Lost in Translation #139
After praying the Hanc igitur, the priest prays the Quam oblationem:
Quam oblatiónem tu, Deus, in ómnibus, quǽsumus, benedictam, adscriptam, ratam, rationábilem, acceptabilemque fácere dignéris ut nobis Corpus et Sanguis fiat dilectíssimi Filii tui, Dómini nostri Jesu Christi.
Which the 2011 ICEL edition translates as:
Be pleased, O God, we pray, to bless, acknowledge, and approve this offering in every respect; make it spiritual and acceptable, so that it may become for us the Body and Blood of your most beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. [1]
And which I translate as:
May You, O God, in all ways, we beseech, deign to make blessed, enrolled, ratified, rational, and acceptable this offering, that it may be made for us the Body and Blood of Your most beloved Son Jesus Christ our Lord.
Josef Jungmann eloquently describes the function of this prayer:
The last prayer before the account of the institution forms with it a grammatical unit. It is like an up-beat before the full measure, a final swell in human words before the introduction of the imposing phrases of the sacred account, which are attached by means of a simple relative pronoun. [2]
ICEL understandably simplifies the main verbs facere digneris as to “be pleased,” since the more literal “may You deign to make” involves the antiquated verb “deign.” Still, the original language draws attention to a significant three-legged stool in the Mass, a relationship between worth (dignus), dignity (dignitas), and deigning (dignari). Here, we unworthy servants ask God to dignify our offering, to elevate it with five qualities so that it may become His Son’s Body and Blood.
Similarly, ICEL opts for the simpler construction of three infinitives in the active voice (“to bless, acknowledge, and approve”) whereas all five qualities are iterated as perfect past passive participles (“make blessed, make acknowledged,” etc.). There is something circuitous about the phrasing of the original prayer, an echo of how one would address royalty. For to a king, a servant does not say, “Yo, king, it’s lunch—get it while it’s hot” but rather “May it please Your Royal Highness to know that lunch is ready.”
The tu in the prayer is difficult to translate as well. In Latin, personal pronouns are unnecessary for the subject of a verb, and so when they are included, it is for the sake of emphasis, which I have tried to capture by placing “You” in italics. Another option would be “You Yourself.”
In omnibus likewise poses problems. The simplest translation is “in all things,” the rendering of choice for some pre-Vatican II hand Missals. But ICEL is correct in translating the expression as “in every respect” (or, more literally, “in all ways”), since the prayer is asking for thoroughness. [3]
Christine Mohrmann describes the fivefold enumeration benedictam, adscriptam, ratam, rationabilem, acceptabilemque as a
rhythmically balanced flow of words, which shows an almost juridical precision… We have already come across this same sacral style in the primitive pagan prayers of the Roman national religion. This monumental verbosity coupled with juridical precision, which is so well suited to the gravitas Romana but which also betrays a certain scrupulosity with regard to the higher powers, was the typical form of expression of the old Roman prayer. [4]
The juridical precision is evidenced in the ascending flow of past participles, almost all of which defy translation.
Benedictam means to “make it blessed,” which is fair enough, except for the fact that this oblation has already been blessed several times during the Offertory Rite. Chalk it up to the “liturgical stammer” that is a feature of the Roman liturgical tradition.Adscriptam. To be ascribed is to be added to a list as a citizen or a soldier, to be enrolled into a dignified elite. [5] The priest is also asking that this sacrifice be registered in our log, that we “get credit for it.”[6]
The Book of Life
Ratam. To be ratified, or as the Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary puts it, is to be “fixed, settled, established, firm, unalterable, sure, certain, valid, etc.” [7] Here, the priest asks God the Father to validate his Eucharistic oblation by turning it into the Eucharistic sacrifice.
Rationabilem. The most intriguing word in the Canon and perhaps the entire Ordo of the Mass is this one, for it goes against the grain of our sensibilities. Even though we Catholic Christians maintain that faith and reason are compatible, we tend to put them in two different containers, at least where worship and study are concerned. We act as if the rational were for the classroom, whereas worship is more for the heart. And yet here in the midst of our most sacred part of our worship is a plea for our oblation to be rational or reasonable.
What constitutes the rationabilem can be discovered with a little effort. According to some scholars, the term was once synonymous with “spiritual” until its meaning migrated to “reasonable, conformed to the essence of a thing” and spiritalis took its place. [8] It may sound odd to think of “rational” and “spiritual” as synonymous until one considers Romans 12, 1: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercy of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing unto God, your reasonable service.” The Greek logiké latreia (rationabile obsequium or “reasonable service”) captures the fact that Christian latreia or worship is logocentric or centered on the Word (Logos) that is Christ. As Pope Benedict XVI observes, “the celebration is not only a ritual, it is not only a liturgical game, but is intended to be ‘logiké latreia’, a transformation of my existence in the direction of the Logos.” [9]
Benedict also notes that rationabile appears in the Roman Canon, when the priest prays that God will, as one old translation has it, “bless, approve, ratify, make worthy (rationabile) and acceptable this offering.” As the Pope explains:
The Church knows that in the Holy Eucharist Christ’s gift of Himself, His true sacrifice, becomes present. However, the Church prays that the community celebrating may truly be united with Christ and transformed; she prays that we may become what we cannot be with our own efforts: a “rational” offering that is acceptable to God. Thus the Eucharistic Prayer interprets St. Paul’s words correctly. [10]
I have translated the last clause as “May it be made for us the Body and Blood of Your most beloved Son Jesus Christ our Lord” even though fiat can also be translated as “become.” I choose the less eloquent “may it be made” to show that this petition is part of an ongoing theme in the Mass between making, not-made, and remaking. The bread and wine were made, the Eternal Son was not made but begotten, and now the begotten and not-made Son who was made flesh is now being made present to us by bread and wine being remade into His Body and Blood.
Dilectissimi. There is nothing unusual in calling Jesus Christ the “most beloved” Son of His Father, but here it forms a pleasing emotional counterweight to the potentially arid legal terminology.
Finally, the prayer asks that the bread and wine become for us Christ’s Body and Blood. One could misunderstand this petition to mean that we want this bread and wine to function for us as Body and Blood rather than for it to become Body and Blood per se. But the prayer hearkens to a biblical manner of speaking which stresses that all that Christ is and does is for our sake, as when the Angels announce to the shepherds “This day is born to you a Saviour.” (Lk. 2, 11)
Notes
[1] 2011 Roman Missal, 638.
[2] Josef Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite, vol. 2, 187.
[3] For Nicholas Gihr, in omnibus means “in every respect thoroughly and perfectly.” (The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, 627)
[4] Christine Mohrmann, Liturgical Latin: Its Origins and Character (Catholic University of America Press, 1957), pp. 68-69; similarly, Jungmann speaks of “the guarded legal terminology of the Romans which is here in evidence” (vol. 2, 188).
[5] “A-scrībo,” II.A, Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary.
[6] Barthe, Forest of Symbols, 111.
[7] “Rĕor, rătus, 2,” II.β, Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary.
[8] Ellebracht, Vocabulary of the Ancient Orations, 18.
[9] Sandro Magister, “Homilies. The Liturgical Year Narrated by Joseph Ratzinger, Pope.”
[10] Pope Benedict XVI, “St. Paul: Wednesday General Audience,” January 7, 2009. Even though I agree with ICEL that “spiritual” is the best translation for rationabilis in this prayer, it is meet that we remember the word’s ties to reason. As Peter Kwasniewski writes:
Protestantism attacked Catholicism as a recrudescence of paganism or a Judaizing cult; modernity attacked Catholicism as irrational superstition and pre-scientific prejudice; postmodernity attacks Catholicism as an avaricious, chauvinistic, omniphobic, intolerant structure of self-serving power; but the Roman Canon serenely bears witness to the luminous rationality of the Faith, the majesty of its God, the excellence of its rites, the lofty aim of its rule of life. (Once and Future Roman Rite, 237)
