Mind your language
WE WENT to the end-of-term orches- tral Mass at Westminster Cathedral and very nice it was too: a Missa Solemnis in C by Mozart and `Zadok the Priest' thrown in for luck. But the language! My husband feels these things more than I do, and ended up responding `Hrrmph' at the Kiss of Peace.
The deficiencies of the liturgical English were pointed up by our singing some of the responses in Latin. So: 'Dominus vobiscum', 'Et cum spiritu tuo.' But when we recited it in translation it went: 'The Lord be with you', 'And also with you.' My husband said afterwards, over a g-and-t in The Cardinal public house, that we might as well have answered, 'Much obliged, I'm sure.'
There was another phrase that attracted his ire. In the Eucharistic Prayer (which we used to call the Canon) there is a bit that says, 'so that from East to West a perfect offering may be made to the glory of your name'. My husband pointed out that this is drawn from the prophet Malachi, and in the Douai version is rendered, 'from the rising of the sun even to the going down . . . there is sacrifice and there is offered to my name a clean oblation'. Perhaps the new translators were influ- enced by Copernicus's theory that the sun doesn't really rise and set.
Dot Wordsworth
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