Meditation on the New Translation of the Missal by Scott Hahn

by Dr. Scott Hahn on 10.31.11 You probably haven’t yet heard the new translation of the Mass, but I’ll bet you’ve heard plenty about it. The media interest has been astonishing. The Church’s education efforts have been prodigious. The response from Catholic publishers has been just short of epic.
Thanks be to God for this historic moment that returns our focus to the Mass. I know that it will be a difficult adjustment for some, both priests and lay people. I’ve been attending daily Mass for a couple decades and more, and so I’ve burned deep neural pathways for all the accustomed responses. I’ll be stumbling over myself in the coming weeks. I’ll be paging through the missal to find new texts for prayers that I could, just weeks ago, recite automatically, without thinking.
And that, too, is a grace! Weeks ago I had the dubious luxury of not thinking at Mass, of letting my mind wander. Now I need to think about what I’m saying and doing. This will feel awkward, but the awkwardness itself will rouse me to my senses. I’ll be looking at the same old ritual, but as if I’m seeing and praying it for the first time. What a great return for a little bit of sacrifice.
Then, as I pray, the translation itself will take me deeper into the mysteries of Jesus Christ. The new translation aims for a more precise, literal rendering of the prayers as they appear in the original Latin and in the biblical languages. I spoke recently with a Latinist who has studied the translation closely, and he said he was overwhelmed by how many biblical quotations and allusions have now come to the fore. He began counting — and he stopped in the nine hundreds!

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