Non Tasarmi, Fratello!

“Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, There’s always laughter and good red wine. At least I’ve always found it so. Benedicamus Domino!” Hillaire Belloc

Saturday, December 29, 2018

Stop Quoting What He Said!

 From "First Things" an article by Charlotte Allen. Read the whole thing.

On November 15 the Italian Bishops’ Conference announced that it plans to change the wording of the Lord’s Prayer in the Mass liturgy. The bishops want the current Italian equivalent of “lead us not into temptation” to become “do not abandon us to temptation.”
The bishops have now petitioned the pope to approve this proposed alteration—a petition he is almost certain to grant. In a 2017 interview with an Italian Catholic television channel, the pontiff expressed his distress with the current Italian wording—non c’indurre in tentazione, a literal translation of the Latin ne nos inducas in tentationem that is part of the Lord’s Prayer in the Vulgate versions of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. (The Vulgate version is in turn a literal translation of words [the root verb is eisphero, “bring into”] that appear in the oldest Greek manuscripts of the New Testament—which means there’s a good chance the clause preserves the exact wording Jesus used when he proclaimed the prayer in his native Aramaic.) 


 It is always irritating when professional liturgists, theologians, and prelates deem ordinary Catholic laypeople mentally incapable of looking beyond the surface meaning of “lead us not into temptation” and understanding that the words might actually imply a subtle and nuanced understanding of God the Father’s providential concern for sinful humanity. It is especially irritating for English-speaking Catholics to face—possibly—the prospect of changing, on a whim of bishops or pressure from the pope, the deliberately archaic language of their own beloved Christian prayer that has included the words “lead into” as a translation of inducas since Anglo-Saxon times. Proposals to “modernize” the English Our Father have surfaced from time to time, but so far both clergy and faithful have rejected them.

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