"Earth" at mass.

As an illustration of the discussion on the Norms, we bring Professor Buell's article on the translation of the Offertory prayers of the Mass. It is not easy reading--one has to pay close attention to the argument--but we trust the effort will be worthwhile. It demonstrates how easily faulty translations can change the intent or meaning of prescribed prayers.

We said it and heard it so often that the prayer has become invisible:

The priest holds up the unconsecrated host on a paten and says, "Blessed are you, Lord, God of the universe, for from your bounty we have received the bread we offer you: fruit of the earth and work of human hands, which will become for us the bread of life." The words are said into a microphone and amplified through a speaker system. We answer, "Blessed be God for ever."

In the English Missal it is called the Preparation of the Gifts. It is the old Offertory. It is worth examining its invisibility.

The actual wording of the Liturgy was, and is, the business of the Church, and the Church's Mass is contained authoritatively in the Church's Latin version. And it is to that we must go to see what the prayers of the Mass are.

The Latin is:

Benedictus es, Domine, Deus universi, quia de tua largitate accepimus panem, quem tibi offerimus, fructum terrae et operis manuum hominum: ex quo nobis fiet panis vitae.

A word-for-word translation of this is:

Blessed You are, Lord, God of the universe, because from Your bounty we have received the bread which to You we offer, fruit of the earth and of the hands of men: from which it will become for us the Bread of life.

But the English Missal, and every missalette, has:

Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation. Through your goodness we have this bread to offer, which earth has given and human hands have made. It will become for us the bread of life.

The effect of loose translations

A loose translation, however permissible it may seem, does give different specific meanings. Saying "through your goodness we have this bread to offer" is not to say "from your bounty we have received the bread we offer you."

1. The first, the Missalette, prayer suggests that God in his goodness allows us to have bread to offer; the second says we have gotten the bread from Him in the first place and that this is what we are offering. The missalette text does not acknowledge that we have received anything from God. It completely drops the word accepimus (we received, we have received).

2. The missalette then describes (our!) bread as being given by the earth, "which earth has given" and as being made by us, "and human hands have made." But the Latin text is fructum terrae et operis manuum hominum, and a correct translation is "fruit of the earth and of the work of human hands." There is nothing in the Latin to suggest anything more than the normal result (fruition, yield, harvest) of the earth's growth and the addition of human work. The fact is that the work of human hands results in a very special bread, specifically defined and made for the purpose, and it is a very special offering, in truth Christ's very own. But the missalette makes the idea stand out that it's our bread, as if we'd thought up the whole thing, that we made it, plain bread at that, that it was given to us by the earth, and that somehow it will become for us the bread of life.

Whether the translators intended it or not, the missalette makes the earth active in giving us our bread; which earth has given means the earth gave it. It carries a possible echo of "given up," or "yielded," or "produced," but these words were not used, and so not meant. Earth has given means not fruition, or result, but bestowal or gift.

Grammatically it personifies the giving earth. It could perhaps be defended as vaguely poetic, hardly pious, rhetoric, but that still makes it a bad translation of normative Latin text. It gives the wrong idea, and it sets the tone for the prayers that come just after it.

3. The parallel prayer about the wine has in the Latin the same shape and style as the one about the bread. It runs: Benedictus es, Domine, deus universi, quia de tua largitate accepimus vinum, quod tibi offerimus, fructum vitis et operis manuum hominum, ex quo nobis fiet potus spiritalis.

The missalette gets this right: "fruit of the vine and (of the) work of human hands." (To parallel the faulty translation about the bread, it should have read, "which vine has given and human hands have made.")

Since the missalette at this point gets that phrase right about the wine (keeping, however, the same changes for universe and bounty, and repeating its omission of accepimus), one is left to wonder why the very same phrase was changed with regard to the bread. It cannot be defended by arguing that "fruit of the earth" is no longer idiomatic to modern ears, for we still use "the fruit of your labor" and "fruitless efforts" and "the fruit of thy womb," and even commercially "fruit of the loom." In the Latin it is obvious that the two prayers are meant to be parallel in structure and wording and content. It is equally obvious that they are meant to be the same in meaning.

4. The missalette has It will become for us the bread of life, and It will become for us our spiritual drink, and these are independent sentences detached from what went before.

In the Latin, however, each sentence is really a subordinate clause referring to what was stated up to that point. It reads: "ex quo nobis fiet panis vitae" and "ex quo nobis fiet potus spiritalis." The word "fiet" is passive, and future, and can have the meaning of "become" or "to be made" or "to be made into (something)."

The sense of the Latin is: from God's bounty, and from the bread that came from that bounty, and from the bread we are offering, there will be made for us the bread of life, and from the wine the spiritual drink. The "ex quo" is a summary phrase, "from which" or "out of which," and it takes in bounty and bread and offering, and says that for us the bread of life, and the spiritual drink, will be made out of them. It could be translated "from which the bread of life will be made for us," and "from which a spiritual drink will be made for us." It is a clear reference to the later consecration. It echoes Christ's own description of himself, "I am the bread of life."

By detaching the "ex quo" clause as an independent sentence, the missalette makes the meaning a lot vaguer than it really is, and this makes it susceptible to a mildly metaphoric meaning, namely, that this is what we are going to do with our earthgiven interpretation. All it takes is slight emphasis on for us.

5. It doesn't help that the missalette heads this section with the title: PREPARATION OF THE GIFTS in bold capital letters. This is clear as to the word "gifts" but ambiguous as to its meaning. There is no preparation at all. It can mean that we are bringing "gifts" to the altar, to the priest, or even to God. The "gifts" (inevitably suggesting "presents") we are bringing there are bread and wine. And it implies that it is our bread and wine that we are giving, not bread and wine from His bounty.

The next rubric, after the "Pray, friends, that our sacrifice," is PRAYER OVER THE GIFTS. Gifts is what is, and gifts is what we bring. There is even a procession of select parishioners to "bring up the gifts," meaning of course the bread and wine to be offered and later consecrated. So missalette and parish practice agree on "gifts."

But whose gifts are they? From whom and to whom are they? The only "gifts" the people really bring to church are money and at times canned goods for the poor. And these are not given to be offered; they are simply given to support the parish and to help someone. They are not thought of as "presents" so much as "donations." Whatever else we might bring as gifts, we never bring bread and wine to church and these are never thought of as gifts at all. The bread and wine were prescribed by Christ Himself. We do not think of them as gifts that originate with us. They are not gifts of the people, nor the priest, nor the procession. And they are not singled out, as they should be, as gifts from God. No, rather they seem, by label (twice in the missalette) and action (the procession) and vocabulary ("bring up the gifts"), to be meant as gifts to God.

But in the context of the missalette the "offertory" sets up these "gifts" as precisely the ones "which earth has given." By some sort of grammatical fluke we have been crediting the earth with giving us the gifts of bread and wine. I hate to say it, but the English Missal (and, of course, all the missalettes) make the Offertory sound pagan. Now that is real confusion.

And confusion it has to be. I would hestitate to think, let alone say, that late 20th-century translators would deliberately give a pagan twist to the Offertory of the Mass. Maybe it was a generous inclusion of Ecology to show that Mother Church welcomes Mother Earth and looks forward to the New Age the way she looks forward to the New Jerusalem. Maybe they just wanted it to be simple and down to earth, to make things easy for the laity. Maybe lots of things. But it is a mistake, and it was a mistake. And after thirty-odd years it may be time to correct it. And while we're at it, we could correct the extra-textual headings in the missalette.

6. But the problem runs deeper than that. It is noticeable (Why didn't we notice it?) that the English phrases "We have this bread to offer" and "We have this wine to offer" do not perform the act of offering the bread and wine. They do not indicate that an act of offering is being done then and there. In this context, when the priest raises the bread and wine as he says these words, he merely displays them to the people. From past habit (older) people and priests can read an act of offering into this, but it is not there. In plain syntax and grammar, saying, "we have bread and wine to offer" means that we could offer them, not that we are offering them. It is of the order of saying, "I have a book to read," or "I have money to spend," or "I have a plane to catch." The words all say and mean you haven't read the book, spent the money, or caught the plane. In the English Missal it means there is no offering, no Offertory. It has simply been left out. And it puts all later references to an offering (and to sacrifice?) in the peculiar position of referring to something that did not take place. In fact, of late I have attended Masses in which the priest said no "offertory" prayers and made no "offertory" gesture of any kind. There is a logic at work here.

Can it be corrected? Will it be corrected?

A first step might be to publish, or at least to publicize, the Latin of the New (now old) Mass. This could encourage us to come up with an adequate and completely faithful translation of the Church's own prayer. It could even lead to having new and up-to-date Latin-and-English missals, this time not to give the meaning of the Latin but to straighten out the meaning of the English. It would get rid of "which earth has given" and "bread to offer." And it would make our translators and celebrants "speak no more than is set down for them." And no less (Hamlet, III, ii, 42, advice to those playing the clown.) Think of the revolution that would be.

Note: the French (Quebec) "missalette," Prions en Eglise, Novalis, Ottawa, has an almost fully correct translation from the Latin:Tu es beni, Dieu de l'univers, toi qui nous donnes ce pain, fruit de la terre et du travail des hommes; nous te le presentons: il deviendra le pain de la vie. (Literally: You are blessed, God of the universe, you who to us give this bread, fruit of the earth and of the work of men; we present it to you: it will become the bread of life.)

The source for the correct English translation of the offertory prayer used in this article is from the 1992 Wrenn/Stravinskas proposed literal translation, put out by the St. Gregory Foundation and the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.

John Buell is a former Professor of Communications at Concordia University, Montreal.