The purpose is to move the mass nearer to the original Latin. A widely cited example (likely because it occurs within the first five seconds of mass) is that when the priest greets the people with "The Lord be with you", instead of "And also with you", the people now respond "And with your spirit".
Awkward, but I'm no writer. My first thought upon hearing of the coming changes was sympathy for the all the 80 year-old priests, old dogs who have to learn new tricks after decades of a particular litany ingrained deep into their brains.
As with the rest of us. My own personal concern was that I would feel somehow an obsolete Catholic. I do not have a perfect attendance record by any means, but have gone enough that I can get by through motor memory of my mouth. Certainly not anymore. Worse, I am also concerned I will feel a disconnect with the Church I grew up with. It was comforting to have an unchanging continuity, to go to mass for an hour and hear the same unchanging words, anywhere I went, as I did when I was eight.
I slept in this morning but my mom went and told me even the priest was reading off the card. The people, she said, recited a mix of the new and old. She felt the new translation is a step back. When she was young and the mass initially changed from Latin, she said there was an similarly awkward, almost too literal translation. She preferred the version I grew up which had a more common language usage, which she found more accessible.
I'm not sure how other languages handle their translations from Latin. At Columbia, our Polish chaplain criticized English (or the American version, anyway) as the only translation to begin the Nicene Creed with "We Believe" - the Latin is Credo, "I believe" - because "Americans think they're special". I liked our version, it gave a sense of community. Unfortunately, he won: the Nicene is changed because to "I believe" in the new version.
I'll be interested to see the faces of the Christmas/Easter Catholics this Christmas when the mass gets going. Will they worry they've walked into the wrong building?
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