"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd." ~Flannery O'Connor

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Dr Scott Carson on pro multis

A few days I noted what seems so far to be a little-noted move on the Vatican's part to translate the phrase in the Mass's words of consecration pro multis as the literal "for many" rather than the catechetical amplification "for all" to which English-speaking Catholics have grown accustomed since Vatican II. Liturgical aficionados know that that issue has been hotly debated between trads and neoCaths for decades; some trads even go so far as to say it invalidates the Novus Ordo Mass. (It doesn't.)

Scott Carson, professor of philosophy at the University of Ohio at Athens, has a sensible and sophisticated post up about the issue. Catholics had better learn to be that way about it. Once the new translation hits the parishes, the questions and debates will probably rattle the walls. The trads will snap their suspenders and cry toldyaso, and the prog-besotted masses will wonder whether the Church now denies that Christ died for everybody, since most don't know that the Latin pro multis is (a) in the current Roman Missal and (b) itself literally translates, from the Gospel Greek, Christ's words of institution.

Get ready.
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