Catholic bishops in the German-speaking countries of Europe have been at odds with the Vatican for years over a controversial and never-implemented translation of the Missal, the Latin prototype for the celebration of the Roman Catholic liturgy.
Germany’s bishops never even mentioned the disputed translation last month in the final report of the national episcopal conference’s autumn plenary. Instead, they thanked Pope Francis at length for his recent “motu proprio.” Magnum principium, which gives such conferences greater authority over liturgical translations.
They also expressed gratitude that the Pope had once again underlined, as he did in his 2013 exhortation Evangelii gaudium, that the “genuine doctrinal authority” of episcopal conferences needs to be more fully elaborated (EG 32). And they said the liturgy commissions of all the various German-speaking conferences would now begin discussing Magnum principium and its consequences in detail.
The German bishops’ president, Cardinal Rei-nhard Marx of Munich, said the first reaction he and his confreres had to the new “moto proprio” was a sense of “huge relief.”
During a press conference at the end of the September 25-28 plenary assembly, he said he believed the Congregation for Divine Worship (CDW) had taken too narrow a view on liturgical translations in the norms it issued in 2001 with the docu-ment, Liturgiam authenticam. The cardinal pointed to the long ordeal of producing the English translation of the Missal, saying he thought it was “altogether excessive” the way the Vatican had insisted on a strictly literal rendering of the Latin.
Cardinal Marx revealed that some of the English-speaking bishops had turned to him for help and that even he found it hard to pray some of the prayers in their Missal.
“The language is simply unacceptable,” he said.
