No official English translation of the Italian language document has been published as yet by the Vatican.

The synod's final report has three parts - "The Church listens to the family", "The family in the design of God", and "The mission of the family".

The English translation can be found here.

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Fr Gerald O'Collins, who taught at the Gregorian University in Rome for 33 years and who holds several doctorates in theology, sent The Tablet an open letter to the bishops.

In the letter, he called for the adoption of a revised 1998 translation completed after 17 years of work by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy.

But this translation, which had been approved by bishops' conferences, was "summarily rejected" by Rome, without any dialogue, the Australian Jesuit wrote.

Roman authorities set up a committee called Vox Clara, which is largely responsible for the current translation, he added.

"Ironically, the results produced by Vox Clara were too often unclear and sometimes verging on the unintelligible," Fr O'Collins wrote.

He noted that those who prepared the current English translation aimed at a "sacral style".

It "regularly sounds like Latin texts transposed into English words rather than genuine English".

This is "something that is alien to the direct and familiar way of speaking to God and about God practised by the psalmists and taught by Jesus", Fr O'Collins stated.

"What would Jesus say about the 2010 Missal? Would he approve of its clunky, Latinised English that aspires to a ‘sacral' style which allegedly will ‘inspire' worshippers?"

If the texts of the 1998 "Missal that wasn't" are set beside the current translation, "there should be no debate about the version to choose", Fr O'Collins wrote.

He told the Anglophone bishops that his "hope is now that you will act quickly to help English-speaking Catholics participate more effectively in the liturgy - a central recommendation in Vatican II's very first document".

He concluded: "I yearn for a final blessing, a quick solution to our liturgical woes. The 1998 translation is there, waiting in the wings."

Sources

• The Tablet
• The Tablet
• Image: The Guardian

There are pigs, sheep and goats here. Some are ancient varieties, more popular 1,400 years ago than they are today.

Like a shaggy-haired pig described my guide, John Sadler, as "half a ton of very grumpy animal ... only interested if you feed it, or if you fall in — in which case you are food."

The animals are part of a re-creation of an Anglo-Saxon village, with timber-framed buildings and turf-covered sheds. The farm is called Gyrwe, Old English for Jarrow. It's part of a museum called Bedesworld.

Even with jets flying overhead and container ships unloading nearby, Bede's World brings to life a time and place when the English language was in its infancy.

The monk who Bede's World is named after, the Venerable Bede, lived in the monastery next door in the late seventh and early eighth centuries.

"He's famous as a writer and a teacher," says Sadler, the living history coordinator at Bede's World.

"And he has this keen interest in history and language."

Bede wrote an ecclesiastical history of the nation at the time.

"He's the first person to actually write down who it was that actually came to the British Isles," says linguist David Crystal, co-author with Hilary Crystal of Wordsmiths and Warriors.

"He talks about the Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes, and discusses the range of languages that were spoken around the country."

These languages arrived in Britain after the Romans had left.

The newcomers found themselves in a place already heaving with languages — various Celtic tongues, as well as bits and pieces of languages left behind by Roman mercenaries who came from all over the empire. Continue reading

Sources

• PRI
• Image: Vita pastoralis

Cardinal George Pell said this will mean that the new Vatican department will be able to access the best people from around the world.

In late February, Pope Francis announced the secretariat which will have authority over all the financial and administrative activities of the Holy See.

Cardinal Pell said the Italian-dominated Roman Curia and his Anglo-Saxon appointment marked "two different ways of thinking".

"It will be a change for some people who bring a different level of understanding and patterns of thought," he told The Boston Globe.

"There will probably have to be formation courses to explain what's needed."

He added with a smile that English is still seen as "the language of the enemy" in the Vatican, evoking memories of King Henry VIII and the rise of Protestantism.

He explained that making English one of the department's working languages was part of an effort to recruit internationally to fill critical roles.

"Not only will the controlling board be international, but so will the staff," he said.

Cardinal Pell said he hoped to implement rational accounting measures, turning the Vatican from an "embarrassment" into a model of good practice.

"There's never been anything like this in the Vatican that's explicitly designed to foster a system of checks and balances," he added.

He insisted that he has the backing of Pope Francis and other cardinals, and that with a governing council and staff it won't be just "one isolated colonial barging around".

He added that he believed the abolition of the scandal-hit Vatican bank was now unlikely.

Sources

• The Tablet
• The Boston Globe
• Image: Daily Telegraph (Australia)

The last few weeks have seen some significant and high-profile comments about the new English translation of the Missal. Vox Clara, initially conceived as a supervisory committee of bishops but seemingly now the dominant executive agency, met in Rome earlier this month. Its subsequent press release ended by expressing "satisfaction that the completion of the English translation of the Roman Missal has been welcomed throughout the English-speaking world".

Meanwhile, in Britain, The Catholic Herald reported that church authorities in England and Wales "do not expect resistance to the new translation of the Roman Missal when it is introduced in September." The acting secretary of the bishops' liturgy commission was quoted as saying: "There are people who like it and people who don't and some who aren't so sure. But I think you'll find that clergy are a fairly pragmatic group of people in the end …"

Yet elsewhere there is evidence of disquiet.

Read more of the discussion of the new English Translation of the Missal at the London Tablet.