Cordileone recently performed an exorcism ceremony outside a Catholic church in San Rafael, where protesters had earlier toppled a statue of Father Junipero Serra.

Serra was an 18th-century Spanish missionary priest, long praised by the Church for bringing Catholicism to what is now the western USA.

His critics say Serra, in converting Native Americans to Catholicism, forced them to abandon their culture or face brutal punishment. Read more

The first five-minute bulletin will be broadcast on Vatican Radio on Saturday, becoming a regular weekly event. Continue reading

The university says Latin is not a thing of the past. The manual will help people learn to the language of the Church Fathers, medieval theologians, and Vatican Legislation texts. Read more

The Vatican is insisting on a precise translation from the Latin text approved in 2002, as it did for the translation into English.

The planned new translation will be for French-speaking parts of Europe, Canada, Africa and the Caribbean.

It will replace the first translation made after the Second Vatican Council.

A first draft of a new translation from bishops in the French-speaking world was rejected by the Vatican in 2007.

Several francophone bishops' conferences, especially in Belgium, Canada and Switzerland, have raised objections to the latest text.

Bishops from these conferences say that they find the latest text pompous and unnatural, the French daily La Croix reported.

The French bishops are less critical, but still have reservations.

But Cardinal Robert Sarah, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, told the French magazine Famille Chrétienne that Pope Francis had recently told him "the new translations of the Missal must absolutely respect the Latin text".

The latest French text uses the word "consubstantial" in the Nicene Creed.

It also brings back the "through my fault" sequence that had been replaced by "Yes, I have truly sinned" in French.

For the chalice, it turns the current word for chalice "coupe" back to the older "calice", which has become a swear word for exasperated French Canadians.

The introduction to the Offertory ("Orate fratres") has become stilted and hard to recite.

By contrast, a change to the Lord's Prayer has been well received.

The currently used French prayer now says "do not submit us to temptation", which theologians say implies that God tempts people to sin.

The new translation, which France's Protestant churches also support, says "do not let us enter into temptation".

Sources

• The Tablet
• Image: Catholic Herald

With that in mind, here are a few Latin words or phrases that every Catholic should know.

Every Catholic should know a few Latin words and phrases.

Here's 20 of them. Continue reading

If you want some everyday phrases have a look at this

Bonam Fortunam

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

Some students in Rome speak the language all day, and one band has even produced an album in the mother tongue of Julius Caesar.

Nor is the language confined to dusty books: Google Translate now has a Latin setting, and Facebook's 1.2 billion users can choose Latin as their default language, where on logging in they are asked "Quid in animo tuo est" ("What's in your mind").

More than 3,000 people have subscribed to a new online monthly magazine called "Hebdomada Aenigmatum" which features crosswords, Sudoku and other puzzles in the long-dead language used by ancient Roman emperors and philosophers. Continue reading

The gold, silver and bronze medallions marking the Pope's first year in office had been specially made by the Italian State Mint.

They went on sale on October 8 and it was not long before the embarrassing mistake was discovered.

The medals depicted Pope Francis, the first Jesuit Pope in history, and a phrase in Latin that profoundly affected him as a teenager in the 1950s, inspiring him to become a priest.

It should have read: "Vidit ergo Iesus publicanum, et quia miserando atque eligendo vidit, ait illi, 'Sequere me'," which translated means, "Jesus therefore sees the tax collector, and since he sees by having mercy and by choosing, he says to him, 'follow me'."

The phrase comes from a meditation by the 8th-century English monk the Venerable Bede on a passage of the Gospel in which Jesus calls St Matthew to be an apostle.

The Latin for Jesus is "Iesus", since the letter J is not used in Latin.

According to Italian media, as few as four medals may have been purchased before the mistake was discovered and the rest were withdrawn.

That ultimately means that the medals displaying the error are extremely rare, and could fetch a very high price on the rare coins market for those lucky enough to get their hands on one before they were withdrawn.

As the news hit Twitter, one user tweeted: "I blame the Lesuits."

Sources:

The Telegraph

BBC

Image: The Telegraph

Latin is the language of the Vatican and Benedict is looking to breathe new life into the dead language by developing a new academy "to better promote the knowledge and speaking of Latin," Vatican spokesman Fr Ciro Benedettini said on Saturday.

Until the 1960's Vatican documents were published only in Latin, however most seminarians no longer carry out their studies in Latin and priests around the world no longer use it to chat with each other.

So far the only Vatican body charged with keeping the Latin language alive is the embattled Secretariat of State, but the new pontifical academy has been confirmed in a letter sent by President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi.

The aim of the dicastery for culture will be to promote the use and knowledge of Latin in church and civil settings, including schools.

Recently the Catholic Church introduced a new translation of the Mass, based on a more accurate translation from the Latin.

The Holy Father however is not alone in his push for Latin. London mayor Boris Johnson, an enthusiastic proponent of the classics, is calling for Latin to be given greater contemporary relevance and for more teaching in schools and universities.

Sources

• Vatican Insider
• The Guardian
• Image: Wikipedia

That's because the Vatican plans to introduce a new English-language Roman Missal, the prayer script we Catholics use at Mass — and its awkward changes to prayers and the liturgy are raising a chorus of complaints from priests and the laity.

It's tempting to dismiss the clash with the old saying about fights inside academia: they're so fierce because the stakes are so low. But the Catholic missal melee is unfortunately a reminder that the tiresome practice of theological hairsplitting is still alive and well in the 21st century.

The source of the fuss, like so much Catholic dysfunction today, is Vatican II. That modernizing 1960s church council reformed the Catholic liturgy, allowing Mass to be said in the more accessible vernacular instead of Latin.

But one of its more tedious byproducts was the way it emboldened liturgical liberals — the Kumbaya crowd, who often turn Masses into hand-holding, guitar-strumming services that even progressive Catholics find grating — and how it embittered conservatives, including Pope Benedict XVI, who want to take the Mass back, at least partway, to the Latin of the more rigid and remote Tridentine tradition.

The Vatican's new missal in English, which debuts next November at Advent, is a result of that conservative backlash.

Even if it doesn't restore the Latin, it requires the vernacular to be as faithful a translation of the Latin as possible.

Read more of Time Magazine's article: Heat-Seeking Missal? Fight on Liturgy Divides Catholics