I am sympathetic of the criticism’s Leon Wieseltier voices in his review of the translation, New American Haggadah.

He laments the declining literacy in Hebrew among American Jews and how that necessitates translations of holy texts that, like the Qu’ran, are inextricably and spiritually tied to their original language.

Latin does not have quite the same importance in Catholicism. Though it is deeply bound up with the liturgy, it does not have the same ‘originalist’ aspect that Arabic and Hebrew have in the faith traditions of Islam and Judaism. That said, ‘Logos’ (ironically, a Greek work) is a crucial concept.

Also, the critic’s broader critique of the translation brings to mind my own mixed feelings of the newly released English language liturgy. It’s not exactly a new ‘translation’ – translation not being the right word. It is part of a continuous process of incorporation of theological understandings into the liturgy.

One thing that paved the way for a, not easy, but less us say ‘less difficult,’  transition to the Catholic church was my childhood in the Episcopal Church. Many of the wordings were similar or the same. While the Catholic Church, naturally, does not use the King James Bible, neither does it use one of those stylistically abominable ‘modern’ translations.

But now, the wording is moving further from my childhood memories and feeling less familiar and more alien.

On a much more personal level than even my childhood memories, the old phrase, spoken before communion, ‘I am not worthy to receive, but only say the word and I shall be healed,’ was infinitely comforting while I struggled with a life threatening and debilitating illness. While I understood that the promise was not that God would necessarily physically heal me – some live, some die, some suffer, some do not – but the words themselves were reassuring. The new wording ‘and my soul shall be healed,’ feels almost like a betrayal of that earlier comfort. Irrational, I know. And ‘soul’ betters reflect what the sacrament offers. But nonetheless…