This week’s Collect is rich.  The ancient author was skilled.  The modern translators blew it with this one.  I’ll look this week not only at the 1973 ICEL and 2011 ICEL but also the 1998 ICEL which was rejected.  Let’s see where they went wrong.

Remember: The language of liturgical worship in the Latin Church is Latin.

This Collect is in the 8th c. Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis and also in the Veronese Sacramentary.

COLLECT – (2002MR):
Da nobis, quaesumus, Domine Deus noster,
in tua semper devotione gaudere,
quia perpetua est et plena felicitas,
si bonorum omnium iugiter serviamus auctori.

Words like iugiter (related to the word for “yoke”) and servio (which takes the dative) are by now old friends, so we can leave them aside. In other WDTPRS articles I have mentioned “false friends”, that is, words very similar to English cognates but having quite different, even surprising meanings in Latin. Your Lewis & Short Dictionary reveals that in classical usage devotio can mean “fealty, allegiance, devotedness; piety, devotion, zeal.” Devotio also means “a cursing, curse, imprecation, execration, a magical formula, incantation, spell.” It is not too difficult to decide which direction to go in the context of our prayer today!  I made a greater examination of devotio for the 4th Sunday of Lent. Briefly, devotio can be seen as “a devotion to duty”. Our “devotion” must lead the soul to keep the commandments of God and the duties of one’s state before all else. If we are truly devout in respect to God and devoted to fulfilling the duties of our state, as our state in life truly is here and now, then God will give us every actual grace we need to fulfill our vocations. We are, in effect, fulfilling our proper role in His great plan and thus He is sure to help us.

I also like the conceptual (not syntactical) parallels between perpetua and iugiter and then plena and omnium followed by felicitas and bonorum.  If you work it a bit, this looks like a ABCCBA pattern.  Very cool.  And the element which separates them.. or rather joins them is that si… “if”.

LITERAL RENDERING:
Grant to us, we beseech You, O Lord our God,
always to rejoice in Your devotion,
for happiness is perpetual and full,
if we serve constantly the author of all good things.

Today’s Collect, which is also in the very ancient Veronese Sacramentary as a prayer during July, has a clause beginning with si… “if”. This introduces a conditional statement: we will get Y if we do X. Consider this in light of the the religious attitudes of many today who presume that heaven’s rewards are ours automatically without our having to do anything more than just feel good about ourselves or, in some non-Catholic groups, make a “once for all” affirmation of Jesus as “personal Lord” and so forth.

Note the words perpetua and felicitas in our Collect. When and if you hear the Roman Canon (1st Eucharistic Prayer), you will recognize the names of two ancient martyrs, Sts. Felicity and Perpetua. It is hard to imagine that these two words are in this Collect by mere coincidence. As a matter of fact, in the eighth century Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis or Sacramentary of Gellone today’s prayer appears for martyr.

Trivia moment: the cloister of the Benedictine Abbey the Sacramentary came from, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert of the Gellone valley in France, was disassembled during the terror of the French Revolution and rebuilt in “The Cloisters” in New York City. But I digress.

Let’s digress some more!

Who are Saints Felicity and Perpetua?

After a lull in the official persecutions of Christians, in A.D. 250 the Emperor Decius determined that Christians were the enemies of the Roman Empire. At that time in the Empire there was widespread corruption and decadence in the aristocracy, the Persians were menacing the Eastern borders and Germanic barbarians were pressing on the North. The economy was a disaster. From the pagan point of view, something had upset both the proper order of society and the relationship of the state with the gods, the pax deorum. A new religion was taking hold in great numbers. Decius issued a decree: under pain of death everyone was to sacrifice to the Roman gods and obtain a certificate that they had done so. The aim was to cut down the leaders of the trouble-making Christian sect. The result, however, was a strengthening of the Church through the blood of martyrs (from the Greek word for “witness”). A new cult of martyrs developed and many were thereby attracted to Christianity.

The whole of the third century was marked by persecutions of Christians, though they were sporadic and often localized. But we know they took place whenever social conditions degenerated enough to warrant a scapegoat. We have documents from that period attesting to the persecution of Christians including the prison diary of a young woman named Perpetua, martyred around 202 in Carthage, North Africa. She was still a catechumen (not yet baptized), but who nevertheless identified herself as Christian. She handed over her still nursing baby and insisted on being put into the arena during a civic festival. After many tried to dissuade her, she got her wish. With great heroism she faced the animals and gladiators. After many torments a young gladiator was sent to finish her off, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Finally, Perpetua grabbed his hand and pointed his sword at her own throat. The heroism of Perpetua inspired many people who also began to give strong witness to their faith and were subsequently imprisoned. This is also the fate of a pregnant slave girl name Felicity (Felicitas). Felicity had her baby just before the imprisoned Christians were in their turn all sent to the arena. The acta (trial records and transcripts) and ancient diaries indicate the sort of amazing love these Christian martyrs had for each other in prison. There is a powerful scene related when Perpetua and Felicity arrange each other’s clothing so as to preserve their modesty even while they were being tortured. They bade each other farewell with the kiss of peace.

The farewell gesture of Perpetua and Felicity should remind us today to be dignified and to uphold the solemnity of the moment in Holy Mass if and when the optional sign of peace is invited.

OBSOLETE ICEL (1973):
Father of all that is good,
keep us faithful in serving you,
for to serve you is our lasting joy.

Pardon me but…. ARRRGGG! What were they thinking? For years we have seen, again and again, that many of the lame-duck ICEL prayers bear little or no resemblance to the Latin originals.

NEW CORRECTED ICEL (2011):
Grant us, we pray, O Lord our God,
the constant gladness of being devoted to you,
for it is full and lasting happiness
to serve with constancy
the author of all that is good.

I won’t give that rendering high marks. It eliminates the important condition: “happiness is perpetual and full, IF we serve constantly the author of all good things”. I can live with what they did to devotio.  But the elimination of that “if”… no.  Just no!  They changed what the prayer really says.

Lot’s of people who whinge about the new, corrected translation say that the 1998 version, rejected, was soooo much betterrrrrr.  It isn’t very useful to whine about the 1998 version on the eve of the implementation of the 2011 version, of course.  That said, let have a look at that 1998 text.

REJECTED ICEL VERSION (1998):
Gracious Lord and God,
grant that we may always take delight in your service,
for only through our faithfulness to you,
the author of every good,
will full and lasting happiness be ours.

I am not sure where “gracious” came from.  It’s nice, but it isn’t in the Latin.  I am okay with “take delight”.  This version also eliminates an explicit “IF” introducing a condition, but the “if” is still sort of there in that “only”.  If the conditional isn’t clear, neither was it totally expunged.   I give this slightly higher marks than the 2011 version.   Better?  Not much.

The elimination of that “IF” really irks me because I think it is at the heart of what the ancient original really says.