I haven't seen the entire new translation of the Roman Missal yet, but, considering the sometimes banal and bad translations in the current text, it has to be an improvement. The International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) has a long history of providing liberal, dumbed-down translations that eliminate the sense of the Mass as a holy sacrifice. It's been the happy, clappy banquet party of the lamb with sour suffering shoved under the altar cloth for many years. ICEL also gets the credit for politically correct and "inclusive" language which almost eliminated the generic male pronoun in favor of awkward and ugly alternatives. I still cringe when I hear "human beings" replacing men, meaning all mankind. What's not to understand about the sentence, "Jesus came to save all men?" As a woman I do not feel threatened or overlooked by that terminology. And so I rejoice to see the coming changes and hope that much of the "inclusive language" will be reversed. (For an interesting historical perspective on ICEL's impact on the Mass see Kenneth Whitehead's 1998
article,
How "Inclusive Language" Came to the Liturgy: ICEL's Strategies in "Shaping English Liturgy" in the
Adoremus Bulletin.)
