God's Daughters

When ever does the learned and admirable Dr Peter Kwasniewski not write good theology, good liturgy, and good sense? I commend his recent characteristically brilliant piece at Onepeterfive to those who might otherwise  ... 'leave it for later' ... because it looks a bit technical. It is in fact extremely important and perfectly accessible even to those who think of themselves as non-academic. I would add just one point.

Dr K cites paragraph 9 of the CDF document Placuit Deo and criticises it for talking about "Sons and Daughters of God" when the Biblical logic, basically Pauline, of the passage requires the phrase "Sons of God". We are, indeed, Sons of God only because we share in the One Sonship of the One Son. Strictly speaking, the Father has only the one Son, whom the Johannine writings and the 'Nicene' Creed very pointedly call Monogenes, Unigenitus. So, strictly speaking, none of us is simpliciter God's Son; but all the Baptised, through the filiation, huiothesia ('Son-ification') of Baptism, are made members of Him and thus sharers of his unique Sonship. (Hence the common shorthand phrase 'sons of God'.)

So Archbishop Ladaria's CDF has got things wrong. Big black mark.

Or has it?

A trawl through the various languages in which the Vatican has so far published Placuit Deo reveals that, in the Romance languages, the phrase is given as "Sons of God". Only in the English and the German does "Sons and Daughters of God", a corruption of Biblical teaching and logic, make its appearance. (I still cannot find a Latin 'official version': if there is one, perhaps somebody could point me to it. Similarly, if anyone has evidence for which language this document was drafted in ... I suspect, Italian ...)

So we have here a very jolly example of the importance of Latin in expressing accurately and decisively and unitively the Church's teaching (see S John XXIII Veterum sapientia especially paragraphs 5-7 & 11). Once this essential safeguard slips away, we are well down the slippery slope to a fissiparous ex-Catholic religion in which every culture gallops along its own dodgy path and we are not really 'Catholics', members of a Universal Church, any more. That, of course, is precisely what the schismatically-minded German bishops crave. (Admiration is due to some brave Bavarian bishops who have recently broken ranks with the heterodox majority in the German Conference.) Bearing in mind Archbishop Ladaria's own high reputation, we should probably assume that this office-glitch results from the CDF being undermanned. I wonder why that might be.

The fact that the English-language version of Placuit is defective is particularly worrying. English is a widely employed global language, so much so that translators providing for Catholics who use other than mainstream European  languages very often do their translations from the English. This dangerous error is, therefore, likely to be disseminated via the English version. When you get your Swahili or Urdu or Mandarin version, I bet you will find  ...

Dr K points out that the (anti-biblical, anti-Pauline, anti-Catholic) mistranslation of 'sons' as 'sons and daughters' is also found in at least three places in our current English translation of the Pauline Missale Romanum. I wonder ... perhaps Dr K knows ... or perhaps somebody else does who can inform us under a pseudonym ... whether this mistake does represent the translation as put together by ICEL, or whether it resulted from the unfortunate and rather ragged fiddling around to which the ICEL draft was subjected under the auspices of Vox clara.

Eyebrow-raising, doncha think, that the German and English translations should alone share this nasty and presumably intentional mistake. It reminds me that when the English bishops, a couple of years ago, so thoroughly disgracefully attacked Pope Benedict's new Good Friday Prayer for the Jews, they did so (they more or less admitted) at the urging of the almighty German bishops. Some pretty shifty business afoot somewhere here. Or do I mean shady? Shabby, perhaps?

Heil Marx, indeed. Jawohl, mein Fuehrer! It's enough to make a simple man (and his daughter) wonder who won the war.