Most Rev’d Robert J. Dwyer (d. 1976) was Archbishop of Portland, Oregon. He took part in the Second Vatican Council.1 On 26 October 1973, he wrote as follows:
Who dreamed on that day
that within a few years,
far less than a decade,
the Latin past of the
Church would be all but
expunged, that it would be
reduced to a memory fading
in the middle distance?
The thought of it would
have horrified us, but it
seemed so far beyond the
realm of the possible as
to be ridiculous. So we
laughed it off.
The fathers of Vatican II never dreamed that the ROMAN CANON, for instance, would ever be said in the vernacular. On “laughter,” see #2 here.
Archbishop Dwyer (of Portland) was not a fan of the bizarre 1970s ICEL translation. Among priests fluent in Latin, ICEL earned the moniker Intentional Corrupter of Everything in Latin. Some of the actions of the 1970s ICEL—such as deleting the word “soul”—were beyond scandalous. From an objective standpoint, the 1970s ICEL frequently omitted entire paragraphs for ideological reasons. Archbishop Dwyer wrote on 13 April 1975:
It is disheartening to note that the bishops of Great Britain and Ireland, who for so long have held out against the imposition of the horrendous ICEL translation of the Mass, preferring the older, more accurate, and more beautiful version, have at last thrown in the sponge and conceded victory to the liturgical barbarians. So now the entire English-speaking world is forced, by hierarchical fiat, to endure the inexactitudes and ineptitudes of a translation which, on the face of it, was made by men whose knowledge of Latin was deficient, who possessed no ear for the rhythm of language and whose general qualifications as translators would certainly not recommend them to any publisher on the lookout for a correct and musical rendering of, say, Goethe or Racine.
The 2011 revision was much more accurate, as this chart demonstrates.
1 He must not be confused with Most Rev’d George Patrick Dwyer, Archbishop of Birmingham, who died in 1987.
