There are differing reactions to the new English translation of the Mass. Where I live, it’s mostly humor—people laughing at themselves when they make mistakes, laughing at Father, who laughs at his own mistakes. Some people, less inclined to find humor anywhere anyhow, get frustrated and ill-tempered, and some declare they will continue with the old responses. Why? Actually, they just don’t want to trouble themselves with learning the new, but they say things like, “This is silly. It says the same thing anyway.” Does it? Well, yes—and no.

I’m sure there are lengthy discourses already written in the blogosphere and elsewhere, minutely dissecting each small change with a view to criticism or praise, depending primarily on the predisposition of their authors. And there is likely also a good deal of philosophizing among the translation’s fans about the metaphorical appropriateness of introducing the new translation at the beginning of a new liturgical year.

Looking at those small changes, I’m struck again by the Catholic persnickety-ness in the use of words. It’s a different attitude from that of non-Catholics. For example, Episcopalians seem to take a very casual approach, as in: Well, God didn’t mean any of this literally, you know. You have to understand that it’s all metaphor (or words to that effect), allowing them to interpret rather than translate. Then we have the fundamentalist literalists: A Baptist once told me that my vegetarianism was “against the Bible.” Why? Because, she said, the Lord told Peter in a dream to slay animals and eat them. That the dream was a metaphor for spreading the Gospel to the gentiles was not considered. So, at one extreme, it’s all metaphor; at the other, it’s all literal.

But the Catholic approach to language is uniquely authoritative even if one disregarded the teaching authority of the Church. We could say that maybe it takes a couple of thousand years of dealing with translating/interpreting to become any good at it, that maybe a few hundred years just isn’t enough practice. But that would only account for the way Catholics read and write about Holy Scripture. It does not account for the great works of literature, religious and secular, within those two thousand years of Catholic history. One looks for a single characteristic trait to account for this peculiar superiority of Catholic letters. I think it lies in the Catholic view of language itself.

There is a great reverence in the Church for words, but there is also an implicit acceptance of their limitation, unlike the secular, or sometimes Protestant, attitude that tends toward dismissing words as “just semantics” or to worship words, to make of them an idol. This can lead to a kind of Babel-like apocalypse of confusion, where interpretation and translation come into argumentative play in attempts to understand Scripture, as cited above. In literature, it simply leads to shallowness. It’s an irony that when all truth is subjective, words lose all meaning, just as it’s ironic that when words are Truth itself, they can convey no truth.

Perhaps it’s the Catholic awareness of words as vessels of reality, rather than reality itself, that endows an almost glib adroitness with figurative language. It’s almost as if the intellects of a Tolkien or a Hopkins, for example, were born with a comprehending distinction between parable and the literalness of divine command, making them so adept at distinguishing one from the other that they can combine literal and figurative, and not only make perfect sense, but sub-create whole new realities. They can create a place known as Middle-Earth, they can see—and say—that God’s glory is in stippled trout and brindled cows. And then there occurs that mysterious human cognition of Truth in those who “have ears to hear.”

Words are not reality, but without them, there is no reality, for they are arks, not covenants. They are man-made abstract vessels of God-made concrete reality. To dismiss them is to dismiss the reality they contain and to descend into the insanity of meaninglessness. To adore them is to disregard their purpose, their content, and to descend into the self-worship of humanism.

It’s important to be persnickety in the use of words.