Lost in Translation

It was a random Sunday in Ordinary Time and I made my way up to the ambo for the liturgy of the Word. “Sisters and brothers,” I read from Paul’s letter to the Colossians, “put on, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another.”

It’s a beautiful, challenging passage, and I tried to proclaim it with joy. In my parish, I’m a lector, and joyful proclamation is what I’m supposed to do.

Problem was, I’d transposed a couple of words: Sisters and brothers, I’d said, instead of brothers and sisters. And somewhere in the congregation of my quiet little parish, the Vatican Police were ready to pounce. A few weeks later, when my turn to read at Mass came around again, our pastor met me in the sacristy with a stern warning. “Some people were complaining,” he said. “Be sure to read exactly what the Scripture says.”

But Scripture, it turns out, says something a little different than the words in the lectionary. In the New American Bible, Paul addresses his letter simply to the “holy ones and faithful brothers in Christ.” No sisters in sight. The lectionary, it turns out, isn’t a word-for-word transcription of the Bible; the men who compile the readings for Mass tweak them first. “When a biblical translation is meant for liturgical proclamation,” the US Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote in 1997, “it must also take into account those principles [of inclusive language]. . . . since the text is proclaimed in the Christian assembly to women and men who possess equal baptismal dignity.” 

Which got me thinking. As a writer and editor, I’m careful to use gender-inclusive language, or to do some light revision whenever necessary. Fireman becomes firefighter, of course—a no-brainer. The sentence The nurse checks her patient’s ID before administering medication can easily be recast as Nurses always check their patients’ IDs.  They’re simple fixes that avoid gender stereotyping, or excluding half the human race—without altering meaning. And when I first became a lector, a few decades ago, our workbook offered suggestions for changing masculine words and phrases into language that included all the humans in the congregation. 

Back in the early nineties, while that lector workbook was instructing readers to pencil in gender-inclusive changes to the readings, a team of scripture scholars, under the direction of the USCCB, was creating a new lectionary with inclusive English, which Donald Trautman, then-bishop of Erie, called “a major pastoral concern for the Church in the United States.” The scholars carefully followed the guidelines for translation provided in 1969 by Pope Paul VI.  

In 1991, the bishops approved the new lectionary—which replaced words like “mankind” with “humanity,” but retained masculine pronouns for God—and sent it off to Rome, where it received a seal of approval in 1992.

But Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the Vatican’s biblical commission abruptly revoked approval in 1994 and sent a team of translators back to the drawing board. In the version they eventually produced, which debuted in 1998, the inclusive language was mostly gone

Richard Skilba, auxiliary bishop of Milwaukee, a member of the team that had worked on the inclusive lectionary, seemed to know what I—and many lectors—would face in the future. This gender-exclusive edition, he said, “is sure to consign us to yet another generation of pencil-marked texts.” 

So that was the lectionary I read from on that random Sunday in Ordinary Time. And when my turn rolled around again, it was the Fifth Sunday of Easter and my passage was from the first letter of John: God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him.

If I’d been writing or speaking about that passage, I’d have said that “those who remain in love remain in God and God in them.” So that’s what I did. It felt like the right thing to do. It seemed like the only thing I could do.  Did that “harmonize with the true and authentic spirit” of the liturgy?  I’m not a biblical scholar, or a theologian, or a liturgist. But it felt true and authentic to me.

I still haven’t heard, but I’m expecting to be chastised. Stick to the script, I’ll probably be told. That’s what the official lector guidelines say. And in the spirit of humility, and of love for the church universal, I get that. Who am I to spot-correct Scripture?

But still. Words matter. Through the ministry of lector, I have the privilege of using my voice to proclaim Scripture for the entire congregation—including the women, to whom the Word is addressed as urgently as it is to men.

If we’re worthy of baptism, surely we’re also worthy of being named in the liturgy. If, as the fathers of the Second Vatican Council insisted, worship consists of “the full, active participation of all God’s holy people,” surely we mustn’t be so easily dismissed in the language of worship.

So I’m faced with a dilemma: The ministry of lector offers me deep spiritual nourishment; reading Scripture at Mass helps the Word come alive for me, and I hope for my listeners, too. But can I be a “good” Catholic and pencil in corrections to the lectionary’s masculine language? Or (maybe more importantly) can I be my authentic self before God if I don’t? Whichever way this goes, I’m pretty sure my days as a lector are numbered. It feels like my voice is being silenced.