Undusted Texts

 Pope Leo XIV's recent encyclical  Magnifica Humanitas  builds on the Social Doctrine of the Church, of which Pope Leo XIII is generally considered the father (though, of course, he built on principles found in the Church Fathers and other theologians).  Due to that, almost all of the quotations and citations in the document are from the pontificates of Leo XIII and later, with the vast majority being from Vatican II and thereafter.   There are only a handful of quotations from non-papal authors; most-reported in the press is the quotation from Gandalf in Tolkien's  Lord of the Rings  (MH 213); another is from Viktor Frankl (MH 121).   But the one that most caught my eye is from one of my favorites, Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle . Pope Leo quotes from Bérulle's masterwork, the  Discourses on the States and on the Grandeurs of Jesus : “According to the teaching of our faith, we have and adore, in our mysteries, a God who is born in a ma...

Introduction Jean-Jacques Olier (1608-1657) was a French priest and founder of the Sulpicians (Society of the Priests of Saint Sulpice).  Though encouraged at a young age, by St. Francis to Sales, to become a priest, he lived for fashionable society; when he studied at the Sorbonne, he hoped for academic glory, striving to learn Hebrew in order to defend his thesis in that language, just for the thrill of it.  When his eyesight began to fail, he undertook a pilgrimage to the Holy House of Loreto, where he was cured and converted.  Taught by St. Vincent de Paul and Charles de Condren, superior general of Pierre de Bérulle's Oratory of Jesus, he undertook both spiritual reform and works of charity.  Eventually headquartered at the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, he founded a seminary and an order of priests, the Sulpicians, who continued Olier's dual aim, especially in following St. Vincent de Paul's lead in caring for the poor.  (A pupil of the se...

Christ is risen! A translation is always a balancing act between an ungrammatical, too-strict word-for-word replacement and a new work merely "inspired by" the original text.  I've always loved the way John Dryden describes the issue in his essay "Ovid and the Art of Translation."   Dryden defines three distinct styles of translation: "metaphrase, or turning an author word by word, and line by line, from one language into another"—about which he later says, "'Tis much like dancing on ropes with fettered legs: a man may shun a fall by using caution; but the gracefulness of motion is not to be expected"—"paraphrase, or translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by the translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense; and that too is admitted to be amplified, but not altered," and finally "imitation, where the translator (if now he has not lost that name) assumes the ...