Hastening with a loving heart on St. Benedict’s feast day by Xavier Rindfleisch

The newish calendar has moved St. Benedict so as not to disrupt Lent! As if he could!  But in any case this year it is St. Joseph who pushes St. Benedict off to a little memorial at Vespers.

Benedictines aren't easily offended, but watch out when they are, especially when another Benedictine gets it wrong.  

Hastening with a loving heart on St. Benedict’s feast day by Xavier Rindfleisch

St. Benedict, Sadao Watanabe

Kneeling in the back of my favorite abbey church yesterday, I followed in my bright and shiny new CTS Daily Missal as the monastery’s abbot chanted the collect of Saint Benedict in Latin:

Deus, qui beatum Benedictum abbatem
in schola divini servitii praeclarum constituisti magistrum,
tribue, quaesumus
ut, amori tuo nihil praeponentes,
viam mandatorum tuorum dilatato corde curramus.

Imagine my shock, felt the more intensely for being in an abbey church that is the very heart of the Order, upon reading what the English-speaking world is praying today:

O God, who made the Abbot Saint Benedict
an outstanding master in the school of divine service,
grant, we pray,
that, putting nothing before love of you,
we may hasten with a loving heart
in the way of your commands.

amori tuo nihil praeponentes: “putting nothing before love of you”? Really? Does not every English translation of the Rule of Saint Benedict render that text from chapter 4 of the Rule literally: “to prefer nothing to the love of Christ.” Adapted for this prayer, should the text not read “that, preferring nothing to your love”?

“In a similar way” – to coin a phrase – the petition of the prayer is adapted from the end of the Prologue to the Rule: dilatato corde . . . curritur via mandatorum Dei: The heart is expanded or enlarged and the monk runs in the way of God’s commandments. Curritur is not from the verb festinare (“to hasten”), it is, simply and literally, from the verb “to run.” Dilatato is not “loving.” Mandatorum is “commandments,” not “commands.”

I consulted 2008, the ICEL text canonically approved by the world’s English-speaking bishops before someone – Vox Clara? the Congregation for Divine Worship? – took hatchet and pick-axe to it:

O God,
who established the Abbot Saint Benedict
as a renowned master in the school of divine service,
grant, we pray, that we may prefer nothing to your love
and run with open hearts
in the way of your commandments.

I could also quibble with this translation: beatum could be translated as 'saint' but probably is better translated as 'holy' and certainly 'Abbot saint Benedict' is awkward. Much more natural for English would be 'blessed Abbot Benedict'.  The issue here is not the well known medieval use of beatus and sanctus as synonyms, but the 'developed' norms of translating the Latin terms into  English. There is an inherent difference between 'beatus' meaning the divine action which causes holiness and 'sanctus' which means being in a state of holiness, even if at times this distinction is ignored and these two Latin words are treated as synonyms.