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September 14, 2021In spite of their relative smallness as Catholic dioceses, the Personal Ordinariates have an outsized mission in the Christianity of the English-speaking world. They preserve Anglican patrimony and they restore it to full communion with Rome. As such, the Ordinariates serve as a de facto custodian of the English language within the Catholic Church and a bridge to our separated brethren.
To better serve those informal roles, as well as its formal mission, the Ordinariates should consider adopting the English Standard Version-Catholic Edition (ESV-CE) of the lectionary in place of the current Revised Standard Second Catholic Edition (RSV-2CE) lectionary. The ESV is a better translation, a Catholic edition now exists, and the Vatican has recently approved the ESV-CE as a Mass lectionary. And its adoption would better serve the ecumenical mission of the Ordinariates.
I have no quarrel with the RSV-2CE. I bought that version of the Ignatius Bible as soon as it was published in 2006. The Ordinariates’ preference for it over the NAB was one of the things that attracted me to the Ordinariate.
But a Catholic edition of the ESV, let alone an approved ESV-CE lectionary, did not exist at the time the Ordinariates were established under the 2009 apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus. And, honestly? I have always thought of the RSV-2CE as a Catholic substitute for the ESV until such time as an ESV-CE came into existence. Now that one has, we should go with the real thing.
In fact, I would hazard a guess that there are very few people who would say the RSV-2CE is their first choice for the translation used in the Ordinariates’ lectionary. My sense from reading the commentary on various informal Facebook group pages is that most Ordinariate Catholics would have preferred the first Catholic edition of the RSV, not the second edition, for the Ordinariate lectionary.
That makes sense. Ordinariate members wish to preserve their beautiful English language patrimony within the Catholic Church. The 1966 RSV-CE marked the first time in history that there was an approved Catholic Bible within the rich Tyndale-King James Bible tradition of Scriptural translation. It is a natural choice for Ordinariate members.
But the RSV-2CE came into existence precisely because Rome wanted the RSV-CE to conform to Liturgiam Authenticam before it would approve a new lectionary. So a modern lectionary with archaic pronouns is not an option.
If, then, we must have a lectionary that uses modern English, it ought be the best modern translation available: both in its accuracy and in maintaining the beautiful cadences of English scriptural translation that we recognize from the Tyndale-King James Bible tradition. That, of course, is the ESV-CE.
The RSV-2CE and the ESV-CE are both revisions of the RSV that remove the archaic language of the RSV. But as Ted Janiszewski, director of the St. Irenaeus Ministries in Rochester, N.Y., and others have said, we know very little about the scholarship behind the choices made by the RSV-2CE translators. But not so with the ESV-CE.
According to a National Catholic Register interview at the time the ESV-CE was first published in the United States,
“There’s been a lot of new manuscript discoveries and new analysis of the textual basis of the Bible since 1952, when the RSV was originally published, and the ESV is very conscious of those textual improvements and makes those changes along the way. So an example of that would be Deuteronomy 32:43. We have new textual information about that verse for the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the ESV is able to take that into account in its translation in that verse.”
Also,
“One of the other things I would point you to is the continuity between the Old Testament and New Testament [in the ESV]. The RSV was very conscious of trying to translate the Old Testament on its own terms without reference to the New Testament. And so that meant that a lot of links between the New Testament and Old, a lot of quotations of the Old Testament in the New, were lost in the RSV…So [for instance] the ESV does a better job at translating those psalms in a way that matches their quotations in Hebrews chapter one.”
That is an important point. The original RSV was published by what we now think of as the liberal Protestant mainline. Although it was the 1950s, there were already some liberal blind spots that caused the RSV to be rejected by conservative Evangelicals. The most egregious errors (removing the virgin birth from Isaiah 7:14) were fixed in the Catholic editions. But not all of them. The ESV, as noted above, maintains a continuity that is missing from the RSV.
In fact, the ESV can be to Catholics and Protestants together what the RSV was supposed to be but never really was. And by adopting the ESV lectionary, the Ordinariate can play the key role in making it happen.
The publication of the RSV was a landmark event in the religious history of the mid 20th century. The 1943 papal encyclical “Divino afflante Spiritu” had called for new translations from the original languages. Now, for the first time, there was the possibility for a common Bible translation for Catholics and Protestants alike.
Though beloved by a fervent few, the RSV never really filled that role. Evangelicals rejected it immediately. The U.S. Bishops spurned the 1966 RSV-CE in favor of their own 1970 NAB. The Protestant mainline replaced the RSV with the NRSV in 1989. And even most conservative Catholics—the RSV’s biggest fans—tend to use the 2nd Catholic edition, a version used by no one outside of the Catholic Church and few within it.
Enter the ESV.
This Bible won’t be rejected by Evangelicals. It is the Evangelical’s Bible. Yes, mainline Protestants may still reject it. Even so, the ESV bible consistently ranks in the top 5 selling Bibles worldwide.
Where it matters, where the growth sectors of Christianity are, the ESV is it. I have seen this with my own eyes.
The NIV is still the top-selling Bible according to the latest data. But in my experience, the NIV’s support seems to draw from older Evangelicals. And even then, they are holding on to the 1984 NIV and are crestfallen over the 2011 NIV. I don’t think the NIV will maintain that top spot much longer.
For almost every young Evangelical I meet, the ESV is their Bible of choice. And I meet a lot. Probably more than your average Catholic.
As the head of the Family Institute of Connecticut, an ecumenical entity loosely affiliated with Focus on the Family, I move in those circles frequently. Both locally and when I attend events with our separated brethren on the national level, it is almost always the ESV from which they read and the language from which they worship.
In fact, it was from our gatherings following the monthly Evensongs of the Pre-Ordinariate Fellowship of Connecticut that I first learned two years ago of the existence of a Catholic edition of the ESV. At 51 years old, I am the oldest member of the Fellowship. The other members, all younger and many of them converts from various Protestant denominations, all grew up with the ESV.
It’s what they know. It’s what they love. It’s what is most familiar to them. It is where the Ordinariate has enormous potential to “realize ecumenism” with Christians of various Protestant denominations, reading from a common bible, and helping them come into full communion with the Catholic Church.
Even before the Augustine Institute published the ESV-CE in this country, they already knew the Catholic Bishops of India had published an ESV-CE lectionary. Some of them already had the ESV-CE from its original Indian publisher, the Asian Trading Corporation. When I mentioned this on Facebook, the wife of an Eastern Orthodox priest told me the ESV-CE had been her preferred translation too.
Meanwhile, New Zealand, Australia, Ireland and England are all considering following India in making the ESV-CE as the Bible for their lectionary.
The ESV can succeed where the RSV failed, uniting Catholic and Protestant alike with a common Bible. No entity in all of English-speaking Christianity is better equipped to help bring this about than the Ordinariate. It fits perfectly with our Ordinariates’ ecumenical mission. Alongside our Anglican patrimony, it can be the bridge upon which we invite our separated brethren to the unity that Christ himself prayed for us to have at the Last Supper.
Peter Wolfgang is the Executive Director of the Family Institute of Connecticut. The views expressed here are his own, and not that of the Family Institute of Connecticut.
