http://www.geocities.com/ymjcath/MassNote.htm#Effunditur
Msgr. Klaus Gamber, in his Addendum to The Reform of the Roman Liturgy (a study generally critical of New Order), suggests that "effundetur", the future tense for it will be shed, which comes from the Greek translation used as source for the early vulgates, including St. Jerome's I would assume, could be wrong. The late Msgr. Gamber thought it might have been, instead, the present tense which was used by Our Lord, and so those in the early Church. This future tense for the word, of course, is that used in The Mass; particularly as ordered and fixed at Trent. It suggests, to some, that Our Lord died on The Cross and rose again for many, rather than all, men (meaning men, women - children, too). It has, however, been traditionally understood that Our Lord atoned for all men, but that the fruits of His Sacrifice go to many, but not all.
So Gamber makes the case it was expressed by Our Lord, and clearly understood by the early Church to differ in the Latin by a single letter, yielding the present tense - effunditur - that is, the words of the consecration should contain, rather - "which is being shed". Why such seemed to cause no confusion before just the last decades of the 20th century, in The (Latin) Mass, he seemed to suggest was the fault of the 'new theologian' (see below).
He says this matches well with certain other liturgies and the understanding of early church fathers, of the early Church, itself, essentially. By virtue of Christ's once for all immolation - His execution by the Romans, His Sacrifice for all men as the Sacrificial and so unspotted Lamb - Our Lord deigns to truly and continually offer Himself to The Father for the remission (not merely the forgiveness, I would point out) of our sins. And so, the present tense clarifies that grace is immanent in the Sacrament; regardless of the priest's own sins all else being equal, for example. If so, that was the sense even clearly understood and explained by The Church earlier in this very century, and it goes to what must be the very nature of a Sacrament.
Ultimately, Gamber is saying that the future tense he argues against says to some not the fruit of Our Lord's Sacrifice, nor the grace of The Eucharist borne on His Sacrifice, but rather suggests to modern theologians only the atonement for all men's sins. They simply changed "for many" to "for all" because they imagined the consecration suddenly referred now only, or at best primarily, to the once for all Sacrifice, on Calvary. It would tend to support the complaint against the authors of 'new order' that they imagine the 'celebration', even generally, to be little more than a neo-Protestant memorial; and with the attention on the audience and the auditorium, not on Our Lord, and so forth; that Mass is no more, replaced with a Protestant service that dares only remember Our Lord for fear of 'killing' Him, again.
Labels: Aramaic, eternity, for all
Notice that "for many" is two words in Aramaic, not the single word that the blogger claims, and that translating directly from Aramaic to English, the correct translation is still "for many", not "for all".
