What if Pope Francis’ Translators…

…translated other stuff in history? 

Pretty funny.

You’d think that a polyglot Church would get only the best translators.  But then you remember John XXIII’s reply to the question “How many people work at the Vatican?”

A: “About half”.

But the Vatican has untold riches at its disposal!

Funny, funny Americans.  We are, at heart, still an agricultural land of 19th century Puritans full of moral rectitude against them sinister curtain gliding Italian Jesuits when the myth of Vatican wealth comes up.  We forget that we have ago become the true decadent, flabby, depraved culture of wealth (as the Kardashians, Paris Hilton, and the slavemasters at Walmart strive to remind us daily).

Some perspective from Mike Flynn:

One often hears of the proverbial wealth of the Vatican.  An interesting comparison was made of the operating budget and the “patrimony” of the Vatican by John L. Allen, Jr.

• Operating Budget:  (Vatican) $300 million  Harvard ($3.7 billion)
• Endowment/Patrimony: (Vatican) $1 billion; Harvard ($30.7 billion)

Here in the land of glittering towers dedicated to mammon worship, we really need to get past the notion that the Vatican sits atop Smaug’s horde.  A look at their crummy website makes clear that this is a quintessentially Italian bureaucracy that frequently operates on the “close enough for government work” principle.

And the work of its translators often tells the same story.  Paranoids read into that some sinister conspiracy.  I tend to think “Don’t attribute to malice what is sufficiently explained by laziness or incompetence.”  If the vastly more well-funded American presidency can have this happen, it’s not terribly shocking that the shoestring staff at the Vatican will often have dubious translation too.  They seem to take more care for higher level documents such as conciliar and papal teachings.  But the translations of working documents (like the synod stuff and the pope’s daily remarks on this and that) often have a very slapdash quality.  Take them with a grain of salt.

And recall that the whole phenomenon of a “global papacy” in a 24/7/365 news cycle is about as old as the Internet.  Laity did not scrutinize the flow of information from the Vatican on a daily basis for the very good reason that the information was not there to scrutinize.  When the pope made a few joshing remarks to the local orphanage, we didn’t hear about it forty years ago because our access to information was much more limited, as was our access to colloquiums of paranoids parsing every syllable for telltale signs of impurity and heresy and signs that the End of Days is upon us.  The web amplifies all that.