"Pro Multis" means "for Many", says Vatican Directive to Bishops

(POSTED Nov. 20, 2006, www.RemnantNewspaper.com) For traditionalist Catholics nothing is more symptomatic of the crisis in the Church than the deliberate mistranslation of pro vobis et pro multis—for you and for many—as “for you and for all” in vernacular renderings of the Latin typical edition of the Mass of Paul VI by local episcopal conferences and the ICEL. This error, which falsely suggests the universal application of the fruit of the Mass to the elect and non-elect alike, was rightly described as “truly scandalous” by Monsignor Klaus Gamber in his Reform of the Roman Liturgy, to which the current Pope wrote an approving French language preface when he was Cardinal Ratzinger.

For nearly forty years the Vatican tolerated this abuse, while both lay and clerical traditionalists objected to it as a blatant falsification of the very words of Our Lord at the Last Supper—a novelty not even Protestant versions of the Bible had dared to venture. Yet, over the past forty years, neo-Catholic apologists for the postconciliar novelties in the Church, such as James Likoudis, Karl Keating and James Akin, have consistently defended the error, even though no command of Paul VI or John Paul II had actually imposed it on the Church and the error was plainly open to criticism.

Now, it seems, Pope Benedict XVI has ordered that the error be corrected at long last. On November 18, 2006 Catholic World News reported that “The Vatican has ruled that the phrase pro multis should be rendered as ‘for many’ in all new translations of the Eucharistic Prayer.” The operative word is ruled. According to CWN, Cardinal Francis Arinze, the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, “has written to the heads of world’s episcopal conferences, informing them of the Vatican decision” and further directing “the bishops to prepare for the introduction of a new translation of the phrase in approved liturgical texts ‘in the next one or two years.’”