SAME OLD, SAME OLD

When you're stupid, nothing can be done. Écône's Canon René Berthod (Tony Baloney's translation)

Sometimes we Readers, setting aside our modesty, get the warm feeling Providence actively favors our apostolate.

On the very day we posted "A Tale of Two Faces," where we reminded the cult masters of "Perigrinus's" disparaging remarks about Abp. Thục's Latin, our Boneheaded Pilgrim from remotest Tradistan had the temerity to blog about that very topic.

Commenting on a priest's recollections of (1) Thục's teaching himself Spanish in order to teach Latin in that language and (2) the archbishop's impressive oral fluency in Latin, the Blunderer, apparently unaware of his own self-condemnation, had this to say:

I can assure readers that none of the clergy I know who have attacked Abp. Thuc could pull off either one of these feats. And if you doubt that, you might want to ask one of them!

Well, taking to heart the ancient Delphic maxim γνῶθι σεαυτόν ("know thyself"), we challenge Tony Baloney to question "Peregrinus" on everyone's behalf.  You rabid culties out there may also want to put the same question to him. However, before you do it, today we have a little reminder of Tony's linguistic disabilities, with brand new examples that might coax a straight answer out of the nescient oracle of Sedelandia.

Since 2010, Pistrina has documented Checkie's terminal difficulties with the Church's holy tongue. His embarrassingly shoddy Work of Human Hands fairly bristles with errors of the worst sort. In addition, after our extended 2013 exposé, friend and foe alike know in minute detail all the scholarly defects of his now-discredited monograph "Validity of Ordination Conferred with One Hand": gross mistranslation of infallible papal teaching (bad enough to alter its substance), howling errors in transcription, unwarranted addition of words, faulty renderings, etc., etc., etc.

So tenuous is the Blunderer's grasp of Latin that no one ought to accept anything he's written until someone competent retranslates all citations based on Latin originals. This caveat is especially applicable to his widely circulated 1995 pamphlet "Traditionalists, Infallibility and the Pope" (or TIP, for short), of which the True Restoration blog wrote on July 5, 2013, "To this day, that article has never been answered by any individual or group."

Perhaps the reason for all the silence is that substandard scholarship doesn't deserve an answer in the first place.

The chief failure of the little brochure is that Checkie does not supply the original Latin texts for his quotations, upon which the gravamen of his argument depends.  You are left to assume the translations are accurate.  Yet how can anyone make that assumption with any confidence?  Without the originals available for comparison, no one can trust in the accuracy of the Blunderer's translations, given Pistrina's solid documentation of his handicap with the language.

To be sure, we understand the inclusion of original Latin texts would have greatly enlarged TIP, the real audience of which is the lowest-common-denominator sede-Trad, who'd have no use for the material. To be sure, if the Blunderer's translations in his other works were reliable, we'd be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But that's not the case, is it? You've all seen for yourselves just how grave his errors are.

Nevertheless, in fairness, the Readers agreed to thumb through TIP to see if the same types of blunders prevail. After all, Tony Baloney might have appealed to some halfway intelligent help on such an effort. What with the skeptical Novus Ordo and SSPX world watching, he'd want to cross all the t's and dot all the i's, right?

Wrong! Or if he did have some help, the jerk was as hopeless as the Bonehead.

Unfortunately (and as expected), our initial sampling of TIP found the same classes of problems that disfigure the Checkmeister's other failed efforts at playing the scholar. Today we'll look at a few that immediately popped out in our rapid survey of what the True Restoration blogger somewhat grandly called a "landmark" article.

We'll take the errors in order of severity. (Bracketed numerals identify the specific blunder.) 

CAUTION: HEAVY GRAMMATICAL CONSTRUCTION ZONE AHEAD

(We do hope you'll stay for the ride, though. There's plenty of skewered Cheeseball to make up for the slow going.)

TIP Blunders 1 and 2: On p. 20, 3rd full paragraph, quote from Coronata, Tony Baloney translates as follows (our emphasis): "Such impeccability was never promised by God." Yet in the original Latin text, the word he mistakes for "never" is nullibi, which means "nowhere" [1]. ("Never" is nun[m]quam, or non umquam). The Blunderer's mistranslation robs the sentence of its nuance and lawyerly precision: "...was (or has been) nowhere [i.e., in Revelation] promised by God." This moron should buy a good Latin-English dictionary -- and learn how to use it. Let's add that he also failed to translate the pronoun ipsi in the original: "haec impeccabilitas ipsi nullibi a Deo promissa est, i.e., this impeccability was (or has been) nowhere promised to him [viz., the Roman Pontiff] by God" [2].

TIP Blunder 3: Throughout TIP, Checkie quotes but a few isolated Latin words, so you'd imagine he'd try at least to get all of them right, wouldn't you? If you did, you poor innocent, then you're in for a big disappointment. On page 23, last paragraph, he spells repugnantiam as repugnatiam. Good grief! Wouldn't you think the English cognates repugnant and repugnance would've told him that the Latin must have an n, too?

TIP Blunders 4, 5, 6 and 7: On page 25, in the quotation from Wernz and Vidal, he translates the phrase "omnem sententiam declaratoriam" as "any declaratory judgment" (our bold). The correct translation is "every." The Blunderer's sloppy and inaccurate "any" fails to preserve the nicely exact legal idiom of the original [4]. But what else would you expect him?

In the line above Blunder 4 on the same page, the Cheeseball prints this: "the Roman Pontiff...is deemed to be deprived of the power of jurisdiction..." The original Latin reads "R. Pontifex...sua potestate iurisdictionis privatus existit..." (our emphases). The word sua does not mean "the," but rather "his own," and existit, an active voice verb, means "emerges, appears, becomes, proves to be, shows oneself." Hence, an accurate translation is: "The Roman Pontiff...becomes deprived of his own power of jurisdiction..." Again, the Blunderer's habitual inattention to detail, slovenly guesswork, and itch to gild the lily rule in place of accuracy, precision of expression, and fidelity to the intrinsic meaning of the original [5, 6].

Toward the end of the same paragraph on p. 25, the Blunderer translates "etiam ipso facto cessat esse caput Ecclesiae" as "he would also cease to be head of the Church," grossly neglecting to translate (or retain) the phrase ipso facto [7]. That phrase is stylistically and jurisprudentially necessary, for it repeats the same phrase in the preceding studiedly parallel clause, viz., "ipso facto desineret esse membrum Ecclesiae." (See below for our comments on the imbecile's wrong translation of the present active indicative cessat as "would cease.")

O.K., kids.  Pause and take a deep breath....

At this juncture, we're going to excavate the syntactical BIG boo-boos, so put on to your grammar hard hats! We'll understand if you want to skip the next two sections and head straight for the conclusion below ("THE BOTTOM LINE").

TIP Blunders 8, 9, and 10: We'll stay on p. 25 with Wernz, Vidal, still at Blunder 7. (Can you believe one little paragraph has so many blunders?) Here's the entire sentence in the original (our emphases):

At Papa, qui incideret in haeresim publicam, ipso facto desineret esse membrum Ecclesiae; ergo etiam ipso facto cessat esse caput Ecclesiae.

The fatuous Phony Tony translates it: "A pope who falls into public heresy would cease ipso facto to be a member of the Church; therefore, he would also cease to be head of the Church" (our emphases).

Let's point out immediately that Phony Tony neglected to translate at ("but"), the conjunction introducing the minor premise of a first-figure syllogism [8]. (Tone, for some odd reason, doesn't translate the major premise, although it would have helped his argument. Alas, "when you're stupid....") Please note that here, owing to its logical significance, at is not one of those connectors that can be arbitrarily omitted in translation.

Now, moving on to the really problematic goof ups, first observe that incideret is imperfect (active subjunctive),* yet the Latin-less Bonehead translates it as the present (active indicative) "falls" [9]!  Next observe how that he translates the present active indicative cessat as "would...cease," using the -- forgive our exactness -- central epistemic preterit modal auxiliary would, which in English often renders a Latin subjunctive [10].  The translation is plain wrong. Cessat must be translated as an English present active indicative because the original text is merely making a declarative statement about a liability created by operation of law.

Not surprisingly, the Blunderer, as is his nature, completely misses the point, both semantically and legally. The only genuinely hypothetical notion is in the main verb of the first clause, desineret, an imperfect active potential subjunctive used independently.  The other two verbs can or must be translated as indicatives in the appropriate tense. Here's an accurate translation of the whole thing: "But a pope who fell ** into public heresy would have ceased*** ipso facto (or by that very fact) to be a member of the Church; therefore,  he also ceases ipso facto [or by that very fact] to be the head of the Church."

TIP Blunders 11, 12 and 13: Back on page 20, just below the middle of the page, we find something similar to the errors we've just exposed. Let's first look at the Blunderer's translation followed by the Latin original (emphases on translation blunders ours):

Wherefore, if the Roman Pontiff were to profess heresy, before any condemnatory sentence (which would be impossible anyway) he would lose his authority. Proinde si R. Pontifex haeresim profiteatur ante quamcumque sententiam, quae impossibilis est, sua auctoritate privatur.

Here the Checkmeister does indeed accurately render the present deponent subjunctive profiteatur in the protasis of a "future-less-vivid" condition with indicative apodosis. "Were to" (along with "should") is a common option. However, he fatally stumbles with the two remaining verbs: Est is present indicative, so it cannot mean "would be" [11], and the present passive indicative privatur cannot be translated with the past-tense modal auxiliary would [12].**** And, true to his usual, heedless self, the Cheeseball adds without warrant the adverb anyway, to which there is no corresponding word in the original Latin [13]: it's a pure invention on Tony's part. Perhaps a little special pleading, or just rhetorical seasoning?

A close translation is: "Consequently, if the Roman Pontiff should (or were to) profess heresy before any sentence at all,***** which is impossible, he is deprived of his authority." In choosing the present indicative est, the original  merely paraphrases canon 1556, which states the legal fact that no man judges a Sovereign Roman Pontiff; privatur is present indicative because the original text expresses an event occurring by operation of law. However, the Bonehead can't see the obvious, and since he doesn't have an educated feel for Latin syntax, he makes desperate guesses based on his "gut."

THE BOTTOM LINE

Let's face it: The Cheeseball's blunted TIP is no "landmark" study. It couldn't qualify as a term paper in a down-market community college in the Ozarks. It's a promotional leaflet for the cult written for a general, lay readership disaffected by the changes wrought through the Modernist Putsch at Vatican II. (Just ripe for the plucking!)

Its central message -- a heretical pope loses his office -- was old news back in 1995 when the pamphlet was printed. That proposition has been advanced -- and disputed -- for centuries. (BTW, see our 2011 post, "An Inclination to Injustice," for a chilling reminder of what happens when someone intelligent thinks independently on this opinion.)

Even if all the citations were retranslated and the original texts faithfully transcribed, TIP would never merit serious consideration by scholars and properly formed churchmen, just as no professional student of Elizabethan literature would use the Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare to assess the Bard's contribution to English drama. Since the Blunderer will never issue a corrected version of anything, Traddies everywhere should ignore TIP.

It's important to bear in mind that the 13 blunders detailed above (a) occurred on just three pages of a 32-page booklet and (b) came from just three of the 18 references works listed in the bibliography. These blunders may be just the tip of an iceberg of error. How many more goofs await inspection? No one knows yet,****** so here's a tip from the Readers: send your copy of TIP to the recycling center.

Clearly, no one, least of all zombie cultie "rite-trash," should base an important decision about religion on this sloppy pulp leaflet. Our advice is to adopt Pistrina's position of aliquid pravi:

Something, no one's not exactly sure what, is terribly wrong in the Vatican establishment. Anyone else who feels similarly, whether SSPXer, conservative Novus Ordite, FSSPer, or Traddie of any stripe, is a Catholic worthy of fraternal respect, assistance, and fellowship (as long as they're not associated with the Terrible Trio).

* More fully it's a "generic" imperfect active causal subjunctive in a parenthetical relative clause.

** The "generic" subjunctive often was used for descriptive force alone and accordingly is frequently translated as an indicative. However, since the subjunctive in this construction is potential, a modal can be used to describe a person "with reference to his...potentialities, not with reference to some real act committed or being committed" (Woodcock, §155). Accordingly, we wouldn't have objected if he had rendered the verb modally as "would have fallen" even though it's imperfect (see below). But the ignorant Blunderer just plain erred when he translated incideret as "falls."

***The potential imperfect subjunctive is often best translated as an English perfect (so called "real perfect with have"), when it denotes an action conceivable, i.e., one that might have taken place.  That's the subtlety we wished to bring out. But note that this is not a criticism of Checkie's translation of desineret as "would ...cease."  It's acceptable, though linguistically unsophisticated.  Latinists may wish to compare the clause to Cicero's In Verrem, IV 23, 52: qui videret equum Troianum introductum, urbem captam diceret, "anyone who saw that the Trojan horse had been conducted inside, would have said it was a captured city."

****We concede it is not absolutely necessary to preserve the original voice, so that's why we don't cite an additional error; nevertheless, we don't think that lose is the best semantic solution to an awkward passive rendering in English, since privare means "to debar from the possession or use of something," something quite different from mere loss.

***** The Blunderer adds the word "condemnatory," probably by way of interpretation. We won't quibble here, but it would have been better just to translate quamcumque a little more carefully to bring out a subtler range of meaning.

****** Well, actually, we do know for a fact that there're more blunders. For instance, on the same p, 25, in the quotation from Udalricus Beste, the Blunderer leaves out one of the key qualifiers in a phrase. Checkie translates "by falling into certain insanity," but the Latin reads "certam et insanabilem amentiam" -- certain and incurable insanity." From a juridical point view, the missing words are crucial to define the additional criterion for loss of pontifical dignity.  What was he thinking? Did he stupidly confuse insanabilem for insanibilem?

Quand on est bête, on ne peut rien faire. Isn't that right, Canon Berthod, wherever you are?