‘The liturgical word and action are inseparable.’
The Creed, also known as the profession of faith, is recited after the homily as our response and assent to the word of God proclaimed in the readings and in the homily. We confess the great mysteries of our faith before we celebrate them in the liturgy of the Eucharist.
The Creed began as a baptismal formula in the first person, “I believe.” It was expanded following the definition of the divinity of the Son at the Council of Nicea in 325 and the divinity of the Holy Spirit at the Council of Constantinople in 381. It first entered the Latin Mass in Spain in the sixth century.
The first difference in the new Missal is the change from “We believe” to “I believe.” This is not an expression of American individualism but rather of the one voice of the mystical body of Christ. St. Thomas Aquinas explained it thus: “the confession of faith is handed down in the Creed, as it were, as coming from the person of the whole Church, united by means of the Faith” (Authentic Liturgy, No. 65).
A second difference is the change from “all that is seen and unseen” to “things visible and invisible,” referring to all that God has made. First, this is a more accurate translation of the Latin phrase visibilium omnium et invisibilium. But second, it is more precise language. Something that is unseen can, by changing one’s position, become seen. But something invisible remains invisible, regardless of one’s perspective.
A third change is from “one in Being with the Father” to “consubstantial with the Father,” referring to the relationship of the Son to God the Father. The creeds produced by the first two ecumenical councils, Nicea in 325 and Constantinople in 381, described the Son as “from the substance of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, the same substance [homoousion] with the Father.”
When these two ancient creeds were translated into Latin, the term homoouison (homo means same; ouison means substance) was rendered as consubstantialem. Before the Second Vatican Council, consubstantialem was rendered as “consubstantial” in the English translation of the Creed. In the opinion of theologians and the Holy See, consubstantial is a more accurate translation than “one in being.”
This also reflects one of the principles from Authentic Liturgy, the document that guided the translation of the Latin text into the vernacular: “Certain expressions that belong to the heritage of the whole or of a great part of the ancient Church, as well as others that have become part of the general human patrimony, are to be respected by a translation that is as literal as possible” (No. 56).
A fourth difference is the change from “born of the Virgin Mary” to “was incarnate of the Virgin Mary.” Although it is true that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, the current translation obscures the uniqueness of the incarnation: all of us have been born, but only the Second Person of the Trinity was incarnate and took on a human nature. This is also consistent with Authentic Liturgy’s principle that particular words be rendered “according to the precise wording that the tradition of the Latin Church has bestowed upon it” (No. 65).
The Catechism of the Catholic Church stresses the power of the liturgical word: “The liturgical word and action are inseparable both insofar as they are signs and instruction and insofar as they accomplish what they signify” (1155). That is, the words of the liturgy both teach and make present the reality they signify. In the Creed they teach us about our unity as the one body of Christ and about God the maker of all things, the unity of the Son and the Father, and the mystery of God becoming man. In the liturgy we speak the words of the Word and so participate “in Christ’s own prayer addressed to the Father in the Holy Spirit” (CCC, 1073).
Father Stice directs the diocesan Office of Worship and Liturgy. He can be reached at frrandy@dioknox.org.
