The curious case of the cup has been gripping traditionally minded Catholics for a few years now. I mention the question because a secret text of the new translation of the Mass has been bouncing about the internet for a few weeks now. People who seldom go to church often get more annoyed about the banality of the language of the prayers than regulars do.
As for the word cup, its use in the English version of Mass, instead of the word chalice, did not please Cardinal Jorge Medina Estevez, head of the curia’s congregation for divine worship, one bit. ‘The translators avoid the use of specifically sacral terminology, and use words commonly employed in the vernacular for kitchenware,’ he complained.
But Cardinal Estevez retired and still the cup/chalice debate raged. There is a text in the Gospel (Matthew, xx 22) that says: ‘Can you drink the cup that I am going to drink?’ In the light of a Vatican ruling that liturgical texts should be guided by the Vulgate (Latin) Bible, even the flaccid bishops of the United States prepared to amend their lectionaries so that the word chalice should appear instead of cup.
The history is not simple. There used to be a word in general use in West Germanic languages like English that was borrowed from the Latin calix long ago, before our forebears landed in this island or Christianity was known to them. In Old English this word celic was replaced by another form caelc reborrowed from Latin, under the influence of Christian texts. So in the Lindisfarne Gospels (written in about 950) a cup of cold water is rendered caelc watres caldes. The word had no sacral connotations here, referring to the kitchenware of the time.
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