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Open Mind, Faithful Heart: Reflections On Following Jesus By Cardinal Bergoglio

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Open Mind, Faithful Heart: Reflections On Following Jesus By Cardinal Bergoglio
It’s not unusual that the Anglophone media has problems parsing Pope Francis. This problem relates in part to a lack of vocabulary to express spiritual concepts or translate accurately what was said in Spanish or Italian.

Last year I participated in a book club in which we discussed Open Mind, Faithful Heart: Reflections on Following Jesus by Cardinal Bergoglio. Among other issues discussed, I made some remarks about the translation. Although my mother tongue is Portuguese, I know Spanish quite well, and certain comments by others in the group made me aware of some of the unique challenges that English poses for dealing with spiritual themes, especially Catholic ones.

Multiple concepts condensed under a single word usually means there’s a …show more content…
And English is the most versatile language, and the most well adapted for a great number of subjects from medicine to physics. But my experience is that of a foreigner; and it relates to the particularities of a certain language to capture—or not—a spiritual tradition that is quite universal.

A cornerstone of Christian doctrine is the commandment to love one another. The parable of the Good Samaritan and the mandatum novum do vobis summarize the nature of caritas. Jesus begins the Good Samaritan’s parable answering a question: Et quis est meus proximus?, translated in the USCCB version as: “And who is my neighbor?”

Neighbor is used as a translation of the Latin word proximus, which is prójimo in Spanish and próximo in Portuguese. In all romance languages there is another word for neighbor (Spanish: vecino, Portuguese: vizinho, French: voisin) used only to describe the person who lives close to …show more content…
I’m neither the vizinho of the reader nor his friend, as we don’t have a close relationship, but I could say that the bond created by reading this article makes me his proximus, at least more proximus than someone who’s never heard about me. This is not to say that the use of “neighbor” as a translation for proximus is a naïve choice; it’s just that by collapsing the spiritual neighborhood with the physical one the language loses
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