It’s also the reason Yakimoski is one of 350 Canadians and 20,668 Catholics worldwide who have added their name to the web site www.whatifwejustsaidwait.org. Yakimoski has joined 11,458 lay people, 2,437 priests, 261 deacons, 2,987 religious sisters and brothers and 3,526 lay ministers as of May 4 in asking bishops to go very slow as they introduce the new translations.

Bishops in Canada already plan to take 18 months to gradually introduce the missal, but Yakimoski and others want the bishops to be ready to change the texts if priests or the people find the words unsayable and unprayable.

As much as the wording itself, what upsets Yakimoski is the way the Church arrived at the new translations. He sees the heavy hand of the Vatican bureaucracy guiding a process that ignored the wishes of ordinary Catholics.

“We weren’t asked anything. The only laity that are listened to are the hand-selected ones who are part of some select group.”

Franciscan Father Martin Bettin is also troubled by the way the new translation has been overseen by a Vatican-appointed committee of bishops known as Vox Clara.

“I don’t think that’s a level that’s even needed,” said the retired priest from Nelson, B.C. “Get some people who are specialists in the field and go with that.”

It’s not that Bettin thinks nothing should ever change in the English translation, or even that the 1970s translation is perfect. But the Second Vatican Council foresaw individual bishops’ conferences producing their own translations, bringing to bear pastoral expertise about their own people, said Bettin.

“Rome doesn’t have the best knowledge of everything all the time,” he said.

Italian vocabulary and forced Latin grammatical structures found in the new translations are going to be a problem, said Jesuit Father Jean-Marc Laporte from Halifax.

“English has got its own genius, it’s own structures. It has its own way of expressing things,” he said.

Laporte finds it odd that Vox Clara banished the word “cup” from the eucharistic prayer.

“They want to use chalice,” he said. “But cup is a good Anglo-Saxon word, and that’s actually what Jesus used... a cup — the normal kind of drinking vessel of the day.”

Laporte is aware of the shortcomings of the 1970s translations. When the Third Eucharistic Prayer actually refers to Christ’s sacrifice from the rising of the sun to the setting, the current translation simply says “from east to west a perfect offering may be made to the glory of your name.” That needs work to express the full reality of the Latin text, said Laporte.

“If it’s not broke, don’t fix it,” said Laporte. “There are some things that are broke.”