Two English versions of the Roman Catechism are in common use: the Rev. J. Donovan’s of 1829, which this edition prints, and John McHugh and Charles Callan’s of 1923, which most reprints in the shops today reproduce. If you have read that the older one is inaccurate, you have read McHugh and Callan. We set the two beside the Latin, over the same passages, and counted — and what the counting shows is not which is the more accurate book, but where the 1923 came from.
McHugh and Callan describe their book as “an entirely new English version of the work, from the original.” The wording does not support that. Over 53 collated passages:
The longest unbroken run is sixty-four words. But the decisive evidence is not a similarity — it is a shared departure from the Latin. Two independent translators may arrive at the same rendering of a plain sentence. They do not both invert the same clause into the same six words.
To their credit, they do not altogether conceal the descent: their own introduction says that the first volume of their Parochial Course of Doctrinal Instructions “is a revision of Dr. Donovan’s translation,” and that they had his work before them.
Donovan revised himself. His second edition (Rome, Propaganda Press, 1839) and the Dublin printings descending from it carry a repaired text; the American reprints — 1833, 1870, 1905 — carry the 1829 readings unchanged. Set Callan against both, and he follows the revision: closer to the revised Donovan in 53 of 53 passages, at a median of 64% of his words in order against 31% for the 1829.
This matters for the charge. “Singularly devoid of accuracy… hardly more than a paraphrase” is aimed by McHugh and Callan explicitly at the 1829 first edition — a text its author had by then superseded twice, and which they were correcting by printing a version descended from his own correction of it. Theodore Buckley’s earlier charge of “manifest inaccuracies” (1852) names exactly one passage, and it is a first-edition reading too.
It is a fair question, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a sales one.
The 1829 has eight places, in the passages we collated, where the English says something the Latin does not, or drops something the Latin has. They are corrected in this edition — in Donovan’s own later wording, not ours — with the 1829 reading kept beside each one so you can see what was done, and all of them listed in one place. The 1923 corrects the same eight without saying so.
But the 1923 is not free of them either. On the very same passages it departs once on its own account, at a place where Donovan is right, and the casualty is a negation:
This is the part that matters, and it is easy to get backwards. Donovan’s text has been read against the Latin on every leaf of the book — the Rome 1845 Latin beside the English, section by section, 400 leaves logged one by one — and then a random sample of passages was drawn from across the four Parts and read again clause by clause against its own Latin. That is where the eight come from.
That reading was done here, by the editor with AI assistance, and every correction is logged to the leaf it came from. We say so plainly because nothing on this page asks you to trust the reader: the leaf, the Latin and the change are all published, and a correction nobody recorded is the one you cannot check.
Nothing of the kind has ever been done to the 1923. It has been read against the Latin on 53 passages, about a twentieth of the book — and only because we read it, so that the comparison would not be rigged by testing Callan only where Donovan was already known to be weak.
So the eight are not a measure of how faulty Donovan is against Callan. They are a measure of how hard this text has been looked at. A settled defect looks exactly like an unexamined one, and the difference is whether anyone went and checked. On the whole book, for the 1923, no one has.
None of which makes the 1923 a bad book. It is a sound one, by a pair of able Dominicans, and if you are reading it you are in good hands — and, for the most part, reading Donovan. But if what you want is the version whose faults are known, it is this one; and for any passage you care about, the printed page, the Latin behind it and every change we have made are all in front of you, so you need not take our word for any of it.
Because it is the thing itself rather than a silent revision of it, and because the handful of places where it needs correcting are corrected in the open, with the printed reading kept beside them. Because the prose is the prose his critics conceded was “flowing and readable.” Because every one of the 412 leaves is here beside its scan, with the printer’s own marginal summaries standing where he set them, so nothing rests on our word for it. And because it carries the Catechism’s own Praxis Catechismi— the year’s preaching plan printed with the Latin book, a subject for every Sunday and feast of the year with the pages to preach it from. Donovan left it in his Latin, being addressed to priests who read it; here it stands in the Latin with an English translation beside it. The 1923 sets it aside and supplies a sermon programme of the translators’ own.
Donovan’s text was first read against the facsimile leaf by leaf for its setting, then read again with the Latin of the Rome edition of 1845 beside it, section by section, across the whole book; 400 leaves are logged individually. The passage collation on this page is a second, narrower instrument: 59 body paragraphs of 110 words or more drawn at random from a recorded seed, stratified across the four Parts, each aligned to its own Latin and read clause by clause — 53 judged after six were discarded as misalignments, 11,371 words, 5.6% of the body. Callan was then read over the same 53, by the same reader against the same taxonomy, so that anything found on one side would have been found on the other; testing him only where Donovan was already known to be weak would have been rigged. The Callan text is the 1923 first edition (archive.org catechismofcounc0000jose), not the 1934 second revised edition, which is still in copyright and which archive.org dates 1923 from its imprimatur. The revised Donovan is the Dublin 1867 (James Duffy), the nearest reachable witness to the Rome 1839; the 1839 itself we have not been able to see. Word-order figures are the fraction of one version’s words appearing in sequence in the other’s corresponding passage. Eight is a floor and not a ceiling, on both sides: a sense reading catches what is conspicuous and cannot say what it missed, and one of the eight was invisible to the Latin alone, surfacing only when the two Englishes were set side by side.