Huambo, 17 December, 2019 / 11:07 pm (ACI Africa).
More than two decades after Pope St. John Paul II approved the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) as the official teachings of the Church, Angola’s Church leaders have implemented the translation of the document into Umbundu, the country’s second most spoken language after Portuguese. In Kenya’s Maralal Diocese, the natives can read the New Testament in Samburu language.
“The Catechism is a safe and authentic reference text for the teaching of Catholic Doctrine,” Vatican News has quoted Archbishop Emeritus Francisco Viti of Angola’s Huambo Diocese, who did the translation as saying.
“It is an exposition of the Catholic faith and the doctrine of the Catholic, one can know what the Church professes, celebrates, lives and prays in its daily life. For this reason, I decided to translate it into Umbundu,” the 86-year old Archbishop added in the Sunday, December 15 Vatican News report.
Explaining the dynamics of the translation, the Angolan Prelate revealed, “The translation was very difficult because it implied philosophical, theological and scientific terminology, even the problem of Bioethics.”
Umbundu is the most widely spoken Bantu dialect in the Southern African nation of Angola, with an estimated one third of the country’s 31.83 million population being native speakers of the language.