Latter-day Saints often use the term “translate” in a number of ways. Critics often claim that appealing to the various meanings and uses of such a term is a desperate apologetic. Notwithstanding, such is common, even in modern English. While pursuing a book on Conciliarism (which I also recommend for those interested in such a topic), we find it used in a manner that does not mean “to render from one language to another”:
Of the in-built weaknesses characteristic of the medieval Church, two enduring and intersecting disabilities stand out as being of truly fundamental importance: the first, the politicization of the Church’s self-understanding, the second, the transformation of the very idea of ecclesiastical office itself. Their importance is evident because they established the mental categories in terms of which even the most intelligent and spiritually minded of people did their thinking on matters ecclesiastical; it is evident, too, because they set the limits within which even the most dedicated of Church leaders and zealous of Church reformers were destined of necessity to manoeuvre.
To the first of these disabilities we have already had occasion to allude, for it reflected the post-Constantinian juridification of the Church and of the categories of its structural self-understanding. With it came the concomitant subordination of the scriptural understanding of office as essentially ministerial, involving above all service to others, to the less demanding, more familiar, and administratively manageable political mode of thought. Here, what the Gregorian reformers of the eleventh century actually succeeded in achieving did much to set the pattern of development for centuries succeeding. Anyone prone to minimizing the essential continuity of late medieval papal history with that of the earlier period would find it a sobering experience to glance at the twenty-seven blunt propositions of the Dictatus papae, the celebrated document that, in March 1075, was inserted in the papal register. Those propositions not only reflect the thinking of Gregory VII (1073-85) himself, but also provide the key of the principal directions of papal policy right down to the fourteenth century. In some of them—the claim, for example, that the pope could depose the bishops or reinstate them or translate them from see to see—one can see adumbrated that drive to exercise the fullness of papal jurisdictional power over the provincial churches of Christendom that was to be pushed so vigorously by Alexander III in the twelfth century and by Innocent III and Innocent IV in the thirteenth, but was to reach its peak only in the fourteenth after the papal court had been settled in Avignon. (Francis Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300-1870 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008], 22-23, italics in original, emphasis in bold added)
