New Translation of the Roman Missal

[from my parish bulletin]

On the First Sunday of Advent of 2011, the Catholic Church in the United States will take a step towards praying in unison with the whole English-speaking Catholic world. A new worldwide English translation of the texts of the Mass has been approved by Rome and will be implemented this upcoming Advent in the United States.

This will not entail radical changes in the structure and flow of the Mass. It is a new English translation of the original Latin prayers of Mass, without any major changes in the rubrics of the Mass such as those seen after the Second Vatican Council.

The new translation of the Roman Missal, the book used at Mass that contains all the prayers for Mass, is an attempt to develop a better translated, more precise and more faithful text. The current Missal was translated in the 1970s by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) created in 1963 during the Second Vatican Council. This translation catered to a particular time period and used certain agreed-upon guidelines to translate the original Latin texts. The end result was texts that used short phrases and simple grammatical structures that were not always faithful to the original Latin texts in structure and content. In the 1970s this was considered appropriate and desired even though it yielded a poor and over-simplified translation.

The Church today, after praying with this translation for several decades, has chosen to retranslate the texts using different parameters. First of all, the new guidelines direct that the English translation must be faithful to the Latin texts both in structure and content. This results in a more formal and deeper theological language. In addition, there has been an attempt to link liturgical texts to their Scriptural source.

As the time approaches we will be providing more information and catechesis about the changes and about the Mass in general.