A Liturgical New Year's Gift for English-Speaking Catholics

A local report calls the "long-awaited overhaul of the English-speaking version of the Roman Missal" "a more faithful translation of the official Latin text, much of which is based on Scripture" — Changes in Catholic Mass begin this weekend. "There's been an effort since the Mass came into English, back in the late '60s, to find a worthy translation from the Latin text," said a local priest Fr. Robert J. Kennedy. He continued:

The original translation that took place was done in a matter of months, rather quickly. There were concerns on a variety of fronts about the accuracy of the translation and whether it caught the beauty and the theology of the Latin translation.

Ever since then, they've been slowly taking their time to do a careful translation.

Impatient Catholics should remember the line from the film The Cardinal (1963): "The Church thinks in centuries, not decades." Whether she was doing so at the time of that film is a open to question.