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• The liturgy of details in the new Roman Missal.

By GEORGE WEIGEL [First Things] – The long-awaited introduction of the new translation of the Roman Missal on Nov. 27, the first Sunday of Advent, offers the Church in the Anglosphere an opportunity to reflect on the riches of the liturgy, its biblical vocabulary, and its virtually inexhaustible storehouse of images. Much of that vocabulary, and a great many of those images, were lost under the “dynamic equivalence” theory of translation; they have now been restored under the “formal equivalence” method of translating. Over the next years and decades, the Catholic Church will be reminded of just what a treasure-house of wonders the liturgy is.

At the same time, the “changes in the words” offer the Church a golden opportunity to confront, and then break, some bad liturgical habits that have accumulated, like unlovely barnacles on the barque of Peter, over the past several decades.

For example:

1. Holy Mass should never begin with a greeting or an injunction that is not in the Roman Missal. The first words the congregation hears from the celebrant should be the liturgical words of greeting prescribed in the Sacramentary…

Continued at First Things | More Chronicle & Notices.

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Tom
Tom
12 years ago

I finally experienced the new liturgy today and you could literally fell the energy of the community fall! The responses were not the problem the in comprehensible prayers were the problem. Terrible syntax and the problems go on and on.

Terrible translation with zero sensitivity to the pastoral well being of the people. It is hard to evangelize with a translation this bad.

I fear more will just go elsewhere.

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