New Missal to be introduced in Australia from mid-2011

The new English translation of the Roman Missal is expected to be implemented in Australia in mid-2011.

"The Permanent Committee of the Bishops Conference has agreed to a model for implementation," Fr Peter Williams, executive secretary for the Bishops Commission for Liturgy, told The Catholic Weekly.

"The implementation will begin from about the middle of next year. What we will do is we will slowly over a period of time introduce some various parts of the new missal to congregations so that they can accommodate the change.

"A date will be determined by the Bishops Conference either at the November conference this year, maybe if we're in a position to know when we will have completed published books, but it will be sometime towards the end of next year when it will come into operation."

p>The changes to be implemented in late 2011 include new responses by the people in about a dozen sections of the Mass, although changes in the words used by the celebrant are much more extensive.

Fr Peter said the benefit of the new translation is that it gives a "more accurate rendering" of the Latin.

"I think there is general agreement by everybody that when the first translation was done back in 1973, because the fact that everybody was clamouring for the vernacular text, the job was rushed," he said.

"The other difficulty was that the instrument of translation they used was one in which fidelity to the primary or source language was not really specified in terms of translation."

SIC: CTHAUS