By Melanie Jones: Subscribe to Melanie's RSS feed
November 27, 2011 6:09 PM EST
For the first time in 40 years, Roman Catholics across the globe will be relying on "cheat sheets" to adjust to some significant changes during Mass, as a new version of the Roman missal commissioned by the late Pope John Paul II arrives in churches worldwide.
Nov. 27 marks the first day of the church year, and of the pre-Christmas Advent season, also called "Little Lent." The Catholic Church has chosen this Sunday to launch, for the first time since 1973, a different English translation of the Roman missal, the Latin prayer book used for Catholic mass.
The new translation began with the late Pope John Paul II. In 2000, he commissioned church translators to draft a more formal word-for-word translation of the Roman missal.
Over a decade later, the Church has finally put the translation into effect, and churchgoers the world over are struggling to forget phrases that some have memorized since childhood.
The new translation was introduced in every Catholic Mass in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and India. It has already begun to be phased in at other English-speaking churches around the world.
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Supporters of the new translation say the revisions help to better convey the sacredness of traditional worship, something diluted first with the shift from Latin to English and then with some of the Vatican II reforms in the 1960s and 1970s.
"We [English-speaking churches] lost a bit of the solemness of beauty of the original Latin-- something that didn't happen with other translation," Vancouver Archdiocese spokesman Paul Schratz told The National Post.
Paul Tortora, a former altar boy who attended morning Mass at St. Patrick's in New York, is similarly enthusiastic about the revised Roman missal.
"If they bring back more of the traditional way of doing things, I think people will appreciate the Mass more," Totora said. "But I'm old school."
"I'm furious with the Church."
Other churchgoers were not so optimistic, and in fact felt confused and upset by the new translation, which some believed was an arbitrary change that disrupted traditions they'd carried on since childhood.
Kathleen McCormack, a church volunteer and former school teacher in North Carolina, found the elaborate wording of the new translation distancing and off-putting. "Consubstantial?" she said, referencing a passage in the new version of the Nicene Creed describing Jesus as one with the Father. "What is that word?"
George Lind, 73, of New York City, had far stronger words about his feeling on the new Roman missal.
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