PrayTell: What is your sense from a publisher’s perspective of the absolute kill date on the missal? Do you need to have the text by this Friday to make it by Advent 2011? Or if it comes several weeks later, would you still make it work in time somehow?
Jerry Galipeau, World Library Publications: This is not an easy question to answer. By this time of year, all of our texts for 2012 normally would have been submitted to the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL), the Bishops’ Committee on Divine Worship (BCDW), and the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD) for proofreading and approval.
When I was worship resources editor here at WLP, I streamlined some very long and cumbersome processes. In so doing we were able to give ourselves (and those agencies) more lead time so that we were not backed against the wall when publishing deadlines loomed. So, we have quite a bit of time built into our own processes here.
The current worship resources editor, in frustration, has begun to construct the so-called “annual file,” the file from which all annual, quarterly, and three-times-per-year, worship resources are constructed. She is using current sacramentary texts. If we receive the texts sometime in the next few months, she, probably with the help of other editors, will painstakingly move through this file and substitute texts. This is not the ideal way of doing things, obviously. We wanted to have the time to apply our styles to the texts themselves from a series of source files, then know that what we were “plopping in” were texts that had already gone through a thorough proofing process. I would imagine that everything we (and other publishers) submit to the agencies over the next several years will be proofed with a fine-toothed comb, adding another layer of time.
So, that’s our situation. More pressing, of course, is the question about the Missal itself and the time it will take to construct it, edit it, and have it proofed and printed. We can do all we can to provide worship resources, but if there is no Missal ready in time, what’s the point?
In some low moments I am tempted to send the 2012 proof with the current sacramentary texts in it and wait for the reaction from the agencies . . .
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