As the Missal Mess has leaked into the public sphere, this much has become clear:
1. The 2008 text prepared for the national conferences of bishops by ICEL was approved by the conferences and sent by them to Rome for approval.
2. The CDW in Rome approved the final text on March 25, 2010, and this missal was presented to Pope Benedict on April 28 as the “Received Text.”
3. But the Received Text – leaked here – is very different from what the national conferences approved. It has thousands and thousands of changes from the 2008 text, most of them of the sort one wouldn’t expect from a national conference.
4. In summer 2010 it became known that the CDW had made changes to the final version – for example, rewording the doxology to the Eucharistic Prayer.
5. An internal report – leaked here – goes on for 35 pages outlining the errors and problems in the Received Text.
6. A November 18 statement of the US conference, intended to give us “the calm needed to welcome and implement the new text,” asserted that the CDW listened carefully to the bishops in approving the final version. It also asserted that the leaked report failed to take into account the more recent corrections made by the CDW.
Corrections? What sort of corrections? The Received Text has been heavily critiqued, even ridiculed, online in recent months. We all have been curious how the CDW would respond. Would they make only minor corrections, leaving the problematic Received Text intact for the most part? Or would they make drastic corrections and improvements, giving us a better text but necessarily admitting their previous mistakes?
Now we know. As conferences receive the final text from the CDW, some eight months after it was supposedly approved in its final form, we can now compare the Received Text to the final text.
It’s the former – only minor corrections, the Received Text pretty much stands. All the punctuation errors are fixed. But apart from that, the Received Text is pretty much what we will get in our new missals next year. Here is a small sampling of changes made or not made.
It is very surprising that no change was made to the Easter prefaces: “but [in this time] above all to laud you …, when Christ our Passover has been sacrificed.” The cum-clause is clausal, not temporal, so it means “since,” not “when.” The wording suggests that it is in this time (of the other possible wordings, “on this night” or “on this day”) that Christ has been sacrificed, which borders on heresy. Oh well.
This is in the “Throw Mama from the train a kiss” category. A fellow monk thinks the end of the preface should run:
We acclaim without your glory
end we sing of the hymn as:
awr
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