Coming on November 27, 2011!

 

Blessed Pope John Paul II presented the Church with a gift for the millennium: the third edition of the Missale Romanum (Roman Missal) since the Second Vatican Council. The Roman Missal is the book that sits on the altar at Mass and contains all the prayers and a description of the actions that make up the celebration of the Mass, "the source and summit of the entire Christian Life."

 

Along with this new missal, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments provided us with an entirely new instruction on the translation of liturgical texts entitled Liturgiam Authenticam. This instruction, the fruit of decades of consultation, describes a new way of translating that is more capable of conveying the meaning, beauty, and form of the ancient Latin prayers. Indeed, the vast majority of the prayers we pray at Mass have been preserved by the Latin Church for more than a thousand years and help not only to pass on what we believe but also to make clear who we are.

 

The prayers of the Roman Missal serve an indispensable role in passing on the faith, for, as the ancient axiom lex orandi, lex credendi reminds us, what we pray is what we believe. The authentic translation of these prayers, therefore, plays an important role in the catechetical life of the Church.

 

Thanks to the new Roman Missal and the instruction Liturgiam Authenticam, the Church in the English-speaking world will receive a new translation of the Mass, beginning with the First Sunday of Advent of 2011. 
 

To learn more, visit the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops

 

Information is also available at Revised Roman Missal;  feel free to download New_Responses_for_the_Faithful

For Frequently Asked Questions on the implementation fo the Third Edition of the Roman Missal, click on: Roman_Missal_FAQ