Fr. Z's Blog

Here is a serious insider-canon-ball post about something which nevertheless affects a great many people, since it deals with our liturgical worship, namely, the words by which the priest introduces the Lord’s Prayer.

In the new, corrected translation we see:

23. Then the Priest, with hands joined, says aloud:
At the Savior’s command
and formed by divine teaching,
we dare to say:

No leeway.  The priest is to say those words and not something else.  No freedom to ad lib.  We have to say the black and do the red.

Here is something (edited) I received from a priest:

Father,
I have pasted the response of the head of the Diocesan
Liturgical Commission in regards to a question I sent the commission.
I need some perspective please. Blessings and peace to you.

__________________

Here is my actual response regarding the invitation to the Lord’s
Prayer:

It appears that the Vatican now has a preference for us to use the
intro that appears there. It’s the same one that has always been there
in Latin. HOWEVER:

The vernacular translations added others partly because of a letter
from the Congregation for Divine Worship in 1973 that said in part
this (and I highlighted the pertinent part):

“Among the possibilities for further accommodating any individual
celebration, it is important to consider the admonitions, the homily
and the general intercessions. First of all are the admonitions. These
enable the people to be drawn into a fuller understanding of the
sacred action, or any of its parts, and lead them into a true spirit
of participation. The General Instruction of the Roman Missal entrusts
the more important admonitions to the priest for preparation and use.
He may introduce the Mass to the people before the celebration begins,
during the liturgy of the word prior to the actual readings, and in
the Eucharistic prayer before the preface; he may also conclude the
entire sacred action before the dismissal. The Order of Mass provides
others as well, which are important to certain portions of the rite,
such as during the penitential rite, or before the Lord’s Prayer. By
their very nature these brief admonitions do not require that everyone
use them in the form in which they appear in the Missal. Provision can
be made in certain cases that they be adapted to some degree to the
varying circumstances of the community…”

In the view of a representative of ICEL and Vox Clara, who worked on
the translation both in Rome and here with the USCCB, and whom I
consulted about this question, the 1973 letter is still in force.

Ooookayyyy…. that doesn’t sound plausible to me.

I checked with a good canonist on this. Here is the response I received:

This letter from the CDW is most likely a general executory decree (c. 30ff), or possibly an instruction (c. 34). General Executory Decrees “do not derogate from the law” (c. 33) and “cease to have force by explicit or implicit revocation by the competent authority, and by the cessation of law for whose execution they were issued” (c. 34) Similarly, Instructions “cease to have force not only by explicit or implicit revocation by the competent authority who published them or by that authority’s superior, but also by the cessation of the law which they were designed to set out and execute.” (c. 34, 4).

I would argue that this letter from the CDW referred to the rubrics of the 1970 Missal. Where the current Missal repeats the provisions of the 1970 Missal, this letter would still have force. Since the rubrics of the current Missal do not use the phrasing “with these or similar words” for the introduction to the Lord’s prayer, I do not believe that the provisions of the ’73 letter from the CDW apply, since the item they refer to has been integrally reordered (cf. c. 20).

Whew.

Bottom line. The “liturgist” says that the rubrics in the most recent Roman Missal don’t have to be obeyed because of a letter from 1973. Wrong. The new rubrics have to be followed.