Bishops' statement on new English Missal draft

The Department for Christian Life and Worship of the Bishops' Conference of England and Wales issued the following statement on Friday, with regard to the International Committee for English (ICEL) in the Liturgy translation of Ordo Missae. The Bishops' Conference has received and considered the ICEL green book translation of the Ordo Missae. The 'green book' is issued to enable a preliminary consultation of all Bishops in the English-speaking Conferences on the basic proposals of ICEL, before ICEL produces its final text, in a 'grey book', which it recommends for Conferences' use. The Bishops of England and Wales expressed their appreciation for the work ICEL has done in preparing the 'green book'. They agreed a number of general observations about the text which ICEL's editorial board will consider together with the observations it receives from all the other English-speaking Conferences. The recommendations of the Editorial Board will be passed to the Bishops of ICEL, who will decide on whether a further 'green book' should be issued before preparing a 'grey book' to issue to Conferences. The general comments and requests made to ICEL included that: a. The Bishops wished further attention to be given to the question of sentence length and syntactical constructions. b. Unnecessary archaisms should be avoided c. Changes to 'people's texts' should be made only where there is substantial cause. d. The Bishops' Conference was glad to see that in a number of places, where it would not dilute or distort the faith of the Church, ICEL had shown a preference for the use of inclusive language. Producing a single English language translation for use throughout the world is a very daunting task. It is one that the Bishops Conference believes ICEL can achieve, assisted by the guidance of the Holy See in the recent Instruction Liturgiam Authenticam. A copy of the draft (in pdf format) has been published in Australia on ABC's Religion Report site at: www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/relrpt/liturgy.htm