It has been announced by the Catholic Church that, beginning November 27, they will start using a new English translation of the Mass. The first translation, the 1973 English translation, provided a very loose translation and the second was not based on any of the Latin acclamations. The revised translation has, instead, faithful translations of the three Latin acclamations.

Some of the changes to the old version are:

The greeting:

a.  The Lord be with you.

Old response: And with you.

New response: And with your spirit.

The Creed:

a. Old Creed: We believe.

New Creed: I believe.

b. Old: Seen and unseen.

New: Visible and invisible.

c. Old: Born of the Virgin Mary.

New: Was incarnate of the Virgin Mary.

Before Communion:

a. Old: Lord I am not worthy to receive you but only say the word and I shall be healed.

New:  Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.

Also, in the communal confession the words “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault”, were added.  And confessors will now say “for I have greatly sinned” instead of just “I have sinned”.

Something we found interesting about the new translation was that, for the Spanish speaking part of the world (at Eging we have an Argentinian, a Venezuelan and a Puerto Rican), these changes to the English Mass are what we have being saying for years, probably since the Church started using Spanish and not Latin in our countries to perform Mass.  We say: “Y con su espíritu”; “Creo”;  “de todo lo visible y lo invisible”; se encarnó en María, la Virgen”; “por mi culpa, por mi culpa, por mi gran culpa”, etc.

One thing is for sure, English speaking priests better create some workshops for people to memorize this new version or else Christmas Mass won’t be as beautiful this year with half of the people saying the new version and the other, the old one.