Greg Daly
Fr Martin Browne OSB (third from left). Claims that Pope Francis has changed the Lord’s Prayer are overblown, a leading Irish ecumenist has said.
“I think there’s an element of fake news surrounding the story of the Our Father in the Italian Missal,” Fr Martin Browne told The Irish Catholic. “You’d think from some of the headlines that Pope Francis had wielded his full papal powers to order that the last line of the prayer be changed.”
The reality, the Benedictine monk said, is far more ordinary, arising as part of the translation of the latest version of the Missal into Italian.
“It’s not that the Pope arbitrarily ordered the prayer to be edited. The Holy See simply confirmed what the Italian bishops had produced,” he said, with the general assembly of Italy’s bishops having decided last November to translate the penultimate line of Our Father as ‘non abbandonarci alla tentazione’ – ‘do not abandon us to temptation’.
Decision
The Italian decision to change the translation of the line conventionally rendered in English as “lead us not into temptation” follows similar decisions by the Spanish-, Portuguese- and French-speaking bishops.
“I see the point of what they have done,” continued Fr Browne, who is a member of an international group tasked with preparing texts for the Week of Prayer for Christianity Unity. “God isn’t a trickster who causes us to sin, and so translating the words so that the prayer doesn’t give that impression makes sense.”
Although Bishop Francis Duffy of Ardagh and Clonmacnois, who chairs the Irish bishops’ Council for Liturgy, has said the English-language bishops will “give close attention to the reported change to the Lord’s Prayer”, Fr Browne believes Ireland’s bishops should steer clear of following the Italian example.
“The Our Father has a life outside the Mass that no other liturgical text does,” he said. “When the Missal was first translated into English, the translators rightly decided not to try to force new words on worshippers because the older words were in the marrow of their bones.”
Expressing concerns about damage to a prayer-language shared with other English-speaking Christians, Fr Browne said the Lord’s Prayer is the one thing almost all Christians can say together.
“I think it would be a disaster if English-speaking Catholics changed the text of this foundational prayer, thus erecting a barrier against praying together with our brothers and sisters of other traditions,” he said.