Lead Us Not into Innovation

Rumour has it that Pope Francis is changing the words to the Lord’s Prayer (the Our Father).

These rumours are false, it seems. He has approved a change to the Italian translation. “Lead us not into temptation” becomes something like “do not abandon us to temptation” (“non abbandonarci alla tentazione”).

I believe it would be a mistake to make a similar change to the English translation. But that does not seem to be proposed.

I think it would be a mistake for two reasons. Neither of them on the grounds that the change would be theologically wrong. First, because it would cause the Catholic version of the prayer to diverge from the Protestant version. Introducing some new difference, without a very good reason, is bad for ecumenism. Anyone want to comment on the insertion of the single word “filioque” into the Creed, and the millennium-long intra-Christian strife to which that led? But this concern is surely minimal for Italian. There are not so many Italian-speaking Protestants.

The second reason is pastoral. I recall the terrible disorientation caused by abandoning the Latin mass a couple of generations ago. Some cite this as accounting entirely for the falloff in Mass attendance since. The statistical graph looks like a cliff right when this change was introduced. Nothing to me—to me, the mass is the mass—but it meant a great deal to many. The weekly mass was the one reliable moment of stability for some amidst the modernist chaos. It was as though the ridge-pole was pulled out from their lives. The same would be true for a change to the Lord’s Prayer, something all Catholics have learned by heart. Perhaps in spades.

For about the same reason, I am troubled by reports that Francis wants to allow non-Catholics to take communion. “Let’s not wait for the theologians to come to agreement on the eucharist,” he is reported to have said on a flight home from Romania.

But, as usual, his words seem to have been misquoted and misconstrued. If you include just a little more of the context, what he said sounds very different:

“To walk together: this is already Christian unity, but do not wait for theologians to agree to arrive at communion. Communion happens every day with prayer, with the memory of our martyrs, with works of charity and even of loving one another.”

He was not, it seems, referring to the Eucharist, but to communion in the more general sense.

A good rule of thumb seems to be: never believe anything reported about Pope Francis until you have consulted at least three sources. One of them CNA.