Another crack in the Church for the translation of the Lord's Prayer

From his beginnings as president of San Pedro, Francisco proposed to modify this version of the Lord's Prayer and to unify it in the same sense, which he has in Spanish and French, in all languages. And this is what has just been approved by the General Assembly of the Episcopal Conference and will appear in the third edition of Roman Messale, the liturgical book that contains the official texts of the Mbad in the Catholic Church.

Francisco is not the first pope to change the traditional translation of the Our Father. John Paul II had asked to unify, in different languages, the phrase that says "forgive us our trespbades as we forgive those who offend us" (when it was said before "forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors") ; nevertheless, the change introduced today will encounter much more resistance, for theological reasons (and, since we are political), in English Catholicism.

The clergy and biblical scholars have already expressed their reservations about the following change: "Let us not be deceived." Two years ago, when Francis declared that "it is we who fall into temptation and not God who misleads us," Meredith Warren, a specialist in religious studies at the University of Sheffield, said : "What the pope wants is to exempt God from this responsibility, but by doing so, not only ignores many of the biblical examples in which God collaborates with the devil to tempt man, and even his own Son, but the new version goes against the literal meaning of the word gospel texts in Greek.

This is the point where it will surely be discussed more, because the Latin version, the one that has been prayed for centuries before the Church begins to celebrate Mbad in the Romance languages, also coincides with the English version: "and Do not induce us temptation. And this comes from a complicated Greek verb, "eifero", which can be understood in both forms. The pope only understands one: "The original Greek expression," he said, "is difficult to accurately translate, and all modern translations are flawed. there is one thing we can be sure of is that, no matter how the text is understood, we must exclude God from the mission of tempting man. "

However, even in this area, English-speaking Catholics do not agree to use grammar to confront the Argentine pope. The Church of England and Wales stated that she did not intend to immediately change the text of the prayer. "The Italians have already changed the Our Father at the request of the Pontiff, but in our church, we do not believe that we will do it immediately," said a spokesman. Anglicans have been more intransigent: prayer is accepted in ancient and contemporary forms, but in both cases, it says "do not induce us into temptation". If the Church, if punished in recent years by so many scandals and confrontations, needed another, it now has that of translators.