'Children's Eucharistic Prayers' to be removed from Missal

Briefing: good news. Kiddies' versions of the canon of the Mass reinforce the idea that liturgical prayer should be 'accessible' rather than 'sacred'. This theory, which is contrary to the entire liturgical tradition of the Church, has created the banality and tedium which is, among other things, driving young people out of the Church. Anything mysterious, poetic, or profound has been turned into mush - but now it seems the process is being put into reverse, assuming they don't just produce new ones as bad as the old - and that hardly seems likely. The new translations, when they appear, will be another big step forward.

From CFNews: Bishop Arthur Serratelli of Paterson, NJ., chairman of the US Bishops Committee on Divine Worship, has informed the US bishops that the Vatican will remove the Eucharistic Prayers for Children from the Roman Missal.

According to a CWN report Bishop Serratelli 'disclosed the Vatican plans in a letter to the American bishops. He reported that the Congregation for Divine worship, plans 'to publish a separate text at a later time'.

The Eucharistic Prayers for Children, like many other liturgical texts, have been criticised for failing to convey an adequate sense of the sacred in the liturgy. In recent years, the Vatican has made special efforts to recover that sense of the sacred, and to curtail the proliferation of liturgical texts in order to encourage consistency in the liturgy.

'This does not change our present practice', Bishop Serratelli wrote in his September 29 letter. The change will take effect at an unspecified future date. However, the US bishops committee has decided to suspend work on a new translation of the existing Eucharistic prayers for children. In light of the coming change, Bishop Serratelli said that he was removing that item from the agenda for the November meeting of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops'. [The Wanderer]