Electric Prayer

The Liturgy of the Hours, the Mass, and other things.

Archive for October, 2008

Psalm translations for Mass

Posted by universalis on 22 October 2008

I have a question that I’d like to ask the users of Universalis.

Everyone will have noticed that in the Readings at Mass page of Universalis, the scripture readings are shown but the responsorial psalm isn’t. This is for copyright reasons. The owners of the copyright in the psalms used in churches in most of the English-speaking world (the Grail translation) do not allow their copyright material to be reproduced on the Web.

It’s not impossible that attitudes will change one day, but meanwhile there are two things that we might do:

  1. Reproduce our own translation of the relevant psalm (the same version that you see in the Liturgy of the Hours), with a warning that this is for reference only and is not the version that you will hear in church.
  2. Reproduce the Jerusalem Bible translation of the relevant psalm, with the same warning.

The question is: would either of these courses of action be useful to you (“any psalm translation is better than none at all”), or would they be irritating (“better have nothing than have the wrong translation”)? If they would be useful, do you have any preference?

If you are in the USA, please do not respond: the issues are different there, and I hope to write a post about them soon.

Update: Thank you all for your comments. They have been very useful indeed and will help with our future planning.

Posted in Downloadable Universalis, The Universalis site | 40 Comments »