The Catholic investigative journalism outfit, The Pillar, just published an excellent, extensive “inside-baseball” interview with Msgr. Andrew Wadsworth, the executive director for the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL), the body responsible for translating many (though not all) liturgical texts from Latin into English.

The main topic was the hymnody for the Liturgy of the Hours and its Second Edition revision, which — as this blog has also documented before — was completely retranslated by ICEL from the corpus of the original 294 Latin hymns included in the current editio typica altera of the Liturgia Horarum. This is in contradistinction to the approach taken by the 1975 edition of the American breviary, which took a very eclectic approach to hymnody in pulling from various Catholic and Protestant, ancient, modern and contemporary sources, many of them not directly related to the particular tradition of divine office hymnody (regardless of their other merits).

Msgr. Wadsworth reiterated that the new hymnal is nearly done and will be released either later this year or early next, and — this is a new and very encouraging element — will contain both a proper Gregorian plainchant tone, and a more modern and often better-known metrical hymn tune for each of the hymns, making it accessible for a much greater variety of people and pastoral purposes.

Also discussed was the importance of printing books that are beautiful and of high quality, not merely functional; yet another very promising glimpse into the considerations that have framed this revision process. I hope it will translate into a real renaissance of quality liturgical printing, as exemplified by early- to mid-20th century high-quality and beautiful breviaries published by once-giants of the industry Benziger Brothers, Desclée, Pustet et al.

A final note: I know this is not within the purview of ICEL (the doxology was translated by the similarly-acronymed ICET, the International Consultation on English Texts), but another outstanding question not addressed in the interview is the final fate of the Glory Be (or Glory To), and whether the “traditional” English form derived from the Book of Common Prayer (“Glory be…world without end”) will be restored and/or provided as an alternative to the modern ICET text (“Glory to…will be forever”) in the revised breviary.

That, and a few other recommendations that might make this very promising revision even better, are discussed in my five recommendations for the new LOTH Second Edition.

Read the full Pillar interview with Msgr. Wadsworth here.

Kudos to all parties involved!