The bishops’
conference of England and Wales has given the go-ahead for three
publishers to produce Sunday missals in time for Advent, it emerged this
week.
The missals, containing the new translation of the Mass,
will be produced by HarperCollins, Redemptorist Publications and the
Catholic Truth Society.
They will cost between £16.99 and about £25.
St Paul’s
Publishing will be producing its annual paperback missal for just £6.
It will provide the readings from Advent this year until the end of
2012.
It is understood that Martin Foster, acting secretary of the
Liturgy Office, rejected at least one other publisher who applied for
the contract.
Mr Foster said submissions were judged according to
the “quality of design and presentation, understanding of liturgical
text and if they were offering anything unique”.
He said: “The publishers who were chosen fulfilled these criteria better than those who did not.”
Catholic Blind Services (CBS), meanwhile, has announced it is producing missals in large print formats and in Braille.
Seán
O’Donnell, the CBS director, said volunteers were under “a great deal
of pressure” to finish everything in time.
He said: “There are no paid
staff, so everything is done voluntarily and without any funding. If we
had been given the texts earlier we would not be under so much
pressure.”
HarperCollins, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, has built on its previous Sunday missal
by updating its design, strengthening its binding and adding prayers,
readings and illustrations. Its low-cost edition will be £16.99.
Dr
Robin Gibbons, the missal’s editor and a professor at Oxford, said
extra content would be added, mainly from Church documents, to “help
people understand what the Mass is about and how it fits into the vision
of the Church’s year”.
The illustrations, he said, would be in a
Romanesque style – that is, from about 1000 to 1200 AD.
The Redemptorist Sunday missal,
which costs £19.95, will contain prayers and an illustrated Stations of
the Cross by Redemptorist founder St Alphonsus Liguori.
The CTS Sunday missal, meanwhile, will offer the Latin text of the Mass in a separate column alongside the new English translation.
It will include full-colour illustrations taken from a 12th-century manuscript, the Ingeborg Psalter, which also feature in the altar missals.
CTS
will also be publishing a daily missal, including both Sunday and
weekday readings, for about £45.
HarperCollins will be publishing three
editions of its weekday missal, costing between £30 and £40.