The Vatican’s Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments gave its seal of approval on a new Lectionary proposed by the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales in July of last year.
Published by the Catholic Truth Society
(CTS), changes to the new lectionary, which includes the scripture
readings for Mass and the sacraments, will see the English Standard
Version: Catholic Edition (ESV-CE) of the Bible and the Abbey Psalter
replacing the Jerusalem Bible with the Grail Psalms.
Other changes, according to Liturgy Office, will include the provision for Saints who have been inserted into the Universal Calendar since the last Lectionary was published in 1981. There will also be the readings for the National Calendars. In addition, some of the revised liturgical rites, such as Marriage, have additional readings.
The Lectionary is changing as part of the continuing process of revising liturgical translations, notes CTS. The process began with the Roman Missal in 2011 and has continued to work through all the other liturgical rites.
The
changes are intended to make the biblical translations more faithful to
the original languages, using better and more up-to-date biblical
scholarship and to use a text which is “more proclaimable”, CTS says.
The new Lectionary will come into force on the first Sunday of Advent 2024. Parishes will not be able to keep using the old Lectionary and will need to change over to the new one by 1 December 2024.
The Lectionary will have a fully up-to-date Proper of Saints, including the new universal and national feasts that have been instituted since the publication of the last Lectionary, and is currently set to consist of 4 volumes:
Sundays, Solemnities, Feasts of the Lord.
Weekdays: Advent, Christmas, Ordinary Time (weeks 1-9), Lent, Easter. Proper of Saints: December – May, Commons.
Weekdays: Ordinary Time (6-34). Proper of Saints: June – November, Commons.
Ritual Masses, Masses for Various Needs and Occasions, Votive Masses, Masses for the Dead.
There will be three different sizes of the Lectionary: a full-size Ambo edition (the same size as the Altar Missal), a smaller chapel edition (the same size as the Chapel Missal), and a study edition for liturgy preparation (the same size as the Study Missal).
The new Lectionary will soon be available in the next few weeks for pre-ordering (on the CTS website it is possible to sign up to be notified
when the Lectionary is available to pre-order) and is due to be in
stock in October 2024. A full set is likely to cost several hundred
pounds, notes CTS.
To accompany the roll out of the new
Lectionary, CTS and other publishers will be producing people’s Missals
in due course including Sunday, Weekday and Daily Missals.