Vatican will drop Eucharistic Prayers for Children

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Vatican will drop Eucharistic Prayers for Children

Washington, Oct. 3, 2008 (CWNews.com) - The Vatican plans to remove the Eucharistic Prayers for Children from the authorized prayers of the Roman Missal.

Bishop Arthur Serratelli of Paterson, New Jersey, the chairman of the US bishops' liturgy committee, has 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 criticized 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.