The Traveller's Mass

Introduction

Before that, the Holy Mass used to be celebrated only in Latin, the Roman Catholic Church's official language. This goes along with the interpretation (again, according to the Vatican Council II) that the Holy Mass is actually celebrated by the whole assembly of the faithful, not just by the priest or bishop, who properly "presides" the Mass. Therefore, it was natural to allow that the sacred office of the Mass was performed in the same language spoken by the faithful, namely, the modern language of that particular country and time, as opposed to Latin.

This situation may of course cause problems to a traveller, who happens to visit a foreign country, would like to attend the Mass there, but doesn't know the local language. The Holy Mass can be celebrated in commonly known languages (say, the modern koin? viz. English) in cathedrals or other major churches, but this may apply only to important centres, and their schedule may require additional travelling, if you are living far from there.

I was once told of a "traveller's dispensation", namely the permission not to attend the Holy Mass during a journey. I could not verify the existence of such a dispensation, but I could personally experience the need of regularly attending the Holy Mass while travelling, especially for prolonged stays abroad (say, weeks or months).

You can certainly follow the Liturgy of the Word (the two Readings, the Responsorial Psalm, and the Gospel) by equipping yourself with a missal in your own language (or bringing copies of the relevant pages for the few Sundays you plan to stay abroad). The rest of the service can be followed "by heart", i.e. remembering the various parts of the Mass by memory, and answering to the priest accordingly.

However, I found that having a two-columns version of the Order of the Mass (i.e., the whole text of the liturgy, perhaps excluding the readings), in both the local and your own language, can help you considerably. Not only it helps you not feeling "dull", perhaps answering mechanically to the service as recited by the priest, as soon as you manage to "catch the rythm of it". But it can eventually help you integrating in the local community, have a true community worship, and be able to repeat to yourself the words of Jesus: For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them (Mt 18:20).

The project

In 2005, which had been proclaimed the Year of the Eucharisty by the late Holy Father John Paul II, I undertook a project I initiated then, namely having two-columns versions of the Roman Catholic Holy Mass in as many languages as possible.

I started with the few languages I can manage (Italian, English, Spanish, Latin), and with Norwegian, of course (although I can't speak it). Then I added all those in which I could find an official version of the Order of the Mass on the Internet.

Currently supported languages are:



Albanian (al)

Croatian (hr)

Czech (cz)

Dutch (nl)

English (2011 version) (en2)

English (old version) (en)

Finnish (fi)

French (fr)

German (de)

Greek (modern Greek) (gr)

Italian (it)

Latin (la)

Lithuanian (lt)

Norwegian (no)

Polish (pl)

Portuguese (pt)

Romanian (ro)

Slovenian (si)

Spanish (es)

Swedish (sv)

Tagalog (Philippine) (tl)

Notably, the source of some of them is precisely the website of Catholic Church of Norway! A few more useful links and resources are listed below.

The result is a collection of self-contained, two-columns versions of the Order of the Mass in any pair of the above languages, which I hereby offer to the perusal of the occasional traveller (and keep here for my own reference), in PDF format. Here is the table of the available files:

Only the main passages are reported, with the aim of helping the traveller, as is in the scopes of this resource, with a simple and self-contained document. Some passages or headings are missing in certain languages, due to the lack of information in the public domain. Corrections, integrations and suggestions are certainly more than welcome.

Concerning the Eucharistic Prayer and the Preface, only the second (out of several, four being the main ones) is given (whenever available). Future versions may include other Eucharistic Prayers. I have also omitted other, less frequent, variants.

The files are written in LaTeX, using the ledpar package, which enables to have several pairs of text divided in small paragraphs or even lines, aligned in pairs in two-columns format, so to help the reader following the same text in the two languages. The final output has been converted into PDF, which can be viewed and printed with several free programs, even on a PDA (Get Adobe Acrobat Reader). Although there exists an official subdivision of the order of the mass (poem-wise, thus recommending "pauses" where appropriate to the priest or to the reader), I am adopting a somewhat arbitrary subdivision, in order to have a more compact text (the subdivision is finer for the passages which have to be read by the faithful or the assembly). A small cross reminds the reader of cross-signing, kneeling, etc, as appropriate.

How to contribute

An even simpler, but still most appreciated, way to contribute is of course to check for typos or missing items in the versions already available. Some of the mistakes should be ascribed to me, others to the available sources, which often make use of OCR scanned texts, and therefore already contain typos which is difficult for me to check, when in languages I don't know.

Note on ASCII vs LaTeX: I am using

\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc} \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}