Archbishop Peter Smith of Southwark has said that Pope Francis’s reforms on liturgical translation are “going to upset some people”, but that the bishops welcome the change. At a press conference after the bishops’ annual plenary meeting, Archbishop Smith was asked about the Pope’s motu proprio, Magnum Principium, which gives bishops’ conferences more power to issue their own translations of liturgical texts without Vatican oversight. Archbishop Smith noted that there had been some confusion about the text: one bishop, he said, joked that a better title might have been Magnum Mysterium. But the Congregation for Divine Worship had clarified that it would not apply to texts already published, but only to liturgical books published in the future. Archbishop Smith said that the bishops were still in the process of studying Amoris Laetitia. The Pope’s apostolic exhortation is a “very rich document”, Archbishop Smith said, and “we need to study it fully”. The Pope “has not in any way changed the teaching of the Church”, he said. At the same press conference, Bishop John Sherrington, an auxiliary bishop in Westminster diocese, said that the internet posed “multiple dangers” to children. Reflecting on a Vatican-organised conference on the internet, he said that “the Holy See is really concerned about the present situation”. The internet “has a structure that was developed for adults”, the bishop added, “but children and young people use it extensively, and therefore there are many dangers which others can exploit”.
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Papal reform ‘will upset people’, says archbishop
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