Now that the new translation of the Mass is a matter, not of asking “why do we need it”? – (a question which has produced over the last few years a multiplicity of articles comparing the old and new translations) – but of getting on with the practical business of using the new texts, we find ourselves in an entirely new situation. The explications, comparing old and new, are mostly over now. If, for the sake of interest, you want a good example, have a look at this article from 2010 by the excellent Bishop Peter Elliott, entitled “Why we need the new translation of the Mass”. But really, all that’s done with now. The old translation is beginning to fade in our memories; remembering to say “And with your spirit” is getting to be second nature (for my American readers, who only changed over at the beginning of Advent, perhaps I need to say that we in England have now been using the new translation for a couple of months). The actual launch of the new Mass in our parishes, with the people at first using cards giving just the people’s parts, and then the new Mass booklets, followed by the arrival of the new weekly missal and soon of the big heavy daily missal, has brought a situation in which it is now up to us all to benefit as best we can from the undoubted riches and wider spiritual prospects of the new liturgical dispensation. In all this, the Catholic Truth Society is demonstrating yet again how vital it is to the maintenance of the faith in this country. It isn’t just that without it we wouldn’t have the new liturgical books we now need: I suppose some other way would have been found of getting the texts to the parishes. Someone else would produce altar missals and people’s missals and Mass booklets of a sort. But I very much doubt whether the whole thing would have been pulled off remotely as well and as stylishly as it has. We take the CTS for granted; we should recognise it more than we do for what it is: one of the great treasures of the English Church. The CTS hasn’t just produced Mass booklets and the Sunday Missal (of which more presently), but a series of their explanatory booklets on the Mass, timed to service the introduction of the new translation. The most important of these are “Understanding the Roman Missal” by Dom Cuthbert Johnson OSB, and (something of a coup) a “Companion to the Order of Mass” by Mgr Bruce Harbert, former executive director of ICEL, whose appointment as such was an unmistakable sign that this time Rome meant business, and that ICEL was about to change radically from being a staunch defender of the old philosophy of liturgical translation as reductionist paraphrase to the new one of faithfulness – linguistic and doctrinal – to the Latin texts. As editor of the Catholic Herald, I published a splendidly combative article by him after the publication by John Paul II of Liturgiam Authenticam, in which the late Holy Father insisted (§4) that