New and Revised Mass Settings from GIA!

  

Implementation Date Set

The moment we have been waiting for, with emotions ranging from anxiety to excited anticipation, has arrived. This morning Cardinal Francis George, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, announced that the final text of the new Roman Missal has been received. The first use of the new texts will be on the First Sunday of Advent, November 27, 2011. There are some changes in this final version; perhaps most notably, the memorial acclamation “Christ has died” was not approved as one of the American adaptations. Check the Roman Missal website (www.usccb.org/romanmissal) for the final text.

The job of getting the final texts to the publishers is in the hands of the International Commission of English in the Liturgy and the Secretariat of Divine Worship; this will likely take weeks. A bit of an aside: I would like to express gratitude to the staffs of the Secretariat and of ICEL, who—in addition to handling all of the work involved with the new translation—have been very communicative with publishers and understanding of our situations.

At GIA, we have been working hard with composers to produce a wonderful variety of new and revised mass settings. You can view PDFs and listen to MP3s here.www.giamusic.com/sacred_music/new_mass_settings.cfm Today’s news means that we can move on from the holding pattern we have been in for several months and concentrate on getting ready for implementation.

For us at GIA that means consulting the final text (I keep checking the Roman Missal website!) and then going through each mass setting to see what might need to be altered. We’ll work with the composers on those alterations, and we’ll need to communicate them to the Secretariat of Divine Worship. Then we’ll continue the work of getting the masses into their final form—dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s for the individual editions of each mass—and then we can go to press.

During the past several weeks, clinicians have been going to various cities to present GIA’s “And with Your Spirit” sessions. These sessions provided an opportunity for all participants to become more familiar with the new texts, and to sing through samples of most of GIA’s new and revised settings. The sessions attracted large numbers, who greeted the music with gratifying enthusiasm.

There is no shortage of opportunities to attend sessions on the third edition of the Roman Missal. Lots of publishers (GIA, OCP, WLP, Liturgical Press, LTP, and others) and organizations like NPM, FDLC, and the USCCB itself are presenting workshops in many locations around the country, and hosting webinars, in addition to producing printed and recorded materials. Diocesan worship offices are doing their share to educate and assist the members of their individual dioceses.

It is my hope that the work of all these organizations—GIA’s small part in particular—will help facilitate a successful implementation. May our work bear much fruit, and may we come to know and love all of the best qualities of the Roman Missal, Third Edition.

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