The wording of ‘Our Father’ is to be updated.
Known as ‘The Lord’s Prayer’, it is central in the Catholic mass and is one of the first prayers Catholic children are taught.
The change was approved by Pope Francis this week after he previously objected to a line in the prayer, reports RTÉ News.
The pontiff said he disliked the phrase “lead us not in to temptation”, saying it was a mistranslation from the original Greek version of the prayer.
He believes that it implies that it is God and not Satan who leads people astray.
“I am the one who falls; it’s not him pushing me into temptation to then see how I have fallen,” he said on Italy’s TV2000 in 2017.
“A father doesn’t do that, a father helps you to get up immediately. It’s Satan who leads us into temptation, that’s his department.”
The line will be changed to “do not let us fall into temptation” following the Pope’s sign-off on it.
The Italian version of the prayer has been updated but it’s not known when the English version will be.
Theologian Siobhan Garrigan has explained the move, saying that the Pope believes the current version of the prayer could be misinterpreted.
Professor Garrigan, Loyola Professor of Theology at Trinity College Dublin, told RTÉ Radio One’s News At One that Francis does not want modern Catholics to see God as “spiteful” or as “not on your side”.
She added that there is also a debate going on in the Vatican about the use of the word ‘father’ in the prayer, saying that here was concern about emphasising God as a patriarchal figure.
