Posted on by Jeffrey Tucker

The Grail Psalter’s Surprise Showing

Last February (it seems like years ago), InsideCatholic ran my article called Pay to Pray: The Church’s Simony Problem. Based on years of thought and research, I took aim at the practice of using civil law to maintain legal exclusivity to liturgical texts and charge for their use. It works like a tax for evangelization. The practice not only contradicts Christian experience and ethics, I argued; it might be classified as a form of simony.

A primary example concerns the secret dealings over the Revised Grail Psalter. Relatively few people have actually seen this book; it has not been published. But if it so happened to land in my hands and I posted it on this blog, I would be hearing from the GIA – the agent that manages international rights on this book – in about 20 minutes. If I didn’t take it down, I would hear from lawyers. If I didn’t respond after that, I would probably face a DMCA attack from the government. Regardless of the merits of the book, I find it deeply regrettable that the U.S. Bishops seemed to have embraced it for liturgical use.

I’ve written many articles on this entire topic, but I’ve dropped the topic recently because it would appear that the Grail will not be introduced for the Responsorial Psalm text in the Roman Rite anytime within the next decade.

Imagine my surprise when yesterday, composer Paul Innwood notes in a comment box that the Leaked Missal, or what is being called the Moroney Missal, seems to have relied on the Revised Grail for the re-rendering of the approved Missal proper texts submitted to Rome. To what extent we cannot know because we do not have a copy of the Revised Grail; it has not yet leaked. Thanks to other internet leaks, however, we do have a copy of the Gray Book submitted by the conferences and the leaked Missal, with its legendary 10,000 plus changes, from the CDW, and it is clear that the texts of the propers are very different. I had assumed that it was some committee doing what committees do, which is mostly make a mess of things, but perhaps there was a purpose for the changes after all.

In other words, the Revised Grail seems to have made an early appearance in the newly translated Missal, the one we will be using one year from now. What this implies about royalties, copyrights, permissions, or other dealings between interested parties is pure speculation at this point. But we can be sure that such speculations are going to be rampant in the coming weeks, and the search for more evidence will continue.

7 Replies to “The Grail Psalter’s Surprise Showing”

  1. So, if we only set the Grail that's in the Missal, are royalties due to ICEL, GIA, Vox Clara, all of the above or none of the above?

    In the end, I still read the GIA Revised Grail policy online as indicating anything using Grail online may be distributed freely, as long as the source is cited.

  2. There is no Grail copyright in the leaked Missal. That would have contradicted Liturgiam's mandate that "The rights of publication and the copyright for all translations of liturgical books, or at least the rights in civil law necessary for exercising complete liberty in publishing or correcting texts, is to remain with the Conferences of Bishops or their national liturgical Commissions."

    By the way, this sentence reveals fantastic confusions about the purpose of copyright. It is not to necessary for liberty to publish. Copyright establishes monopoly control in order to violate the liberty of others and extract revenue. This is the history and purpose of copyright.

  3. You may want to know that the USCCB has been quietly revisiting a revised Lectionary for a few years now. I believe they have reviewed two or three parts of six by now. My guess is that the new Lectionary will be available by the middle of the decade.

    There has also been lots of controversy about the 341 changes to the Grail, and Cardinal George's acquiescence to said changes after he issued a protest to the CDWDS. Was the English MR3 changed to conform to the Grail, or was it the other way around?

  4. This poses an interesting question. If a "public domain" text in Latin is translated, and that translation is under copyright, than does that exclude anyone else from simply translating the text the same way? What if it is simply the "correct" translation? How is this different from copyrighting the Latin text, or any public domain text for that matter? Is it possible that the purpose of what we are seeing is to create the very situation that points out the ludicrous nature of copyright when applied to liturgical texts?

  5. Sources from the USCCB and other Catholic publications have agreed with your statement: the Revised Grail may not appear in our Catholic Lectionaries for decades. However, it is supposed to be released around Christmas time, 2011.

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