The decree Prece eucharistica of 23rd May ushers in what will be the most striking and the most effective of all the changes in the Mass. The recital out loud and in the vernacular of the canon of the Mass has made many aware of the defects and poverty of this ancient Roman prayer. The latest reform makes good some of these defects of the Roman formula by adding eight new prefaces to the existing collection in the missal: two of these are for Advent, one for the Sundays in Lent, two for Sundays throughout the year to avoid the repetition of the special preface for the feast of the Trinity, a new preface of the Blessed Sacrament and two new common prefaces. All these will help to add variety and to restore the element of thanksgiving for God’s wonderful works, which should be the essence of every eucharistic prayer, but which is so lacking at present.

A more radical remedy, however, is the promulgation of three completely new eucharistic prayers which may entirely replace the Roman canon except on certain occasions. Two of these new prayers may be combined with the variable prefaces according to the season and thus the central prayer of the Mass will once again take on some of the variety it had in the early centuries of the Church and which is still maintained to a certain extent by the Eastern Churches.

The flock will safely pick its way across the stony hills to patches of fresh pasture, for the shepherd is there and, it is hoped, his trusty dogs, yet the hyaenas can be heard, alike from the Osservatore Romano and the Guardian, calling from one side that we should greet Humanae Vitae with joyful submissiveness and from the other that we are damned if we do: it is hard to tell which howls are the more remote. (Hyaenas, of course, have their merits; they are the ancestors of animals we domesticate and grow fond of, terriers, spaniels, and so forth.) These interim notes, written in mid-September when the pastoral instruction of the English Bishops is still to come, offer nothing fresh; they follow the marks in the old ordnance maps published ever since moral theology was established as a scientific discipline about seven centuries ago. They will indicate, first, the place of abstraction in moral teaching; second, the intervention there of ecclesiastical authority; third, the argumentation offered to support a decision; fourth, its consequent appeal to natural law; fifth, the varieties of assent. For convenience these five headings are expanded into five sections.