Catholics Barred from Saying "Yahweh"

[Mike Ellis]

Thought this was an interesting development. It should spur much debate across the land in the old "thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain" vein, a commandment vastly misinterpreted by a large number of Gentiles who do not understand its meaning in Judaism, nor the fact that it is not a commandment for Gentiles.

I suspect it is much ado about nothing, because God in His omniscience very certainly knows when you are talking about Him, no matter what name you use.

I also hope that no one points out that Orthodox Jews find worship of Jesus Christ even more objectionable than Gentiles using God's name, to the point they forbid mention of Jesus and strongly object to the display of crosses etc. If the Catholic religion must be retooled to be sensitive to the concerns of other religions like Judaism and Islam, the priests and the faithful aren't going to have much left to talk about...

CNS STORY: No 'Yahweh' in songs, prayers at Catholic Masses, Vatican rules

No 'Yahweh' in songs, prayers at Catholic Masses, Vatican rules
By Nancy Frazier O'Brien
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- In the not-too-distant future, songs such as "You Are Near," "I Will Bless Yahweh" and "Rise, O Yahweh" will no longer be part of the Catholic worship experience in the United States.

At the very least, the songs will be edited to remove the word "Yahweh" -- a name of God that the Vatican has ruled must not "be used or pronounced" in songs and prayers during Catholic Masses.

Bishop Arthur J. Serratelli of Paterson, N.J., chairman of the U.S. bishops' Committee on Divine Worship, announced the new Vatican "directives on the use of 'the name of God' in the sacred liturgy" in an Aug. 8 letter to his fellow bishops.

(snip)

At Chicago-based GIA Publications, another major Catholic publisher of hymnals, no major revisions will be necessary, because of the company's longtime editorial policy against use of the word "Yahweh."

Kelly Dobbs-Mickus, senior editor at GIA Publications, told CNS Aug. 11 that the policy, which dates to 1986, was based not on Vatican directives but on sensitivity to concerns among observant Jews about pronouncing the name of God. As an example, she cited Heinrich Schutz's "Thanks Be to Yahweh," which appears in a GIA hymnal under the title "Thanks Be to God."

(snip)

The two Vatican officials noted that "Liturgiam Authenticam," the congregation's 2001 document on liturgical translations, stated that "the name of almighty God expressed by the Hebrew Tetragrammaton and rendered in Latin by the word 'Dominus,' is to be rendered into any given vernacular by a word equivalent in meaning."

"Notwithstanding such a clear norm, in recent years the practice has crept in of pronouncing the God of Israel's proper name," the letter said. "The practice of vocalizing it is met with both in the reading of biblical texts taken from the Lectionary as well as in prayers and hymns, and it occurs in diverse written and spoken forms," including Yahweh, Jahweh and Yehovah.