Pope gives his blessing to change in Lord’s Prayer, by Tom Kington.

If you find yourself surrounded by temptation, don’t blame it on God. That was the message from the Pope as he called for the Lord’s Prayer to be altered to shift responsibility for our sins and vices on to the Devil.

The Lord’s Prayer is considered by the Catholic church to be a perfect summary of the gospels. The Pope said that the line asking God to “lead us not into temptation”, or in Italian, non indurci in tentazione, had been translated badly, however.

It should read “don’t let me fall into temptation”, he said, as this would reflect the belief that a sinner finds their own way to temptation. The Pope said: “It’s not a good translation . . . I am the one who falls. It’s not him pushing me into temptation to then see how I have fallen. A father doesn’t do that, a father helps you to get up immediately.” He added: “It’s Satan who leads us into temptation, that’s his department.” …

The Temptation of Christ by the Devil – Barrias, France 1860.

The dispute revolves around how to translate “eisenenkês,” the Greek used in the original New Testament…

The New Testament was written in contemporary Greek by a number of authors between AD50 and AD100, before all 27 books were brought together in AD398, he said. A Latin translation of the Bible by St Jerome in the 4th century, which was adopted by the Catholic church, keeps the literal meaning, using the Latin inducere which means “bring in”.

Always seemed clear enough to me.

A reader writes:

The Pope is spending time worrying about possibly the least offensive, the least significant phrase in the Lord’s Prayer, while the Catholic monks are running riot at Downside school (another sexual abuse story).

It is not hard to see why attendances have fallen, and this soft, leftist Pope is worrying about the most subtle of grammatical implications!

hat-tip Charles of Melbourne