The Roman Missal Urdu Translation Committee

Fr Robert McCulloch (right) with the Urdu translation committee in Pakistan - Photo: Fr Robert McCulloch

The Roman Missal Urdu Translation Committee has been working since the Pakistan Conference of Catholic Bishops set it up in June 2015. Archbishop Benny Travas of Karachi chairs the committee whose working members are:

Columban Fr Robert McCulloch SLD, Consultor at the Dicastery for Sacred Liturgy and Discipline of the Sacraments, and the committee’s coordinator,

Mr Emmanuel Neno, MA Religious Studies Fordham (Executive Secretary of the National Commission for Catechetics),

Fr Almas Daniel STL Liturgy (Rector of St Francis Xavier Major Seminary Lahore),

Fr Gulshan Barkat OMI STL Church History (Superior of the OMI Theological Scholasticate Karachi and Church History Professor NCIT Karachi),

Fr Maris Javed OP JCL (Canon Law Professor NCIT Karachi),

Fr Kamran Daniel STL Liturgy (Secretary of the National Liturgical Commission and Liturgy Professor NCIT Karachi),

Fr Jamshed Albert OP STD Moral Theology until his recent appointment as general councillor to the Dominican Master General. 

Despite the work being delayed for two years owing to COVID-19 and the Translation Committee being able to meet only twice a year, the Proper of the Seasons, the Ordo Missae, and all the supplementary Prefaces have been translated. A draft text of the translation of the General Introduction has been completed. Work began on the Proper of the Saints in January 2023.

Fr Liberius Pieterse OFM and a few collaborators made the first translation of the missal. It was printed in 1974, just after the unexpected death of Fr Liberius, and it has remained in use ever since. When the printed copies of the 1974 translation were finished, an expensive and unsatisfactory attempt was made to upgrade it without any reference to the editio typica (the definitive Latin language edition).

The Roman Missal Urdu Translation Committee is using much of Fr Liberius’s outstanding vocabulary from the 1974 translation. However, it is making a direct translation from the Latin text of the editio typica tertia, which is the third typical edition of the Roman missal Introduced in 2002. This avoids the very long and often “over-translated” content of the 1974 translation and also of the present English translation.

Latin and the Sanskritic languages, including Urdu, share a common linguistic root. So Urdu has the exact equivalent of Latin ablative absolute and gerundive grammatical structures, although much of the Urdu vocabulary comes from Persian, Arabic, and Hindi languages. This enables a short, exact, and simple translation of the Latin original that is not drowned in words. A lot of the necessary new vocabulary needed for the present translation has already been provided from the Urdu translation of the rites for the celebration of the sacraments completed and approved in 1999–2001 and the Urdu translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church completed and approved in 2014. Two members of the Roman Missal Urdu Translation Committee attended the three-month intensive Latin course for liturgical translators at the Pontifical Liturgical Institute Rome from May to July 2019.

The translation work, which will be completed in 2024, is being generously funded by Aid to the Church in Need.

Columban Fr Robert McCulloch is Rector of Collegio San Colombano in Rome