By Agencies
The Pope’s suggestion to amend the Lord’s Prayer is moving forward at the Vatican as Italian bishops consider changing the line, ‘lead us not into temptation’.
Pope Francis has reportedly proposed switching out the age-old line with ‘abandon us not when in temptation’ after saying last year that the current version was ‘not a good translation’.
French Catholics have already been using a revised version of the Notre Père since last year, and the current amendment on the table only applies to the Italian translation.
Responding to the proposed changes on Fox News, Samaritan’s Purse President Franklin Graham explained why he would not use the updated verbiage in his own prayers.
He said it was possible that there was an error in the original translation of the Lord’s Prayer but urged caution in introducing any formal changes.
‘I’m not Catholic but … there possibly could be a translation error with that one word, I don’t know,’ he said.
‘I’m still going to say it the way I memorised it as a boy, that my mother taught me, but the Pope, he might have a point here, so we’ll see.’
He continued: ‘You have to be very careful when you change the Word of God. We do recognise that there are translation errors and there’s a lot of translations out there in the English language and some vary a little bit, but you have to be very, very careful and I know that the Catholics have been very careful as they’ve studied this for 16 years and they’re just not doing this haphazardly, they’ve put a lot of thought and a lot of study into it, so it is an interesting point.’
The Pope highlighted a translation issue in the Lord’s prayer when petitioning for the change in wording last year insisting that God does not lead people into temptation.
“A father doesn’t do that, a father helps you to get up immediately,” Francis said in an Italian television interview, according to The Washington Times. “It’s Satan who leads us into temptation, that’s his department.”
Graham was then asked by the Fox news host if it was right to say that God may allow us to be tempted but it is Satan who leads us into temptation.
He replied, ‘Well, that would be my view, no question, and I think we do pray that the Lord would protect us from temptation and that we would not be led in temptation.’
