The Lords Prayer has been in the world of Christianity for eternity, taught by Jesus of Nazareth to his followers.
In 2017, a popular Catholic channel quoted the Pope saying “Do not let me fall into temptation because it is I who fall, it is not God who throws me into temptation and then sees how I fell,” frustrated that the line “do not lead us into temptations” implies that God actually leads people into temptation.
“A father doesn’t do that, a father helps you to get up immediately. It’s Satan who leads us into temptation, that’s his department,” he explained.
Now Pope Francis has risked the wrath of traditionalists by approving a change to the wording of the Lord’s Prayer. Instead of saying “lead us not into temptation”, it will say “do not let us fall into temptation”.
The new wording was approved by the general assembly of the Episcopal Conference of Italy last month. It will appear in the third edition of the Messale Romano, the liturgical book that contains the guiding texts for mass in the Roman Catholic church.
However, some folks were not pleased by the Pope trying to make God all righteous and have expressed concern about changes to the wording.
“This new version of the Lord’s Prayer tries to avoid implying that God has some hand in evil. But in doing so the pope not only overlooks the many biblical examples where God works with the devil to tempt his followers and even his own son. The new version actually goes against the plain meaning of the Greek of the gospel text,” said one lecturer in biblical and religious studies at Sheffield University.
“Pope Francis has made a habit of saying things that throw people into confusion, and this is one of them. It just makes you wonder, where does it stop, what’s up for grabs? It’s a cumulative unease,” the editor of Catholic World News, a conservative website mentioned.
