Pope Francis thinks the Lord’s Prayer needs rewording and wants a certain phrase adjusted in the most widely known Christian prayer, the “Our Father.”
The Catholic leader is concerned with the phrase “lead us not into temptation,” which he feels is misleading, Fox News reported.
“That is not a good translation, because it speaks of a God who induces temptation,” he said in a television interview on Wednesday, The Daily Mail reported.
Francis referred to the Catholic Church in France which addressed the issue by altering the phrase to “do not let us fall into temptation,” making humans the ones at fault.
“It is not him [God] who throws me into temptation and then watches how I fall… God helps us get up,” Francis said, per RT. “It’s Satan who leads you into temptation.”
The French Catholic Church officially adopted the newly translated version of “Our Father” on Dec. 3 and Francis is hoping that the rest of the world could follow suit, Fox News noted.
Austen Ivereigh, the pope’s biographer, told The Guardian he was not aware of any plans to change the translation in the English-speaking world but could “certainly see the logic of doing so.”
“It is not God who tempts us into sin but the enemy of human nature,” he said.
“But tradition and familiarity are also important factors in weighing up any decision to modify a translation.”
Meanwhile the Rev Ian Paul, an Anglican theologian, told The Guardian that the pope’s comments could make traditionalists nervous.
“In terms of church culture, people learn this prayer by heart as children,” he said. “If you tweak the translation, you risk disrupting the pattern of communal prayer. You fiddle with it at your peril.”
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