Do you suppose this will catch on?

Could change some of that happy clappy music protestants love. I saw this item at Modern Reformation, a conservative Presbyterian publicantion.

VATICAN CITY (RNS) Catholics at worship should neither sing nor pronounce the name of God as "Yahweh," the Vatican has said, citing the authority of both Jewish and Christian practice.

The instruction came in a June 29 letter to Catholic bishops conferences around the world from the Vatican's top liturgical body, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments, by an explicit "directive" of Pope Benedict XVI.

"In recent years the practice has crept in of pronouncing the God of Israel's proper name," the letter noted, referring to the four-consonant Hebrew "Tetragrammaton," YHWH. That name is commonly pronounced as "Yahweh," though other versions include "Jaweh" and "Yehovah." But such pronunciation violates long-standing Jewish tradition, the Vatican reminded bishops.

"As an expression of the infinite greatness and majesty of God, (the name) was held to be unpronounceable and hence was replaced during the reading of sacred Scripture by means of the use of an alternate name: `Adonai,' which means `Lord,'" the Congregation said.

That practice continued with Christianity, the letter explained, recalling the "church's tradition, from the beginning, that the sacred Tetragrammaton was never pronounced in the Christian context nor translated into any of the languages into which the Bible was translated."

Invoking a Vatican document from 2001, the Congregation reminded bishops that the name "Yahweh" in Catholic worship should be replaced by the Latin "Dominus" (Lord) or a word "equivalent in meaning" in the local language.

Why Lutherans can't sing

together. These days we're having a musical style problem--our church (UALC) has four--but 200 years ago American Lutherans weren't even speaking the same language. Some Lutheran immigrants didn't have an English hymnal until the late 19th or early 20th century. Here's a very interesting history by Gracia Grindal from the archives of ICM SW Minn. WordAlone Newsletter

"The first Lutherans in this country, those who would regard the Muhlenberg tradition as their own, what became the United Lutheran Church in America (ULCA), had been here for several generations when a new wave of immigrants from Germany, Sweden and Norway began landing on American shores. These Lutherans settled in Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and later the Dakotas. When they got here, unused to the pluralism of America, they thought the old Lutherans had been theologically corrupted by their American context which they saw, perhaps, most clearly in their English hymnals with hymns by Watts and Wesley, which these immigrants did not recognize as Lutheran.

The new immigrants did not speak English and needed hymnals in their own languages, not the English versions that members of the Muhlenberg tradition had prepared over the years. So the Germans of the Missouri Synod began producing their own materials in their own languages, as did the Ohio Synod, as did the Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Finns, Icelanders, and Slovakians. Read the whole article.