It may seem like a relatively small detail, but the change to Canon Law on liturgical translations, authorised by Pope Francis this week, is hugely symbolic. It represents a fundamental adjustment to the relationship between the periphery and the centre in the Catholic Church – between local bishops’ conferences all over the world and the Vatican. The latter made what the secular world would call a power-grab in the late 1990s, when bishops’ conferences were deprived of their right to approve translations of the Latin Mass into the vernacular, a right which had previously been given unqualified approval by the Second Vatican Council.