Thank you for your leader (4 June) suggesting that priests – in consultation with the laity, of course – should be allowed freedom of choice on which Mass text to use.

Besides the English-language versions of the Mass that you mention, pride of place should be given to the 1998 ICEL translation, approved by all the participating 11 bishops’ conferences, the fruit of 13 years’ revision. Any text can be improved, but this one is by a distance the best so far. It is truly in the vernacular, it sings, it can be proclaimed. But in contravention of the Vatican II grant of oversight to the local bishops, it lies gathering dust somewhere on a Vatican shelf, substituted by the inferior 2011 text composed according to the principles of the instruction Liturgiam Authenticam.