IPad coming to church altars with daily missal app

June 20, 2010|Nicole Winfield, Associated Press

ROME — An Italian priest has developed an application that will let priests celebrate Mass with an iPad on the altar instead of the regular Roman missal.

The Rev. Paolo Padrini, a consultant with the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Social Communications, said Friday the free application will be launched in July in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin.

Two years ago, Padrini developed the iBreviary, an application that brought the book of daily prayers used by priests onto iPhones. To date, some 200,000 people have downloaded the application, he said.

The iPad application is similar but also contains the complete missal — containing all that is said and sung during Mass throughout the liturgical year. Upgrades are expected to feature audio as well as commentaries and suggestions for homilies as well as musical accompaniment, he said.

“Paper books will never disappear,’’ he said in a phone interview from his home parish in Tortona, in Italy’s northern Piemonte region. But at the same time “we shouldn’t be scandalized that on altars there are these instruments in support of prayer.’’

Padrini, 36, said he expected priests who have to travel a lot for work would find the application most useful, noting that he recently had to celebrate Mass in a small parish where the missal was “a small book, a bit dirty, old.’’

“If I had had my iPad with me, it would’ve been better than this old, tiny book,’’ he said.

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