Rights dossier — Roman Missal, 1962 typical edition

Researched: 2026-08-07 (RIGHTS-DOSSIER drip, night 3) Work slug: roman-missal-1962 · citation-only, LITURGY · 342 indexed occasions, 711 connections Verdict: NEEDS FOUNDER — but not on rights. A public-domain English hand missal almost certainly exists. The open question is whether ~96% coverage of a different edition is worth having, and that is a judgment call, not a fact I can settle.

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The question, stated precisely

Our 342 indexed occasions are the propers of the 1962 typical edition. The bull-level question "is the Missal public domain?" is the wrong one — the Latin editio typica is not the problem. The question is whether a public-domain ENGLISH text exists that supplies those occasions, because any translation carries its own term.

Rights — the renewal evidence

The leading candidate is F. X. Lasance, The New Roman Missal, Benziger Brothers, 1936/37 (Internet Archive new-roman-missal-lasance; IA metadata confirmed: Lasance, Benziger Brothers, 1936).

A US publication of that date turns entirely on renewal. Checked against the Stanford Copyright Renewal Database (a transcription of the Catalog of Copyright Entries, Class A).

No renewal for The New Roman Missal exists. Across the entire renewal corpus, the phrase "Roman Missal" returns zero records.

The absence is evidential rather than merely silent, because Benziger was a meticulous renewer of Lasance and was still renewing him in the exact window:

| Lasance publication | Renewed | | :-- | :-- | | My God and my all (1923) | 1951 | | The new missal for every day (1924) | 1951 | | Our Lady book (1924) | 1951 | | The new missal for every day, student's ed. (1925) | 1952 | | Let us pray (1925) | 1952 | | Lift up your hearts (1926) | 1954 | | Come Holy Spirit (1929) | 1957 | | Sweet Sacrament, we Thee adore (1930) | 1958 | | The new missal for every day, rev. (1932) | 1959 | | Road to happiness (1933) | 1960 | | Novenas… Holy Ghost (1934) | 1961 | | Holiness and happiness (1934) | 1961 | | Self conquest (7 Feb 1936) | 27 Feb 1963 | | Let us go to Jesus (1951) | 1958 |

Fourteen renewals, an unbroken chain, every one filed at the 28-year mark — including a February 1936 publication renewed in February 1963, which is precisely when a 1936/37 missal renewal would have fallen due. They renewed three other Lasance missals. They did not renew this one.

Instrument validated before the negative was trusted. Multi-word queries AND correctly (new missal→3, Lasance missal→3, Benziger missal→4), and the database demonstrably holds renewals filed 1963 and later (Benziger has records in 1963, 1969, 1975, 1976, 1983), so the 1963–65 window is covered rather than beyond the instrument's reach. The bare term Missal returns 18 records, all of which were read individually; none is the New Roman Missal.

Rights verdict: almost certainly PUBLIC DOMAIN (US 1936/37, no renewal found).

Coverage — the deciding fact, and it is not clean

The registry entry set the standard: "a PD text that silently mismatches the day is worse than no text." So the coverage number was measured against the actual 342 occasions in the database rather than estimated.

A 1936/37 missal cannot correctly supply 12 of our 342 occasions (3.5%), carrying 27 of 711 connections (3.8%):

| Occasions | Conns | Why a 1937 book cannot have it | | --: | --: | :-- | | 5 | 10 | 1955 Holy Week reform — Palm Sunday (×2 nodes) and Holy Thursday (×3 nodes) were rewritten by Maxima redemptionis | | 3 | 7 | Assumption — the 1950 dogma brought a new formulary (Signum magnum); vigil and feast | | 1 | 4 | St. Joseph the Worker — instituted 1955 | | 1 | 2 | Immaculate Heart of Mary — universal feast 1944 | | 1 | 2 | St. Pius X — canonized 1954, feast 1955 | | 1 | 2 | St. Anthony Mary Claret — canonized 1950 |

Coverage: 330/342 occasions (96.5%), 684/711 connections (96.2%).

A first pass overstated this and the correction matters. An initial regex counted all of Passiontide as reformed, giving 25 occasions / 68 connections (7.3% / 9.6%). That was wrong: Passion Sunday and the Passion Week ferias were not touched in 1955 and read the same in a 1937 missal. Only Palm Sunday and the Triduum were rewritten. The corrected figures are the ones above. Note also that Good Friday and the Easter Vigil are not in the 342 at all — those nodes belong to the other roman-missal work (27 nodes, 100 connections), so the Holy Week exposure here is smaller than one would expect.

What the founder actually has to decide

Rights are not the blocker. The trade is:

For: 96.5% of a 342-occasion index becomes readable English instead of a bare citation, at no licensing cost, from a scan already located.

Against: it is not the 1962 edition. It is a 1936 hand missal, and would have to be labelled as one — the archive would carry "Roman Missal — 1962 Typical Edition" as the citation target while serving Lasance 1936 as the text. The 12 mismatched occasions are the visible ones; the subtler cost is that the 1960 Code of Rubrics changed ranks, octaves and commemorations throughout, so even matching propers sit in a different calendar frame.

A middle option exists and is probably the right one: publish Lasance 1936 as its own work (new-roman-missal-lasance-1936) with honest provenance, rather than as the text of the 1962 edition. Readers get the propers; nothing is misattributed; the 1962 citation target stays citation-only and keeps pointing at what it actually names. This costs one extra work entry and resolves the misattribution objection entirely.

Fallbacks, not yet costed

Not pursued this night, because the primary candidate cleared on rights and the coverage question is now the live one. If the founder rejects the labelling trade, the next candidates are the Saint Andrew Daily Missal (Lefebvre, 1940s — note a Gospels in Saint Andrew's daily missal renewal DOES exist in the register and would need untangling) and the Marquess of Bute English translation (1908, unambiguously PD by age, but a translation of the Missal of its own day and so coverage-limited in the same way).

Provenance of this research

Nothing cached to data/raw/. All findings reproducible from the Stanford Copyright Renewal Database public JSON API and the coverage query against the local roman-missal-1962 work.