Q: Is there a style manual that the Church uses when preparing official documents? I am familiar with literary styles such as MLA, APA, and Chicago style, and from the documents I’ve seen I conclude there must be a manual of some kind. I can deduce from the Roman Missal, for example, what words they capitalize when referring to Jesus or God; liturgical documents and even the Catechism have numbered paragraphs that seem to all be arranged in certain ways. Is there something I would call a Manual of Style that authors use?
A: The Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments issued a Ratio translations for the translation of liturgical texts. It was published in 2007 and governs questions such as capitalization and punctuation.