A reading in the calendar of the non-traditional Catholic mass offered as service to mass-goers who want to, on his or her own, absorb and profit from the day's word of God . . .

Very complicated passage here, by the way, will be looking for a better one, problem is non-traditional post-Vatican II fixers were not sharpest knives in the drawer? Sometimes I wonder . . .

What the reader (lector) offers of Paul to the original Roman Catholics, today’s ecclesiastical ancestors, in the traditional translation, Douay-Rheims:

18For I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh. The willing is ready at hand, but doing the good is not.^k19For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want.20Now if [I] do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.21So, then, I discover the principle that when I want to do right, evil is at hand.22For I take delight in the law of God, in my inner self,23^l but I see in my members another principle at war with the law of my mind, taking me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.^*24Miserable one that I am! Who will deliver me from this mortal body?25Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Therefore, I myself, with my mind, serve the law of God but, with my flesh, the law of sin.^m

With footnotes, no less:

* [7:1–6] Paul reflects on the fact that Christians have a different understanding of the law because of their faith in Christ. Law binds the living, not the dead, as exemplified in marriage, which binds in life but is dissolved through death. Similarly, Christians who through baptism have died with Christ to sin (cf. Rom 6:2–4) are freed from the law that occasioned transgressions, which in turn were productive of death. Now that Christians are joined to Christ, the power of Christ’s resurrection makes it possible for them to bear the fruit of newness of life for God.

* [7:7–25] In this passage Paul uses the first person singular in the style of diatribe for the sake of argument. He aims to depict the disastrous consequences when a Christian reintroduces the [Old Testament] law as a means to attain the objective of holiness pronounced in Rom 6:22.

* [7:7–12] The apostle defends himself against the charge of identifying the law with sin. [Not the idea at all. Jesus came to fulfill it, not expose it as a bad thing. He observed it, did He not?] Sin does not exist in law but in human beings, whose sinful inclinations are not overcome by the proclamation of law.

* [7:13–25] Far from improving the sinner, law encourages sin to expose itself in transgressions or violations of specific commandments (see Rom 1:24; 5:20). Thus persons who do not experience the justifying grace of God, and Christians who revert to dependence on law as the criterion for their relationship with God, will recognize a rift between their reasoned desire for the goodness of the law and their actual performance that is contrary to the law. Unable to free themselves from the slavery of sin and the power of death, they can be rescued from defeat in the conflict only by the power of God’s grace working through Jesus Christ.

* [7:23] As in Rom 3:27 Paul plays on the term law, which in Greek can connote custom, system, or principle.

Compliments of US Catholic Bishops.