WHAT IS THE MASS?
What is the Mass? There is no simple answer to that question. The Church uses many different images and terms to describe our most important prayer. The Mass is the celebration of the Eucharist, a Greek word that means “thanksgiving.” It is the Lord’s Supper. It is the Breaking of the Bread. It is the memorial of the Lord’s passion, death, and resurrection. It is the Holy Sacrifice, in which the sacrifice of Christ on the cross is perpetuated. It is the holy and divine liturgy, the sacred mysteries. It is the source and summit of our Christian lives, the new covenant, the work of the Holy Spirit, the paschal mystery. The many different words and images that we use when we speak of the Mass are not signs of confusion, but of wonder at what the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1328) calls the “inexhaustible richness” of the Eucharist. The Mass, our greatest prayer and our deepest mystery, is celebrated every day, many times a day, the world over. The Eucharist is both “bread from heaven” and “daily bread.” The Mass is our everyday
THE SHAPE OF THE MASS
In the renewal of the liturgy that followed the Second Vatican Council, the full, conscious, and active participation of the assembly was the primary consideration.
By participation, the Council Fathers did not mean just joining in the singing and the spoken responses, but active engagement and prayerful understanding of the rites. They envisioned a transparent liturgy, a worship that spoke so directly to the hearts and minds of the faithful that it would require no explanation at all. The liturgy itself is the best possible catechesis on the liturgy. What does the liturgy teach us? It shows us the ministry of Jesus continuing in the present. He gathers a community. He calls us to prayer and repentance and praise. He teaches us with the very word of God. He does not send us away empty, but sets before us a marvelous banquet, feeding us with his very body and blood. Then he sends us forth to do what he has done—to give ourselves for others, not just in words, but in deeds. The Mass is the pattern of our Christian lives.
GATHERING
When Pope Benedict XVI visited the United States in 2008, tens of thousands gathered in Yankee Stadium to celebrate the Eucharist with him. What made them different from all the other excited crowds who have assembled there through the years? When they began to sing together, to listen together, to pray together, they ceased to be a crowd, and became a liturgical assembly. It was not where they were but what they did that set them apart. The Gospels speak of many instances when Jesus prayed alone to his Father. But Jesus also put a special value on communal prayer. “Where two or three are gathered together in my name,” he told his disciples, “there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). Jesus gave his own mission to his followers, sending them forth to do everything he did: to heal, to teach, to proclaim the kingdom. Jesus wants us to meet God in and through each other. So the Christian community continues to gather, Sunday after Sunday. When we get up on Sunday morning and come to Mass, we respond to Jesus’ invitation, and we express our trust in his promise that whenever we come together, he comes, too.
I CONFESS
One form of the penitential rite at the beginning of Mass is the traditional Confiteor, or “I confess,” a prayer that was formerly prayed by the priest alone at the foot of the altar, but which is now prayed by the entire assembly. The Confiteor is at once personal—“I confess”—and communal, prayed aloud, together. We recognize that sin does not just separate us from God; sin comes between us and others, isolating us. We acknowledge that sin has many dimensions, individual and communal: sins of thought, sins of speech, sins of action, sins of omission. Sin is not something that happens to us; sin is something we do. In the Confiteor, we take responsibility for our own actions. The repeated insistence on our “fault,” with the ritual gesture of striking the breast, an ancient sign of penitence, is not meant to lower our self-esteem. Rather, it acknowledges our human instinct to transfer the blame whenever we can (“The devil made me do it!”). This prayer stops us short. We take responsibility for ourselves, our actions, our failure to act. Then we cry out to God in those ancient words, Kyrie, eleison—Lord, have mercy. For the sinner who repents, there is mercy. This truth is at the heart of our faith, and it is where the Mass, our feast of faith, begins.
The Opening Prayer
At the conclusion of the Introductory Rites of the Mass, the presider says or chants the words “Let us pray,” followed by the Opening Prayer. This prayer is also called a “collect” because it gathers or “collects” the prayers of the entire assembly into one. The Roman collects that we pray in our liturgy—noted for the brevity, clarity, and conciseness of the Latin originals—date from a variety of periods. Some are quite new; others reach back more than a thousand years. They are truly treasures of our tradition.
The Opening Prayer can be divided into four main parts: 1) the invitation, or “Let us pray”; 2) the silence that follows, during which each member of the assembly lifts up before God his or her own prayers; 3) the collect itself, spoken or sung by the priest; 4) and finally the Amen, by which the assembly says, “yes,” “may it be so,” making the prayer their own.
The collect itself almost always follows the same pattern. It begins with an invocation to God. A petition follows, usually very general. We ask for health, strength, wisdom, grace, forgiveness, faith, awareness. Every collect concludes by offering the prayer to God through Jesus Christ. With the Amen of the assembly, the Introductory Rites of the Mass come to an end.
Postures of the Mass
In the Mass, we pray not only with our lips, but with our bodies as well. We stand when the ministers enter. In Western culture, standing is a sign of attention, a mark of respect: all stand when the judge enters the courtroom, for example. Standing is also an ancient posture of prayer, mentioned frequently in the Old Testament. When the readings begin, we sit down: a listening posture. Mary sat at Jesus’ feet to listen to his teaching; the crowds sat on the hillside or the seashore to hear his words. Kneeling is another posture that is full of meaning. It expresses adoration and worship, but it can also express humility and contrition. We bow: a sign of honor and reverence, acknowledging the presence of God, especially when we receive the Eucharist. And there are other ritual gestures as well—striking the breast, genuflecting, and of course making the sign of the cross. The liturgy invites us to pray with our whole person—with heart and mind, voice and body.
The First Reading
Each Sunday, we listen to three scripture readings. The first reading usually comes from the Old Testament. “The New Testament lies hidden in the Old; the Old Testament comes fully to light in the New,” we read in the Introduction to the Lectionary. “Christ himself is the center and fullness of the whole of Scripture” (5). On Sundays, these readings usually have a close connection to the Gospel. In this season of Lent, for example, the Exodus account of the thirst of the Israelites in the desert is paired with the Samaritan woman’s encounter with Jesus at the well. Ezekiel’s vision of the Lord raising people from their graves is paired with the narrative of Christ raising Lazarus from the dead.
The readings are taken from many sources—historical books like Judges, Kings, and the Acts of the Apostles, prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel, wisdom literature like Proverbs or Ecclesiastes. But no matter its genre, the first reading always ends with the same acclamation: “The word of the Lord.” The scriptures are written by human authors who wrote in widely different cultural and historical contexts, but these human authors are also divine instruments through whom God speaks to us. And so we say, “Thanks be to God.”
The Psalms in the Liturgy
The book of Psalms is a prayer book, hymnal, and anthology of verse all rolled into one. It contains one hundred fifty ancient songs—poem-prayers that express the joys and sorrows of the Hebrew people and their longing for God. The psalms are incredibly varied in tone. Some are solemn anthems of praise that once accompanied processions of great multitudes to the temple; others record the lonely cries of a faithful soul who feels abandoned by God.
This ancient prayer book of the Hebrew people is our principal prayer book as well. The psalms are everywhere in the liturgy—in the antiphons and acclamations of the Mass, and most particularly in the responsorial psalm that follows the first reading. The psalm that is sung at Mass usually echoes the themes of the first reading, and sometimes even comments on it. On this Third Sunday of Lent, we listen to the Exodus account of the stubbornness of God’s people in the desert, and then the psalm comes to remind us: “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts” (Psalm 95:8). In their wonderful variety, the psalms teach us how to pray.
The Second Reading
The Liturgy of the Word generally follows a consistent pattern of three readings and a psalm. The second reading is always taken from one of the New Testament epistles or the book of Revelation, and generally is not intentionally aligned with either the Gospel or the first reading.
Where would we be without these letters in which great saints and apostles like Paul, Peter, James, and John share their wisdom and pastoral good sense with the early Christian communities? It is in these letters, even more than in the Gospel narratives, that we learn what it means to be church: to live with each other, in the world yet not of the world, in these days after the Lord’s resurrection. Each New Testament letter was written by a particular leader for a particular community at a particular time. We are reminded of this at the beginning of the proclamation—“A reading from the letter of Saint Paul to the Ephesians,” or the Corinthians, or the Thessalonians. These texts were shaped by their particular historical and cultural context, but at the same time, through the liturgy, these letters are written to us, here, today. They speak to the realities of Christian living no matter where—or when—we live. They are truly “the word of the Lord” for us.
The Gospel Reading
The climax of the Liturgy of the Word comes with the proclamation of the Gospel. Everything tells us that something important is happening. We stand. We sing special acclamations. Servers with candles and sometimes incense lead the deacon or priest to the ambo, where the reading is proclaimed from a special book.
All of the readings are important, but the liturgy directs special attention to the Gospel for a reason. “[A]mong all the inspired writings, even among those of the New Testament, the Gospels have a special place, and rightly so, because they are our principal source for the life and teaching of the Incarnate Word, our Saviour” (Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation of the Second Vatican Council, 18). In the Gospels, the narrative of Christ’s saving life, death, and resurrection continues to be proclaimed in our midst.
Our Sunday Lectionary is structured so as to allow us to hear as much of the Gospels as possible. The readings are arranged in a three-year cycle. In Year A, the Gospel readings are taken mainly from Matthew; in Year B, from Mark and John; and in Year C, from Luke. In this way, over the course of three years, we hear a substantial portion of all four Gospels.
—Corinna Laughlin, © Copyright, J. S. Paluch Co.
What is the Mass? There is no simple answer to that question. The Church uses many different images and terms to describe our most important prayer. The Mass is the celebration of the Eucharist, a Greek word that means “thanksgiving.” It is the Lord’s Supper. It is the Breaking of the Bread. It is the memorial of the Lord’s passion, death, and resurrection. It is the Holy Sacrifice, in which the sacrifice of Christ on the cross is perpetuated. It is the holy and divine liturgy, the sacred mysteries. It is the source and summit of our Christian lives, the new covenant, the work of the Holy Spirit, the paschal mystery. The many different words and images that we use when we speak of the Mass are not signs of confusion, but of wonder at what the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1328) calls the “inexhaustible richness” of the Eucharist. The Mass, our greatest prayer and our deepest mystery, is celebrated every day, many times a day, the world over. The Eucharist is both “bread from heaven” and “daily bread.” The Mass is our everyday
THE SHAPE OF THE MASS
In the renewal of the liturgy that followed the Second Vatican Council, the full, conscious, and active participation of the assembly was the primary consideration.
By participation, the Council Fathers did not mean just joining in the singing and the spoken responses, but active engagement and prayerful understanding of the rites. They envisioned a transparent liturgy, a worship that spoke so directly to the hearts and minds of the faithful that it would require no explanation at all. The liturgy itself is the best possible catechesis on the liturgy. What does the liturgy teach us? It shows us the ministry of Jesus continuing in the present. He gathers a community. He calls us to prayer and repentance and praise. He teaches us with the very word of God. He does not send us away empty, but sets before us a marvelous banquet, feeding us with his very body and blood. Then he sends us forth to do what he has done—to give ourselves for others, not just in words, but in deeds. The Mass is the pattern of our Christian lives.
GATHERING
When Pope Benedict XVI visited the United States in 2008, tens of thousands gathered in Yankee Stadium to celebrate the Eucharist with him. What made them different from all the other excited crowds who have assembled there through the years? When they began to sing together, to listen together, to pray together, they ceased to be a crowd, and became a liturgical assembly. It was not where they were but what they did that set them apart. The Gospels speak of many instances when Jesus prayed alone to his Father. But Jesus also put a special value on communal prayer. “Where two or three are gathered together in my name,” he told his disciples, “there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). Jesus gave his own mission to his followers, sending them forth to do everything he did: to heal, to teach, to proclaim the kingdom. Jesus wants us to meet God in and through each other. So the Christian community continues to gather, Sunday after Sunday. When we get up on Sunday morning and come to Mass, we respond to Jesus’ invitation, and we express our trust in his promise that whenever we come together, he comes, too.
I CONFESS
One form of the penitential rite at the beginning of Mass is the traditional Confiteor, or “I confess,” a prayer that was formerly prayed by the priest alone at the foot of the altar, but which is now prayed by the entire assembly. The Confiteor is at once personal—“I confess”—and communal, prayed aloud, together. We recognize that sin does not just separate us from God; sin comes between us and others, isolating us. We acknowledge that sin has many dimensions, individual and communal: sins of thought, sins of speech, sins of action, sins of omission. Sin is not something that happens to us; sin is something we do. In the Confiteor, we take responsibility for our own actions. The repeated insistence on our “fault,” with the ritual gesture of striking the breast, an ancient sign of penitence, is not meant to lower our self-esteem. Rather, it acknowledges our human instinct to transfer the blame whenever we can (“The devil made me do it!”). This prayer stops us short. We take responsibility for ourselves, our actions, our failure to act. Then we cry out to God in those ancient words, Kyrie, eleison—Lord, have mercy. For the sinner who repents, there is mercy. This truth is at the heart of our faith, and it is where the Mass, our feast of faith, begins.
The Opening Prayer
At the conclusion of the Introductory Rites of the Mass, the presider says or chants the words “Let us pray,” followed by the Opening Prayer. This prayer is also called a “collect” because it gathers or “collects” the prayers of the entire assembly into one. The Roman collects that we pray in our liturgy—noted for the brevity, clarity, and conciseness of the Latin originals—date from a variety of periods. Some are quite new; others reach back more than a thousand years. They are truly treasures of our tradition.
The Opening Prayer can be divided into four main parts: 1) the invitation, or “Let us pray”; 2) the silence that follows, during which each member of the assembly lifts up before God his or her own prayers; 3) the collect itself, spoken or sung by the priest; 4) and finally the Amen, by which the assembly says, “yes,” “may it be so,” making the prayer their own.
The collect itself almost always follows the same pattern. It begins with an invocation to God. A petition follows, usually very general. We ask for health, strength, wisdom, grace, forgiveness, faith, awareness. Every collect concludes by offering the prayer to God through Jesus Christ. With the Amen of the assembly, the Introductory Rites of the Mass come to an end.
Postures of the Mass
In the Mass, we pray not only with our lips, but with our bodies as well. We stand when the ministers enter. In Western culture, standing is a sign of attention, a mark of respect: all stand when the judge enters the courtroom, for example. Standing is also an ancient posture of prayer, mentioned frequently in the Old Testament. When the readings begin, we sit down: a listening posture. Mary sat at Jesus’ feet to listen to his teaching; the crowds sat on the hillside or the seashore to hear his words. Kneeling is another posture that is full of meaning. It expresses adoration and worship, but it can also express humility and contrition. We bow: a sign of honor and reverence, acknowledging the presence of God, especially when we receive the Eucharist. And there are other ritual gestures as well—striking the breast, genuflecting, and of course making the sign of the cross. The liturgy invites us to pray with our whole person—with heart and mind, voice and body.
The First Reading
Each Sunday, we listen to three scripture readings. The first reading usually comes from the Old Testament. “The New Testament lies hidden in the Old; the Old Testament comes fully to light in the New,” we read in the Introduction to the Lectionary. “Christ himself is the center and fullness of the whole of Scripture” (5). On Sundays, these readings usually have a close connection to the Gospel. In this season of Lent, for example, the Exodus account of the thirst of the Israelites in the desert is paired with the Samaritan woman’s encounter with Jesus at the well. Ezekiel’s vision of the Lord raising people from their graves is paired with the narrative of Christ raising Lazarus from the dead.
The readings are taken from many sources—historical books like Judges, Kings, and the Acts of the Apostles, prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel, wisdom literature like Proverbs or Ecclesiastes. But no matter its genre, the first reading always ends with the same acclamation: “The word of the Lord.” The scriptures are written by human authors who wrote in widely different cultural and historical contexts, but these human authors are also divine instruments through whom God speaks to us. And so we say, “Thanks be to God.”
The Psalms in the Liturgy
The book of Psalms is a prayer book, hymnal, and anthology of verse all rolled into one. It contains one hundred fifty ancient songs—poem-prayers that express the joys and sorrows of the Hebrew people and their longing for God. The psalms are incredibly varied in tone. Some are solemn anthems of praise that once accompanied processions of great multitudes to the temple; others record the lonely cries of a faithful soul who feels abandoned by God.
This ancient prayer book of the Hebrew people is our principal prayer book as well. The psalms are everywhere in the liturgy—in the antiphons and acclamations of the Mass, and most particularly in the responsorial psalm that follows the first reading. The psalm that is sung at Mass usually echoes the themes of the first reading, and sometimes even comments on it. On this Third Sunday of Lent, we listen to the Exodus account of the stubbornness of God’s people in the desert, and then the psalm comes to remind us: “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts” (Psalm 95:8). In their wonderful variety, the psalms teach us how to pray.
The Second Reading
The Liturgy of the Word generally follows a consistent pattern of three readings and a psalm. The second reading is always taken from one of the New Testament epistles or the book of Revelation, and generally is not intentionally aligned with either the Gospel or the first reading.
Where would we be without these letters in which great saints and apostles like Paul, Peter, James, and John share their wisdom and pastoral good sense with the early Christian communities? It is in these letters, even more than in the Gospel narratives, that we learn what it means to be church: to live with each other, in the world yet not of the world, in these days after the Lord’s resurrection. Each New Testament letter was written by a particular leader for a particular community at a particular time. We are reminded of this at the beginning of the proclamation—“A reading from the letter of Saint Paul to the Ephesians,” or the Corinthians, or the Thessalonians. These texts were shaped by their particular historical and cultural context, but at the same time, through the liturgy, these letters are written to us, here, today. They speak to the realities of Christian living no matter where—or when—we live. They are truly “the word of the Lord” for us.
The Gospel Reading
The climax of the Liturgy of the Word comes with the proclamation of the Gospel. Everything tells us that something important is happening. We stand. We sing special acclamations. Servers with candles and sometimes incense lead the deacon or priest to the ambo, where the reading is proclaimed from a special book.
All of the readings are important, but the liturgy directs special attention to the Gospel for a reason. “[A]mong all the inspired writings, even among those of the New Testament, the Gospels have a special place, and rightly so, because they are our principal source for the life and teaching of the Incarnate Word, our Saviour” (Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation of the Second Vatican Council, 18). In the Gospels, the narrative of Christ’s saving life, death, and resurrection continues to be proclaimed in our midst.
Our Sunday Lectionary is structured so as to allow us to hear as much of the Gospels as possible. The readings are arranged in a three-year cycle. In Year A, the Gospel readings are taken mainly from Matthew; in Year B, from Mark and John; and in Year C, from Luke. In this way, over the course of three years, we hear a substantial portion of all four Gospels.
—Corinna Laughlin, © Copyright, J. S. Paluch Co.