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Now that the Traditional Latin Mass community in our part of the country has become more established, I’ve been looking about me on Sundays and wondering: why don’t more people buy daily missals?
Quite recently, I was surprised to see Fr. Z of What Does the Prayer Really Say? write a post about the Baronius Missal which he had apparently just seen for the first time. Now, I received a Baronius Missal from my dear Doctor as a baptismal gift in May of 2005, so by now it’s an old friend for me. But, looking around at the congregation on Sunday at the Latin Mass, I note that surprisingly few people have their own daily missal. Many use the small red booklets from Ecclesia Dei, together with printouts containing the propers for the day, but it’s only the rare odd person who actually has a full missal.
So here is my word on the matter: if you plan to assist regularly at the Traditional Latin Mass, you really must get yourself a missal! The red booklets are great to have around for the sake of newcomers and beginners, but it is infinitely nicer in the long run to have your own complete hand missal. In the first place, of course, it keeps you from having to refer back and forth between two different documents throughout the Mass (the missals have multiple ribbons for place markers, so it’s quite easy to flip back and forth between the propers and the ordinary.) It also gives you information that isn’t included in the red books (for example, the prefaces for all the different liturgical seasons), and all kinds of other invaluable spiritual aids, such as devotions to be read before and after confession and communion, morning and evening prayers to be used at home, litanies, and all manner of devotions for particular occasions. It has the kyriale in the back with several musical settings of the ordinary, which is great for people who like to sing. For some periods (Lent, for example) it includes not only the Sunday propers, but also the daily ones, and it also includes the propers for all the feast days, so even if you can’t get to Mass every day you can still read the passages on your own at home.
I’m not really sure why more people (including some who assist at the Latin Mass extremely regularly and faithfully) don’t make this investment. My husband suggested that, for some people, paying sixty dollars for a book is just not something they would ever do. And I understand that for some, that kind of expenditure might really constitute a hardship. But I would encourage you to consider the benefits. It’s only a one-time cost — with proper care, you should be able to use the same missal for decades and likely your whole life. And in fact, that’s really the best way to do it, because your missal will start to have a real personal significance when it’s been with you for a long time. You can leave it to a grandchild someday. (What a nice keepsake that would be!) But more importantly, as you become familiar with your missal, certain of its contents become important parts of your spiritual life. I don’t even need ribbons for many of my favorite places by now, because I know exactly where they are. At the same time, I sometimes discover new and interesting tidbits that I hadn’t seen before.
I think it’s particularly funny that I seem to be the only member of our Latin Mass choir who has a regular missal, which is silly, because the missal is especially invaluable for choir members. The pews where the choir sit are already piled with multiple books and pieces of music, and the put-down-pick-up game becomes considerably easier when you have the text of the ordinary and the propers, plus the musical settings of the ordinary all in one book, together with your before-Mass readings and your devotions for before and after Communion! I honestly can’t understand how the others live without this book. So, for all those who don’t have a missal yet, get one. If $60 is too much for you to spend on a whim, put it on your Christmas or birthday list. You won’t regret it.
St. Louis-Marie de Montfort,
Pope St. Pius X,
St. Joseph,
St. Ambrose of Milan,
St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Francis (and St. Clare),
St. Catherine of Siena,
St. Alphonsus Ligouri,
St. John Chrysostom,
There are other more affordable ways to get a missal. I have a leather bound 1962 St Andrews daily missal I picked up about 10 years ago at the salvation army for about $2. I dont like the red missalets I think alot of newcomers to the TLM are confused by the propers for trinity sunday that are printed in them (my wife was). At the last TLM I went to (Belfast NY in the diocese of Buffalo but celebrated by a diocese of Rochester priest!!!) they had printed a booklet missal that was easier to follow than the red booklets.
God bless,
Ben
Well, that’s great, if you should get so lucky. But I guess I’m just saying, even if you have to spring for the new one, it’s worth it.
I agree, the red booklets can be confusing, especially when people are first starting out. It would probably be better if they just didn’t print any propers, and instead put a brief parenthetical explanation of what should go in that space. Still, you have to appreciate Ecclesia Dei for making this stuff available. Nobody else is doing it (at least not on a large scale) and it’s certainly good to have something of the kind being printed en masse.
Actuallly, Roman Catholic Books has put out a competing booklet.
Practically everyone in SSPX chapels has a hand missal. It’s almost cultish…
I own a hand missal myself from my seminary days: it is bilingual Spanish and Latin, published in Spain in 1962. And unlike the English ones, it is quite portable and nondescript. Nevertheless, whenever I go to the traditional Mass now, I never bring it along. Maybe it is the over-exposure to the traditional liturgy: for three years of my life, I assisted at at least one traditional Mass everyday, and many times two or three times a day. I must have served a thousand Masses in three years. Once, I served four Masses in one day (it was a priest’s retreat). I can do the responses in my sleep.
Nevertheless, even in seminary I stopped following along in the missal. For one thing, in spite of the injunctions of some Popes from St. Pius X onward, I find reading along with the priest a bit bizarre. For one thing, my ancestors never did it, and they still prayed at Mass, probably better than I did. The sacrificial element of the priest’s prayers make them uniquely his own. This was one of the things changed in the Pauline reforms, and I really don’t like it. In all liturgies derived from the Apostles, there are prayers that only the priest says and hears. No one in the Orthodox Church, for example, cares what the priest utters while the choir is singing the Cherubic Hymn.
(This is one of the reasons I despise dialogue Masses: the most dialogue occurs at the beginning: “Et introibo ad altare Dei, etc.” which is the Foremass, which are prayers of the priest going up to prepare his sacrifice, and they aren’t supposed to be heard anyway, and are not in sung Masses.)
I find an obsession to follow along with the prayers of the clergy to be a bit of proto-Novus Ordo thinking; perhaps liturgy is the prayer of all the people of God, it’s just that we have different scripts. You can know what the priest is doing, and it is helpful to know some Latin. But to promote hand missals for me seems to evoke the danger of making traditionalists into a cult within the Church (which they probably already are). Lots of people had hand missals before the Council, but the majority probably didn’t. It is just another instance of traditionalists re-creating a church that never existed: hand missals (hardly anyone had them), mantillas (most women outside the Spanish-speaking world wore hats, though my great-grandmother had a big black mantilla that went down her shoulders, sort of like a Garcia Lorca play), an unhealthy fixation on liturgical minutiae, extreme right wing politics, etc., etc.
Perhaps I can only say this since I had the luxury of having the traditional Mass sealed in my brain, but when I go to the traditional Mass, I participate in the most traditional way possible, the one that by far is the most documented way that the faithful participated: I rattle my beads and pray my rosary. I guess that makes me even more of a traditionalist…
I understand some of these points, Arturo, but I am put in mind of a discussion we had some while back about an article from Joseph Bottom about the swallows in Capistrano. (You can find it in the archives if you like, I think from November 2006 — it may have been the last serious disagreement between blog contributors that we’ve had on this blog.)
But here’s the basic idea that occurs to me. There’s probably a reason why St. Pius X was the first one to seriously urge the faithful to follow along with the Mass. Probably no pontiff before him was so fully, painfully conscious of how his age differed from, say, the Middle Ages, when it really might have been fine for people just to pray and allow the liturgy itself to shape their sensibilities. In a predominantly Catholic culture, there can be something beautiful in that kind of gentle formation of the faith. But when the faithful are under constant assault by the forces of modernism, it might be necessary to make the lessons more explicit.
Of course traditionalists are, in good measure, re-creating a church that never existed. There’s nothing else they can do; the past is not recoverable, and the present demands positive action. The fragments of tradition that we snatch at may often be just that — fragments — but we have to build on something, and it’s better to try to help make something positive than to quibble forever about the percentage of women who actually wore mantillas before Vatican II. And yes, the attitudes of modern-day trads are actually quite different; we’re reactionaries, whereas they inherited their traditions unproblematically from their immediate ancestors. But again, what else to do? When the present situation is unacceptable in many respects, you can either go along with it or you can react against it. I myself join in chiding traditional Catholics for what I see as some of the defects an excesses of their attitude, but on some level we do have to accept what we are. Maybe in a few generations’ time our descendants can inherit something a little more organic, sprung from the crude transplants of our day. In the meantime, the really critical thing is that we hang onto the Mass… as long as we have that, something good will come of it.
For people like you who know the Mass backwards and forwards, and who feel that a book would just damage your concentration… okay, leave the missal at home then. But for a lot of people (most, I daresay) the Mass isn’t that familiar, and without a missal they just aren’t that aware of what’s going on. So they chitchat before Mass instead of mentally preparing themselves, daydream while the propers are being read, and spring up out of their seats as soon as Mass has ended instead of making their Act of Thanksgiving. Or, like some people, they carry lots of smaller things with them to try to cover all these bases, which is just unnecessarily cumbersome.
One final word: just because you have a missal doesn’t mean you need to be using it every second. For example, I don’t follow all of the Canon with the priest; at some point I’ll often break off and do my devotions before Communion, or just meditate. Then, if my concentration breaks and I find myself thinking about football or my next post for this blog, I can go back to following along. As long as the missal is there, I can easily follow as much or as little as I wish, and I find that this really helps me to get more out of Mass.
Peculiar to accuse the “new” Trad movement as being disconnected from the past. Bigger fish to fry it seems (e.g. Novus Ordo).
Rather, I think of it all as one big fish…
Once one begins to think things like “all Catholics should look this way” or “all Catholics should pray in church this way” or “all Catholics should listen to the same music” etc., etc, you are in danger of ceasing to be Catholic, and it is just as much a danger as the “amorphous” heresy of the post-conciliar Church.
On the Baronius Missl, it should be noted that the newest edition is different than the older. In my opinion it is considerably nicer. It almost seems that they have adopted some of the positive things seen in the Angelus Press missal (which is also very nice). It is considerably thinner now, has bette guilding, and rounded corners on the pages. I am not sure what else has changed (aside from including Summorum Pontificum).
Well it is pretty expensive to buy Missals for the entire family when there are 10 of you or 13 or 15. They are a very nice thing to have.
Perhaps someone who has noticed that:
“I think it’s particularly funny that I seem to be the only member of our Latin Mass choir who has a regular missal,”
could make a gift of a Missal to someone less fortunate, less sophisticated, less urbane, obviously less pious and even less scholarly. How benevolent that would be. It appears that it would be no bother at all to compile a listing of those who do and do not have Missals. An exact listing.
That’s an awful lot of bitterness, Mary, to be venting against someone who’s just trying to point out the benefits of missal ownage. But I’d hate to assume the worst about people, so I’ll suppose that you probably come from a family of 15 or so, and spent much of your childhood longing for a missal that your parents simply could not afford. Which would make a little bitterness understandable.
In fact, I think I did acknowledge that the financial burden might not be a trivial consideration for some. But particularly for large families, my suggestion would be to form a tradition of giving a missal as a gift on a particular occasion — confirmation, say. That way you won’t have to spend hundreds of dollars on missals all at the same time. And in Western countries, at least, there are very few children whose families are so poor that they have never at any time received a fifty-dollar present. Those unfortunate few are most likely not surfing the net (if you can’t afford a missal, it’s unlikely that you can afford a home computer or internet connection), but you know, if those of us who can afford missals would go ahead and buy them, it would help the problem in two ways. In the first place, the cost of the missal might go down. And also, once missals became more common, parish priests would have a better sense for which families genuinely cannot afford to buy them. Then perhaps a collection could be taken up for those few.