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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.