THE MASS TRANSMOGRIFIED: WHOSE SACRIFICE? WHOSE NAME? (2013)

More on how the mass is reconstituted by free-lancing priest-celebrants.

Item:

May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands for the praise and glory of his name, for our good and the good of all his holy Church. . . .

. . . is commonly changed to “our hands” and “God’s name,” which never in my hearing has been explained to the congregation. It’s been simply done, slipped in, over and over until the people do it that way too.

This has been the pattern throughout imposition of the new mass. Words, gestures, stage directions have been all changed without pointing out to people their implications in terms of belief or (hidden or at least hiding) purposes. Better to signal it, over and over, than to (have to) explain it from pulpit or lectern.

Repetition is the mother of study. Or of learning. Or reflexive response. Or . . . ?

The second of these two changes — his name to God’s name — is to reduce the number of masculine pronouns, apparently to lessen the masculinity (!) of the worship experience.

The first — your hands to our hands — is more pernicious, because it ignores the sacramental minister, makes him one of the pew-sitters, which he isn’t.

Huge doctrinal change here, by which worshipers became officers, as it were, of the sacrament, not the priest, which is to carry priesthood of the faithful to new levels indeed.