Wrote about attending mass a while back, answering q. by a friend, young fellow in his 80s, suggesting how to find spiritual results at mass, nothing grand, mind you, but what picks you up and, and what the heck, perks you up in terms of doing the right thing.
New mass does its best to distract you, you know, when you’d like to pray. Just a little, you know . . .
James Baresel, in Rorate Caeli, quotes experts on the subject, among them Cardinal Newman, who in his 1848 novel Loss and Gain, describes Catholics at mass,
Each in his place, with his own heart, with his own wants, with his own thoughts, with his own intention, with his own prayers, separate but concordant, watching what is going on, watching its progress, uniting in its consummation;—not painfully and hopelessly following a hard form of prayer from beginning to end, but, like a concert of musical instruments, each different, but concurring in a sweet harmony, we take our part with God’s priest.”
Another, Monsignor Ronald Knox, in his 1948 book The Mass in Slow Motion explained that “if you find it difficult or . . . dull trying to follow the Mass, you are much better employed in simply kneeling there and saying your prayers, with a book or without a book, while Mass is going on” and that “[t]he Church doesn’t oblige you to follow [the texts of Mass]; she only obliges you . . . to be there.”
A third writer, Father Bryan Houghton, in his 1958 novel Judith’s Marriage” set just before Vatican II, the main character found the mass nothing like what she thought “a religious ceremony ought to be” since it “was not in any sense a community service; everybody seemed to be doing exactly as he liked”:
The priest was “fiddling about with his tools in complete silence.” A father of a family was focused on pictures in the devotional book Garden of the Soul. His wife was saying the rosary. “Nobody was paying the slightest attention to the priest, just as the priest was not paying the slightest attention to the congregation.” Judith realized that what each person was doing in his own way was adoring God.
Pope Pius XII had made the point in his 1947 encyclical Mediator Dei, “that it is impossible for all to be moved and attracted to the same extent by community prayers, hymns and liturgical services” and that Catholics “can adopt some other method which proves easier . . . they can lovingly meditate on the mysteries of Jesus Christ or perform other exercises of piety or recite prayers which, though they differ from the sacred rites, are still essentially in harmony with them.”
Pius XII was convinced that each person as an individual has his own individual talents and characters and it would seem “to accept that all will introduce at least some individualistic nuance into how they pray.”
Indeed, a person’s prayer is an intimate matter, not to be subsided in favor of what’s common. After all, the word itself, common has also the meaning lesser, as in the admittedly snobbish judgment, he or she is so common, less worthy of notice.
In any case, prayer is something special and not to be limited to what’s done as a group, which is also important, of course, but often subsidiary.
It would seem just as obvious that Catholics would realize and develop an increasing variety of ways to pray at Mass over the course of millennia.
No great intelligence should be needed to realize that the most important thing is for people to spiritually unite themselves as closely as possible to God and to the sacrifice being offered.
Emphasis on spiritually.
We don’t hear that kind of talk these days, immersed as we are or our leaders expect us to be in a “collectivist piety” tradition, “prioritizing . . . praying as part of a group over praying as well as possible.”
Yes.
We would rather hear the claim that “all will pray best at Mass if they do so as part of a self-conscious collective.”
Yes.
Rather than accept that they themselves pray better collectively because of their individual character, talents and temperaments, [the powers that be] put forward their own preferences as innate to human nature.
Not good, my friend, nor fitting in the circumstances.
Further:
Evidence that some pray better individualistically [are] dismissed with exemplary circular logic: an insistence that such people are ‘not open enough’ to praying collectively.
A pity.
Historically, Baresel concludes,
Catholics [have] had little interest in . . . fostering a collective spirit because they understood that the only essential “social” aspect of the Mass was a person’s membership in a social institution—the Church.
Contemporary preoccupation with creating a collective spirit is not the return to Patristic or Medieval piety that its advocates claim. It is a result of the influence of modern Continental philosophy—which elevates emotion above intellect and is therefore preoccupied with an unnecessary “feeling of community.”
How infrequently do we hear such opinion.
Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground 