Priests Tampering with the Mass

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Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com

I was at a mass recently at a parish that is not my own where the priest seemed to take a lot of opportunities to ad-lib with his own thoughts and colloquialisms in place of what is written in the Roman Missal.

This isn’t something I’m all that used to, so my initial reaction was one of anger and frustration. The texts that compose the mass are a treasure of the whole Church – not of any particular person or generation. For any one person to think that they ought to try to make cute improvements to something that contains traces as old as the faith itself seems to suggest that they are more concerned with the attention that it can bring them then on serving as they are called to in the liturgy.

The analogy that came to mind for me is like someone who is appointed curator of a great art museum filled with ancient treasures who decides that the whole collection could use some of their own personal touch, so they run around putting dabs of paint here and there and re-arranging exhibits to suit their own preference.

Now obviously, that’s a bit hyperbolic, but if you consider what the mass is and how sacred it is, it could be argued that individuals tampering with it to suit their own preferences is actually worse.
But as I thought about it, perhaps by the grace of the sacrament that I received on that occasion, I was reminded of something that helped me sympathize a bit.