Father B. gives lesson on how to say mass the Novus Ordo way

By praying it, not announcing or declaiming and not scanning the audience as if giving a lecture or teaching a class. He really means it, and we know it. It’s how liturgy should be. It’s the sine qua non of liturgical practice. You gotta have heart, you can’t be looking around.

The “pray, brothers and sisters” — Orate, fratres in Latin-mass days and still now in the so-called extraordinary form — is another story, of course. Addressing the people, he looks at them. He does not spout the words as if magical incantations. “Behold the Lamb of God — Ecce Agnus Dei — and other parts, same thing.

Novus Ordo? It’s the Paul VI mass, presumably reflecting the wishes of the Vatican 2 council fathers (bishops from around the world) but arguably altered beyond anything most of them had in mind.

Most of us are accustomed to it by…