A fellow does some noodling. What to do?

1. Overhaul sermon training. Make preaching an overriding emphasis. It’s a matter of getting people to know Jesus. If they do not get the preaching, how will they know Jesus?

2. Turn the altar around so the mass is no longer an extended sermon but a prayer in which priest and people are truly in it together, facing together toward God.

3. Restore Latin — for its own sake, a few of us feel, but as a special, ministerial language to be associated with the mass as unique in worshipers’ experience, unlikely to be compared to a family dinner, for instance.

4. Eliminate the handshake of peace as disruptive of this like-no-other experience.

5. Eliminate communion in the hand standing as distracting from and even disparaging the like-no-otherness of the ceremony, specifically the reality of transubstantiation. Eliminate wine communion.

6. Restore altar…

Priests who make it up as they go along.

If you’re a daily Mass attendant, the odds are that you’ve heard General Norm 22.3 of “Sacrosanctum concilium” violated on a weekly basis.

In all the sixteen documents of the Second Vatican Council, is there any prescription more regularly violated than General Norm 22.3 of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy? Which, in case you’ve forgotten, teaches that “no . . . person, not even a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority”?

The Spirit works in mysterious ways. This isn’t one of them.

If you’re a daily Mass attendant, the odds are that you hear that norm violated a dozen times a week. Sunday Mass people typically hear it violated two or three times a week, at least.

Auto-editing or flat-out rewriting the prescribed text of the Mass is virtually epidemic among priests…