Back in my younger days, I considered the importance of ignoring what’s up front during Mass.

Various ministers were thrust up front by current rules. It’s not their fault, I told myself.

Politeness does not require looking at them, however, I added.

So don’t look, I said. Instead, mind your own business, reading and meditating on the day’s Scripture.

There’s too much going on up front, such as traipsing to and fro with book held high over forehead as if to ward off falling plaster, I said, prior to reading Scripture of the day.

It’s not helpful. Merely distracting.

Then you look up and see priest looking at you.

He can’t help it. Reverentially downcast eyes have not been part of his training.

But you can help it by not looking.

The bulletin warned us away from my illegal Latin mass church.

It’s a “chapel,” the bulletin said, “that advertises itself as ‘Our Lady Immaculate Roman Catholic Church.'”

But it’s actually not Roman Catholic, we were told, but is run by the St. Pius X society founded by Archbishop Lefebvre, who was excommunicated, etc. etc.

The bulletin quotes the Pope about the “grave offense” involved in adherence to the Society leading to excommunication.

I’m at risk, therefore, by now and then attending the Latin masses at Our Lady Immaculate.

Would  my  parish consider now and then having a Latin mass, so as to ween me away? For pastoral reasons?

A recent special mass for gays and lesbians at a neighboring parish was a one-time thing.

Maybe have a one-time thing for Latin mass embracers, who make no claims about being born that way but only say they were raised that way?

. . . Father Emil discussed “what Mass is all about” in the bulletin. It’s our coming “with full hearts to thank God,” he wrote.

Moreover, the Mass is “truly alive . . . when we bring to [it] the everyday things of our lives.”

Some of his best mass-time experience, he confessed, was when he is “truly bringing what was in [his] heart to God.”

The “sacrifice of the mass,” he said “refers to our self-offering to God.”

This self-offering “feels good” because it reminds him that God is “taking care of” his problems.

He said nothing about Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross and its redeeming value or its being re-enacted in the mass, whatever we bring.

He spoke only about what we bring.

Apart from his belief in God as protector, it’s as if there were no Christian tradition.

Pagans did this much, and probably still do.

If…

. . . “THE PEACE OF CHRIST BE WITH YOU”? YES! — a 2006 cogitation.

It happens at mass after the Our Father, during which you may have held hands in a show of solidarity or watched others do so. It’s SHAKE TIME.

I liken it to violating a library’s silence by interrupting someone, extorting his or her response.

My friend Jake (not his real name) intends to pull his phone out and threaten to call 9-1-1 the next time he is approached while trying in his admittedly clumsy way to commune with the Almighty. An empty threat, yes.

A Catholic New World reader put it to Question Corner priest, John Dietzen:

I’ve had my arthritic fingers crushed. I’ve had parishioners blow their nose and then offer their hand to me. . . . I’m tempted to isolate myself in back [of church]. . . . [T]his . . …

Something of a replay here, from earlier posts — a coordination if you will, with more from the dissident Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani.

The supposed betrayal came to light officially, on April 4, 1969, when Pope Paul VI announced adoption of the Novus Ordo, “New Order,” of the mass.

Four and a half months later, on September 25, 1969, Cardinal Ottaviani and a colleague blew a whistle on it with an “intervention” accompanied by a cover letter which warned that the Novus Ordo “represents both as a whole, and in its details, a striking departure from the Catholic theology of the Mass as it was formulated” in the 16th-century Council of Trent.

Among other points made or stated, was that Catholics in general had “never, absolutely never, asked that the liturgy be changed or mutilated to make it easier to understand.”

(Catholics as a whole were not complaining, nor…

Pick and choose the best arguments for the mass facing in same direction as people.

This one popped out:

Mass offered with the priest facing the people, versus populum, presents another problem, one that Francis has spent his entire pontificate denouncing—clericalism. In the words of Cardinal Ratzinger, by turning the priest toward the people, “an unprecedented clericalization came on the scene. Now the priest—the “presider,” as they now prefer to call him—becomes the real point of reference for the whole liturgy. Everything depends on him… Less and less is God in the picture.”

Precisely. He’s the focus of attention, the performer, the man of the hour. Not good.

The mass is a show. Of what? Of God’s great mystery reenacted, his dealing with men, women, and children) as we know it through Scripture and Tradition. It’s been a long, hard slog through the ages, starting with Abraham. Neither peep show nor lecture but something symbolic and much more .

Consider it as drama. Gordon Graham, Professor of Philosophy and the Arts at Princeton Theological Seminary, did in 2007 in an essay that explored liturgy, especially the Catholic Mass and its high-church Protestant counterparts “as a kind of drama.”

The Mass, he said, is “a dramatic enactment of the gospel in which all present participate in a variety of roles.”

A sort of choreography is in play, that is. He elaborates.

There is first the “Gathering of the People,” including “latecomers who join in the opening hymn” unknowingly in the role of “physically representing the church as it…