Explanation of the Holy Mass

By Dom Prosper Gueranger, OSB

Hardback

265 Pages

Dust Jacket with Ribbon Marker

Nihil Obstat: CPM

Imprimatur: Guliel Walsh, Archbishop of Dublin

There has never been a book that so well elucidates how the active participation in the Holy Sacrifice, which is the duty of all the laity, can best be accomplished. This was written after The Liturgical Year and was the last book translated by Dom Laurence Shepard, Guéranger’s disciple, before his own death. This book is meant to be a companion volume to The Liturgical Year, and it perfectly matches the set.

The well-known translator of The Liturgical Year has gone to his rest, but in a twofold sense, we may say: his works follow him. This, his last and unfinished work, must therefore come to the readers of The Liturgical Year as a loving farewell from him, a memento of him and of his life-long labors in the cause of Holy Church.
To many, it will be of consoling interest to know that, up to the day of his death, as long as speech was his, Rev. Dom Laurence Shepherd was full of the great passion of his heart — to gain souls to the love of Holy Church. Several times, within even the last month of his painful illness, did he strive to master sinking nature and once more guide his trembling pen to tell the faithful something more of the Bride of Christ, the Church of God. Those last pages, which came from his failing hand, close with the word Lucia in the explanation of the Nobis quoque peccatoribus, page 158. Before the month was out, his friends had poured forth the consoling prayer put on their lips by Mother Church, et lux perpetua luceat ei! Hope had kindled in every heart the reverential confidence that the Champion of Holy Church had received the “corona justitiae” — had passed to the patria lucis aeternae.

St. Mary’s Abbey, Stanbrook,
June 14, 1885.

Preface

The great bishop of Poitiers, Msgr. Pie, in his funeral oration on our father, Dom Guéranger, said: “You have long been feasting at a royal board, where you were daily regaled with the most delicate and varied food. Those Conferences on the Christian Life and Virtues, and that incomparable Commentary on your Rule, you have no right to keep them to yourselves.”

Notwithstanding so pressing an invitation on the part of so competent a judge, as was this devoted friend of our Father, we have long hesitated before yielding up the secret of our family treasure to the public gaze. It seemed to us that such notes as these would only do for his own sons, eager for paternal instructions and never likely to carp at either the simplicity of the form or at the incorrectness of the language.

But so very many friends, assiduous readers of Dom Guéranger’s The Liturgical Year, by their repeated solicitations and earnest appeals, have succeeded at length in dissipating our first fears. They are fully aware that they cannot expect to find once more the eminent writer himself, as we have mere notes, jotted down at the time, almost on the sly, and, afterward hastily put together in a form, the faultiness and inexactitude of which can never be imputed to anyone, save to the more or less faithful copyists. But there is one thing they are sure to find in these pages — the teacher and the father, who in intimacy with his friends or his monks, ever with a lavish hand, distributed that sure and luminous doctrine that leads souls to God.

We here open our proposed publication by a short commentary on the ceremonies of Holy Mass, incomplete though we certainly know it to be, in many points, and characterized, as were all our Father's conferences, by a total absence of all pretension to erudition: we have not, therefore, presumed to change or add anything. Yet mere notes, as these are, seem to us calculated to do good of no little importance.

In order to render them of more practical utility, we have given, in the Appendix, the Ordinary of the Mass, interspersed with the same paraphrase which has already appeared in The Liturgical Year of Dom Guéranger.

Thus will the faithful be provided in this small work with an efficient means of uniting themselves with the priest in an enlightened manner and be helped to derive more fruit from their assisting at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.