Holy Mass: Approaches to the Mystery

This fine little book from 1951 studies the Mass, not from its origins or from theories about it, but from its fully-developed ritual acts. The Mass is a simple reality, yet at the same time rich and complex, as are all things that are concrete and alive. In order to understand it we must go around the mystery, see it from different angles, complete and correct one idea that one ceremony, or group of ceremonies suggests, by other ceremonies or by the same ones seen from another point of view. The Mass is an action, a movement, the work of a whole people assembled round the priest and the altar; the Mass is also and always a mystery, that is to say, a reality that is infinitely beyond us and that our intellectual reasoning could never reduce to a convenient schedule. To get a glimpse of the mystery, to present it under various lights, to bring the Christian soul into contact with it, leaving him the possibility of penetrating further by his own efforts, such has been the author’s ambition.