The New Instruction To The Roman Missal

     The Readings at Mass for the next five Sundays (17th through 21st) are devoted to the Bread Of Life Discourse taken from the Gospel of St. John Chapter 6.

     The prospect of five Sundays devoted to the same chapter of St. John’s Gospel presents a helpful opportunity to explain the Eucharist. This explanation is important because with the first Sunday of Advent 2003 we will mark the implementation of the new General Instruction To The Roman Missal in the Archdiocese of Chicago. Within the next months we would like to begin the catechesis of all in our Parish, and begin planning for the General Instruction’s implementation.
The General Instruction to the Roman Missal is the pastoral introduction to the revised Roman Missal, which will be published in the near future. The General Instruction provides us with the norms for celebrating the Mass, and the theology underlying the norms. The Roman Missal contains all the prayer texts for the liturgy of the Eucharist, which is used by the priest at all Masses.
     The Missal presently in use was issued in 1975. Since that time, the Church universal has had years of pastoral liturgical experience, which has given rise to some new interpretation, and clarification of the norms. Most of the norms are not new. What is important to understand is the spirituality and theology that gives form to the way in which we put the norms into practice. Taking the time now before the new Roman Missal is published enables us to refresh our understanding of the Mass, our role as priests and deacons, and the assembly’s role as active participants in the liturgy.
     That is why within the next month we will reflect on the Bread Of Life Gospel selections in a catechetical effort. The Sunday articles during these weeks in this section will begin a renewal of understanding of the celebration of Mass in our Parish and the centrality of the Eucharist, both in the life of the Church and the individual believer. The articles during the next 5 weeks will be the Bread Of Life Discourse regarding the following themes:

• The Need We Have For Sunday Mass
• We Worship Together
• Receiving Life And Giving Life
• The Eucharist As Self-Gift In Generative And Faithful Love
• Reverence Before The Mystery: The Way Of Our Worship

     Afterwards, articles on the new General Instruction to the Roman Missal in the bulletin will be about:

• The Importance Of Sunday Eucharist
• Ministries And Roles Within The Liturgical Assembly
• Postures And Gestures
• Music In The Liturgy: Let All God’s People Sing!
• Hearing The Word Of God
• The Eucharistic Prayer
• The Reception Of Holy Communion At Mass

     Please, let us keep ourselves informed of the reasons behind some of the new implementation of the General Instruction.

Bread of Life

The Multiplication Of The Loaves And Fish: 
The Need We Have For Sunday Mass
“Why do I have to go to Mass?” It is the question of the drowsy teenager on a Sunday morning. Sometimes, it is a question posed by older and more mature people. In fact, many decide not to go to Mass. A Church precept, or an external obligation or expectation, or even social convention do not seem capable of compelling people to come to the Lord’s house to share in the Eucharist.
Today’s Gospel gives us an intrinsic or internal reason why the Eucharist must be central to our lives, why we need to go and, indeed must go and participate. At the deepest levels of our lives—where we struggle with sin and death, and our life direction and our commitments, and primary loves, and our quest for justice and peace—we are incapable of sustaining ourselves. We cannot feed ourselves with our own meager resources, what is of our own making and devising. It is the Lord alone who can feed us and sustain us when we experience our deepest hungers.
He takes what is little and limited and transforms it not only into a sufficient resource, but into abundant blessing—“more than they could eat.”
To be at the Lord’s altar, to share in His self-giving sacrifice, to eat the Bread of Life is an absolute necessity if we are to survive. For, we go to Mass to meet and receive the Lord Jesus Christ here so that we can live with Him forever. To share in Sunday Mass is not a personal choice or merely a matter of an imposed external obligation, it is the intrinsic need and a sacred duty of people who can only be sustained by the Lord.

The Crowd Seeks Jesus: We Worship Together
     A couple of years ago, the Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam published a book entitled “Bowling Alone.” He wrote about the decline of bowling leagues in America in the last several decades. People do not have the time to get together, or are more individualistic in their choices, or simply do not feel the need to connect. The pattern of “bowling alone,” Putnam suggests, is symptomatic of a larger issue of disconnection in our society. He offers some hope that we can recover a richer and deeper sense of life lived together.
     In our Catholic Christian faith, we do not go it alone. The Second Vatican Council in a very telling statement said that God “...has willed to make men and women holy and save them, not as individuals without any bond or link between them, but rather to make them into a people who might acknowledge Him and serve Him in holiness.” (“Dogmatic Constitution On The Church”, n. 9).
     Notice the communal or corporate sense in the first reading from the Book of Exodus. “The whole Israelite community” interacts with Moses and God. In the Gospel, “the crowd...got into boats” to go in search of Jesus. When they found Him, they are in dialogue with Him together. He challenges them collectively to come to accomplish the works of God, and to hunger for the Bread of Life. Truly, we go to God together.
     When we gather on Sunday for Mass, even in very simple ways, we give witness in our worship to the conviction that we go to God together, united to one another and with all the angels and saints. The common postures of sitting, standing, and kneeling as well as the gestures of signing ourselves with the cross, or the action of responding and singing in common—all this highlights our identity not just as individual believers, but as God’s own faithful people.