Missal

A missal exists to put the whole Mass within reach of the celebrant. Its core is the Order of Mass, the fixed skeleton of the rite from the entrance to the dismissal, printed with the rubrics, the instructions traditionally set in red, that tell the priest what to do as well as what to say. Around that skeleton the book supplies the propers, the parts that change: the opening collect, the prayer over the offerings and the postcommunion for every Sunday, feast and saint's day of the year, together with the prefaces that vary the great eucharistic prayer and, in modern editions, several eucharistic prayers to choose among. Early medieval worship spread these materials across several volumes: the sacramentary held the priest's prayers, the lectionary the readings, the gradual the chants. As celebrations multiplied at side altars with a single priest taking every role, the plenary missal emerged, gathering everything into one book, and by the later Middle Ages it had become the normal form.

The modern Roman Missal reverses part of that consolidation: since the reforms of the twentieth century the readings again live in a separate lectionary, and the missal used at the altar contains the prayers and chants of the celebrant. Editions are controlled centrally, and vernacular translations are made from the Latin typical edition, so that the same book, in substance, stands on altars across the Latin Church.

The Council of Trent asked for order in a landscape of diverging local missals, and Pius V delivered it in 1570: a standardized Missale Romanum imposed on the whole Latin Church, with exceptions only for rites that could prove two centuries of continuous use, such as the Ambrosian rite of Milan and the Mozarabic rite of Toledo. The Tridentine missal proved remarkably stable. Revisions under Clement VIII in 1604 and Urban VIII in 1634 adjusted details, and later popes added feasts, but a priest of 1600 would have recognized the book of 1900.

The edition issued under John XXIII in 1962 was the last of that line. After the Second Vatican Council, the Missal of Paul VI, promulgated in 1969 and issued in 1970, rebuilt the book for a reformed rite: celebrated in the vernacular as well as Latin, with an expanded cycle of readings in a separate lectionary, additional eucharistic prayers, and revised prayers throughout. A third typical edition followed in 2002 under John Paul II, and its English translation of 2011 replaced the earlier rendering with one closer to the Latin. The 1962 missal did not disappear; communities attached to the older form continue to use it under conditions the papacy has adjusted more than once, and the two books now mark the two poles of modern Roman Catholic liturgical life. Through every revision the missal has remained what Trent made it, the instrument by which Rome keeps the Mass one.