For parents

Using it with your child

• Read a moment or two together before Sunday, and look out for them at Mass. One or two a week is plenty. Tip
• At Mass, the red line on each page is the one thing to whisper to a younger child: what to do next. Tip
• Afterwards, ask what they noticed, then try the quiz together. Tip

Go deeper

Each one opens from the moments it explains.

• Why the Mass?Where Jesus asks us to celebrate it, and how the first Christians did.
• The Real Presence and transubstantiationWhat the Church means when it says the bread and wine become Jesus.
• The Mass as a sacrificeHow the Mass makes the Cross present without repeating it.
• Two kinds of priesthoodWhy every baptised person is a priest, and what the ordained priest does that no one else can.
• Sin, Confession and CommunionWhat the “Lord, have mercy” does, what Communion does, and when Confession comes first.
• Who receives Communion, and whyWho may receive, how to prepare, and why other Christians usually don’t.
• Heaven at MassHow the Mass joins the worship of heaven, with the angels and saints.

Teaching, Tradition and Tip

Every fact in the guide has a source, under Where this comes from, and one of these labels:

• Teaching What the Church teaches, or what the Missal itself says.
• Tradition A long-standing devout explanation that isn’t official teaching.
• Tip Our own way of explaining something.

This guide follows the Mass most parishes celebrate (the Roman Missal in its 2011 English translation), with the postures used in Singapore. A few gestures differ from country to country.

Then and now

Around the year 155, St Justin Martyr described a Sunday Mass to the Roman emperor: readings, a homily, prayers for everyone, the kiss of peace, bread and wine brought up, a long prayer of thanksgiving, the people’s “Amen”, and Communion taken to those who couldn’t come. That’s still the shape today (CCC 1345).

Priest, Prophet, King

At baptism we are anointed with chrism and joined to Christ, “who is anointed priest, prophet, and king” (CCC 1241; CCC 783–786). The parts of the Mass are a good way to remember those three:

• Prophet We take in God’s Word so we can pass it on (CCC 785).
• Priest We offer ourselves together with Jesus (CCC 1368; GIRM 79f), and pray for the world in the Prayer of the Faithful (GIRM 69).
• King Christ’s kingship is service: “to reign is to serve him” (CCC 786). We’re sent out “to do good works, praising and blessing God” (GIRM 90).

Tip Matching the three to the parts of the Mass is our own way of teaching it, not the Church’s division of the Mass.

About the sources

Citations link to the paragraph itself on vatican.va: the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (GIRM), the Code of Canon Law and the Church’s handbook of indulgences (Enchiridion Indulgentiarum). For the postures (GIRM 43, 82 and 160) the links go to the official universal text, because the English version on vatican.va is the edition adapted for the United States. Singapore’s own norms come from the Archdiocese of Singapore. Bible quotations are from the New American Bible, also on vatican.va. The introductions to the Lectionary and the liturgical calendar link to copies published by a diocese and a bishops’ conference, since vatican.va doesn’t carry them in English. Where a word’s origin is explained, the source is usually the Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), and older devotions cite the Raccolta, the Church’s collection of indulgenced prayers before 1968. Early writings link to public translations: the Didache on New Advent, Pliny in Fordham University’s Internet History Sourcebooks, and Tacitus in the Loeb Classical Library translation.