ASK FATHER CHAS - EP2
If Mass is One Prayer, Why Do We Pray During Mass?
You are correct when you say that Holy Mass is one prayer. In fact, it is the greatest prayer there is because it is an actual participation in Jesus's supreme offering of himself on the cross that he made once and for all, right, once and for all.
So there is this timelessness to Holy Mass, in that we are brought to the original Holy Thursday at the Last Supper, and made present at the foot of the Cross on Good Friday on Mount Calvary. Mass is the supreme prayer because Jesus, the Lamb of God, is the holy sacrifice of the mass that is on that altar.
But within that supreme prayer of the mass is a number of prayers that include our own personal prayers.
For example, each of us are called to bring to God at mass our own prayer intentions. And so when the priest says, let us pray right after the Gloria, there's supposed to be a brief moment of silence when we recall all those personal intentions for which we want to pray. And then the priest recites the call. It spelled c-o-l-l-e-c-t, like collect, but it's pronounced collect because in that prayer, the priest is meant to collect all those personal intentions.
The people are saying in the silence of their heart and unite them in the one prayer, the collect that kicks off the liturgy of the Word.
So the prayer that is the mass is a collection of prayers. Think of the universal prayer. It's actually called the prayer of the faithful, singular prayer, not prayers of the faithful plural.
Because even though it's composed of many different petitions, it's all supposed to be united in the end as the one prayer of the faithful. So after that, we then enter into the liturgy of the Eucharist, which includes another prayer, the Eucharistic Prayer, of which there are four main versions. Right then we have the most famous prayer of them all, the Our Father.
So this idea that you can call something a prayer, but within that one prayer have many prayers is not something that's restricted to Holy Mass. I mean, think about the prayer of the Holy Rosary. That one prayer of the Holy Rosary has six Our Fathers, 53 Hail Marys, six glory Mes. And so in our prayer time, we are continually bringing many prayers to mind and uniting them to the one prayer of Jesus Christ, who is a prayer, in a sense. He's the offering, the definitive offering to God the Father, who makes all things new. Amen.
ALL ROADS CATHOLIC MEDIA
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