The Order Of The Mass a Different Vision

What makes The Holy Sacrifice Validate and Licit?
There is a principle in mathematics that says that the order of the factors does not alter the result, could this principle be applied to the order of the Mass? This is something that only the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (GIRM) can answer. GIRM defines very clear what elements and in which order the holy Mass should be said. While onthe one hand this essay will approach the history of the development of the Roman Missal from three specific moments: 1570, and 1969. On the other hand it will try to make some movements within the current Order of the Roman Missal that could allow the liturgy to be more fluent and meaningful. It is important to clarify that these changes do not have to do with the rites themselves but with theplacement in where they are located. Therefore the peace of kiss, the creed (profession of faith), and the Our Father should be moved to someplace else within the roman Missal.
The liturgy of the Church “consists in the whole of the public worship which she gives to God throughout the ecclesiastical year” and “is concerned with visible actions, sensible objects, and audible words”. The liturgythen, involves human senses. By seeing the priest presiding over the Holy Eucharist, listening the word of God, and tasting and touching the body of Christ all the senses are made participate in the celebration. This participation of the material things in the liturgy makes it on the one hand changeable and on the other hand immutable. Changeable in the sense that it takes culture customs fromspecific places and transforms them into a way of worshipping God. Mutable in the sense that reminds us the salvific work achieved by our Lord Jesus Christ. As Robert Cabie says beautifully about the celebration of the Eucharist, “instituted as it was by Christ, the Mass has never ceased to be what it was in the beginning. And yet in the course of the centuries the addition of rights and prayers hascaused its form to differ widely according to time and place, even leaving its basic structure unaltered”. The liturgy precisely allows the Church to do everything “properly and in order (1 Cor 14:40)”.
I remember a couple Sundays ago when I went to Mass with one of my best friends asking him -at the moment of the offertory- why the priest did not say the creed. I felt embarrassing with myfriend’s answer. We just did it. What happened to me that day is what often happens to many catholic that participate in the Holy Sacrifice. The Vatican II speaks about “full conscious and active participation of the faithful in liturgical celebrations which is demanded by the very nature of the liturgy”. What does then full conscious and active participation mean? Full conscious means to understand whatwe are celebrating, and indeed to comprehend why we celebrate the liturgy. This is one of the major gaps that the liturgy of the Catholic Church has, people do not know ‘why’. The reason of this lack of knowledge is because “we focus on the practice (what), but often neglected the theory (why)”.
The history of the development of the Roman Missal has its origin in the beginning of theChristianity. The early Church always understood and practiced the words of Jesus “Do this in remembrance of me (1 Cor 11:24)” in a liturgical context. During the Medieval and reformation period (1570), “the Mass in the Missal seemed to be merely a series of disconnected rites, the majority of which were performed with the priest at the altar”. There was a kind of ‘clericalization of the liturgy’. The 1969Order of Mass, though based on the 1570 Order of Mass, “was imbued with a new spirit and vision”. This new spirit allowed the priest to have ‘liberty to speak to the people at the beginning of the Mass’, gave him ‘options among various prayers texts’ and dealt with ‘liturgical place’. The use of varied locations, in fact, “derives from the nature of the liturgical action”. As Vatican II states,...