The Liturgy of the Word

Last year, Catholicism In Focus asked the question, “How Late Can I Come to Mass?” Officially, there isn’t a rule or an actual cutoff. There are no bouncers at the door. While most people would say that if you made it by the Gospel and Homily, you were good, this has simply never been the case.

But the very fact that most people thought this—and held to this conviction so strongly that they fought with me on social media when I presented this video—shows how engrained this notion was. Why is this significant? Because implicitly, the vast majority of people have been raised to believe that the what maters at Mass is the Eucharist, and everything else is secondary. “Oh, don’t worry, you just missed the first reading. You didn’t miss what really matters…” You might not find someone who actually says these words that bluntly, but the idea is certainly there.

This, quite obviously, is not what the Church wants us to think, and the problem was apparently so bad, that it had to explicitly state the opposite in its Constitution on the Divine Liturgy: “The two parts which, in a certain sense, go to make up the Mass, namely, the liturgy of the word and the eucharistic liturgy, are so closely connected with each other that they form but one single act of worship. Accordingly this sacred Synod strongly urges pastors of souls that, when instructing the faithful, they insistently teach them to take their part in the entire Mass, especially on Sundays and feasts of obligation” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 56.)

The liturgy of the Word is not simply a warm up to what really matters. It is a gift in and of itself. In reading from Scripture, Christ is made truly present. That is pretty incredible, and something that we should take seriously!


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