Is Your Missal On-Target? (part I)

Just before you find a seat in those increasingly crowded pews, do you grab one of those handy (but often well-worn) red (or yellow) paperback missalettes? And did you remember to grab the printed out slip paper with the propers for the day in question? Once in your pew, are you fumbling with loose holy cards because you have no handy place to stick them?

Welcome to the world of Latin Mass attendees with no Latin missal of their own!

At one point or another, most of us were a "first-timer," stumbling into a timeless ritual which was so very different from our Novus Ordo experience. Unless we had a friend who helpfully shoved a thousand(+) page Latin Missal in our hands and then guided us through this ribbon and that ribbon as we learned our way around, odds are that you picked up one of those handy little printed missalettes stacked on a table in the back somewhere. They made following the actions on the altar, along with the responses easy and understandable. No doubt about it, those mini-missal booklets are great! Not surprisingly, many TLM veterans still use the "Red Books" as their go-to missal week-in and week-out.

If you're thinking of graduating to a more comprehensive missal to assist you in your prayers, you have a bunch of options from which to choose! We'll explore some of the more popular editions in our next blog post.