OU WILL WANT to download these pages from the famous “People’s Mass Book” (1964), which was based on Omer Westendorf’s “People’s Hymnal” (1955). Our readers will remember the article dealing with the Elvis Presley Mass—something extremely relevant to the following document.
Notice how this 1964 book carefully 1 refers to the Low Mass. And notice what it says about “Masses without music” and “recited Masses”—were those prayers inserted by WLP, or am I missing something?
* * PDF Download • PEOPLE’S MASS BOOK
The translation of Eucharistic Prayer No. 1 is interesting. So is the part instructing the people to recite the ORATIO FIDELIUM (“Prayer of the Faithful”) while the priest is saying the Offertory prayers—which could not be said in English, if memory serves. 2 So much for entering more deeply into the Mass!
I could list more peculiar items, but instead I will let the reader discover them without my comments. Several aspects of this document strike me as inexplicable and bizarre. However, it certainly bolsters what we wrote about the Elvis Mass.
The book contains a bunch of interesting Mass settings at the end. Here’s the first page of something that will seem familiar to those who have looked at MR3. The book also contains a Mass based on the theme from “Dragnet,” a popular radio (and later television) program in those days. You can read more about that here.
NOTES FROM THIS ARTICLE:
1 Cf. the final two pages of the PDF file.
2 Fr. Valentine, a priest in those years, said they never bothered to allow them to be translated into English because they planned on eliminating them—which is precisely what they did.
