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Views from the Choir Loft

The Distracting Prayer of the Faithful

Dr. Peter Kwasniewski · May 16, 2013

N THE SPIRIT OF THE Reform of the Reform, one might well question the role of the Prayer of the Faithful (or General Intercessions) in the new Mass. A motley collection of petitions, usually poorly written and even more poorly read, disturbs the natural flow of the liturgy as it proceeds from the readings into the Profession of Faith, which is the natural response to God’s revelation of Himself, and into the Offertory. The homily already threatens to disturb the liturgical flow, because it represents more the temporal human axis of liturgy, but a good homily need not last for more than a few minutes, and if it is truly good, it has whetted the soul’s appetite for the Bread of Life through pondering the Word of God. With the solemn chanting of the Creed, the eternal divine axis of the liturgy decisively reasserts itself, as the soul exercises the gift of faith and prepares to bring gifts to the altar, where the Lord will transform them into the gift of Himself. Seen from “above,” looking at the structure and flow of the liturgical action, the intercessory prayers mark a most awkward caesura in the liturgical action.

It is different in the Good Friday liturgy because this liturgy is already radically different from the form that evolved for the other days of the year. The public intercessory prayers have all the more power and force for being specially and solemnly recited on Good Friday, the day on which we recall the historical event of the Lord’s sacrifice and death. One is almost knocked over by the power of the Good Friday liturgy; one only waters down its forcefulness by borrowing its features and distributing them widely, albeit superficially, throughout the year.

One can make a similar argument regarding the low Mass and the Requiem, which served as models for the Novus Ordo. As long as they were done in their own limited context, the low Mass and the Requiem perfectly served their purposes. As soon as certain features of the Requiem low Mass became the standard Mass, the balance was destroyed. If the reformers were so concerned about the hegemony of the merely recited Mass and the daily Mass for the Dead, they should have found intelligent ways to limit these practices rather than effectively allowing them to take over completely. Nowadays, almost every Mass is a low Mass, and the Mass for the Dead itself has been “lowered” to such an extent that it seldom seems to be what it actually is. Even the qualities that were precious in the low Mass and Requiem were destroyed, ironically by taking the “low” elements and lowering them as far as possible without vitiating the validity of the Mass as such.

Returning to the intercessory prayers: it is unnecessary to establish a separate part of the liturgy for them as long as one retains (as one should) the Roman Canon, with its beautiful intercessions for the Church, the Pope, the Bishop, priests, and the people, and, after consecration, for the faithful departed. There is a pause at the Memento, Domine, famularum famulorumque tuorum for remembering those for whom we have promised to pray and “all those dear” to us. Once more, the Placeat tibi is intercessory, and rightly so: it brings to a full close the majestic action of the sacrifice begun at the Suscipe, Domine and tracing an arc whose apogee is the elevation and whose perigee, if I may so speak, is the Domine, non sum dignus, when the glorified Lamb of God, of infinite holiness, is besought to heal our souls, that he may enter and make His dwelling there. The end joins to the beginning in a cycle that is not Nietzsche’s despairing eternal recurrence but the joyous certainty of faith: He who created the world at the beginning, He who re-created it by His incarnation, will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and will give to His faithful servants the reward of everlasting happiness.

Opinions by blog authors do not necessarily represent the views of Corpus Christi Watershed.

Filed Under: Articles Last Updated: January 1, 2020

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About Dr. Peter Kwasniewski

A graduate of Thomas Aquinas College (B.A. in Liberal Arts) and The Catholic University of America (M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy), Dr. Peter Kwasniewski is currently Professor at Wyoming Catholic College. He is also a published and performed composer, especially of sacred music.

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Corpus Christi Watershed

President’s Corner

    “Yahweh” in church songs?
    My pastor asked me to write a weekly column for our parish bulletin. The one scheduled to run on 22 June 2025 is called “Three Words in a Psalm” and speaks of translating the TETRAGRAMMATON. You can read the article at this column repository. All of them are quite brief because I was asked to keep within a certain word limit.
    —Jeff Ostrowski
    “Music List” • Pentecost Sunday
    Some have expressed interest in perusing the ORDER OF MUSIC I prepared for Pentecost Sunday (8 June 2025). If such a thing interests you, feel free to download it as a PDF file. Because our choir is on break this week, the music is relatively simple.
    —Jeff Ostrowski
    “Truly Great Processional” • (Pipe Organ)
    I stumbled upon this live recording of a PROCESSIONAL I played on the pipe organ in 2002. It’s an excerpt from a much longer composition by Sebastian Bach. In those days, there weren’t sophisticated recording devices allowing one “fix” wrong notes. (Perhaps they existed, but we didn’t have machines like that.) So it was necessary to play the entire piece from beginning to end. If you’re a church organist, feel free to download the PDF score. I suppose it’s only a matter of time until some joker uses “artificial intelligence” to play music at church … but there’s something so satisfying about playing an organ in real life.
    —Jeff Ostrowski

Quick Thoughts

    Antiphons Don’t Match?
    A reader wants to know why the Entrance and Communion antiphons in certain publications deviate from what’s prescribed by the GRADUALE ROMANUM published after Vatican II. Click here to read our answer. The short answer is: the Adalbert Propers were never intended to be sung. They were intended for private Masses only (or Masses without music). The “Graduale Parvum,” published by the John Henry Newman Institute of Liturgical Music in 2023, mostly uses the Adalbert Propers—but sometimes uses the GRADUALE text: e.g. Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul (29 June).
    —Corpus Christi Watershed
    When to Sit, Stand and Kneel like it’s 1962
    There are lots of different guides to postures for Mass, but I couldn’t find one which matched our local Latin Mass, so I made this one: sit-stand-kneel-crop
    —Veronica Brandt
    The Funeral Rites of the Graduale Romanum
    Lately I have been paging through the 1974 Graduale Romanum (see p. 678 ff.) and have been fascinated by the funeral rites found therein, especially the simply-beautiful Psalmody that is appointed for all the different occasions before and after the funeral Mass: at the vigil/wake, at the house of the deceased, processing to the church, at the church, processing to the cemetery, and at the cemetery. Would that this “stational Psalmody” of the Novus Ordo funeral rites saw wider usage! If you or anyone you know have ever used it, please do let me know.
    —Daniel Tucker

Random Quote

No concession should ever be made for the singing of the Exsultet, in whole or in part, in the vernacular.

— ‘Fr. Augustin Bea, S.J. in the years immediately before the Second Vatican Council’

Recent Posts

  • PDF Download • “Text by Saint Francis of Assisi” (choral setting w/ organ: Soprano & Alto)
  • “Yahweh” in church songs?
  • “Music List” • Pentecost Sunday
  • “Participation” • Recovering its Receptive Dimension
  • “Breathtaking Photographs” • First Mass of Father Michael Caughey, FSSP (Muskegon, MI)

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