Encounter or an obligation – our understanding of Mass molds us in the world

When I was growing up, the conventional wisdom was that you had fulfilled your obligation to attend Sunday Mass if you arrived before the Gospel was proclaimed and stayed until you had received Communion.

As a valid principle, this was akin to the notion – handed down from one generation of college students to the next – that they can leave the classroom if their instructor is more than 10 minutes late. They forget that they are in school to learn, not to avoid learning.

This all came to mind recently when the celebrant at a Mass I attended gently chided parishioners who make a habit of the early departure. From a purely practical point of view, this behavior was more understandable seven decades ago than it is now. Before the reforms that followed the Second Vatican Council, a lot went on after Communion, including the celebrant, with his back to the people, reading aloud, in Latin, what was euphemistically called “the last Gospel,” namely the first 14 verses of the Gospel according to John. And this was followed by the “prayers at the foot of the altar,” three “Hail Marys,” the “Hail, Holy Queen,” and the “Prayer to St. Michael.” Now, there is only the Prayer After Communion, announcements, and the final blessing and dismissal.

But “pre-Vatican II” or now, the compulsion to leave before the Mass is over suggests a misunderstanding of why we attend Mass in the first place. It isn’t because attending Mass is an “obligation”— an unfortunate word in this context. We attend to encounter Jesus Christ. We encounter him in a palpable way in the Eucharist, his body and blood, and in the assembly, each other.

Jesus tended to mean what he said. So, when he said that the bread and wine were his body and blood, he meant it. When he said, “where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them,” he meant it. We attend Mass to have this mystical experience in which we literally, not figuratively, become one with him and – in him – one with each other. Why would we be in a hurry for that to end? Why would we not, like Peter on Mount Tabor, say, “Lord, it is good for us to be here”?

Perhaps you’ve heard the story told by the late Father Benedict Groeschel, CFR, about the non-Catholic clergyman who told him, regarding the Eucharist, “If I believed what you believe, I would … run inside the church, fall on my knees, and never get up again.” Are we at Mass because we believe what Father Groeschel believed? Even if we feel compelled to engage in some form of public worship, do we choose the Mass because we believe that Jesus is alive and that he is there with us? Willingness – eagerness, even – to bolt from Mass at the earliest opportunity comes down to what we do or do not believe about the real presence of the risen Christ in the Eucharist and in the Church.

Sooner or later, of course, we have to “go,” as the deacon tells us in the dismissal, as I have told many a congregation. A celebrant once asked me not to use the form of the dismissal that says, “The Mass is ended.” He preferred “Go and announce the gospel of the Lord” or “Go in peace, glorifying the Lord with your life,” and I get that. He didn’t want even those folks who stayed till the end to think of the Mass as just one event in their week. But whether we do go to announce the Gospel or do go to glorify the Lord depends on what we experience – Was it really an encounter with the risen Christ and his Mystical Body? – and what we take with us when we leave.

Deacon Paolino is a member of Our Lady of Lourdes Parish, Whitehouse Station.