An Elevator Speech

27 Jul

I imagine pushing the “up” button, and hearing someone ask, “Hey, Father, what’s with this new Mass that’s coming in November?” We get into the elevator. I have less than two minutes, before one of us gets off. I’d better have an elevator speech ready. Maybe this one would work:

It’s the same Mass. It’s still going to be in English. It’s just a new English translation of the Mass that was given to the world in Latin – in Latin because it was given to the whole world – back in 1970. It’s the same Mass, just some new English words.

Some of the new words are really lovely. Some are closer to the words in the Bible. Some will make it more clear about what we believe. Some of the words will help us remember that the Mass is something special: we’ll use some words that we use only at Mass, words that we don’t use when we speak to each other in an elevator.

It is going to be a real good opportunity for us to fall in love with the Mass all over again.

Oops! This is my floor. 

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