Question & Answer Conducted by Fr: John Symon

Question. In your paper I have read various reports about the Normative Mass. What exactly is this further forthcoming change? As a choirmaster I should like to know !tow it will affect what we sing at Mass. If the Proper and Common are going to he altered, is it really worthwhile training a choir to sing them as they stand in English at present?
A. R., Birmingham.
Answer. As we all know, one of the Vatican Council's decisions about the Mass was that its ceremonies needed to be revised and of course the first stage of this revision has been an accomplished fact for some time. The Normative Mass, a phrase which simply means the standard form of Mass, represents a further stage in the Council's plan.
According to the farreaching principle set down in the Liturgy Constitution, when this reform has been carried through, we should be able to see more evidently where one part of the Mass ends and another begins. superfluous accretions will be pruned, and those parts which have been unfortunately neglected will be restored.
Just over a year ago, the new form of Mass was celebrated before the bishops gathered for the Synod in Rome. According to the current gossip, this form is expected to be made public early in the New Year but, to be realistic, experience has taught most of us to be just a little distrustful of predictions that this or that forthcoming reform is just round the corner.
Amateur prophets are invariably over-sanguine and, even although in these postconciliar days, matters tend to be dispatched more expeditiously in Rome than was the case in the past, the ecclesiastical wheels still turn fairly slowly.
Not surprisingly, the Roman Reform Commission on the Liturgy has quite properly a system of built-in checks and counterchecks; they are designed to ensure that the final published form of any new rites is as nearly perfect as possible.
The Normative Mass simply means the Massliturgy, revised and adjusted in accordance with the Vatican Council's Liturgy Constitution, and, particularly from the Romi;ri Commission's own periodical