Why Mass is Cheapened by Socializing

The house of God should be a place of prayer, as Jesus said. When people are chatting then those who seek to pray cannot. In the presence of Our Lord there should be silence and awe, for we participate in a profound mystery. From Life Site:

The liturgy of the Church has for its primary aim to honor and glorify God, and in so doing, to sanctify our souls, leading us to an ever deeper intimacy with Jesus Christ. In accomplishing these aims, the liturgy furthers the brotherhood of man: it enables fellowship to exist, for there is common brotherhood only in the common adoration of the Father through His Son. The problem with the notion of “fraternity” is not that it is completely false, but that it has been sundered from the only context in which it makes any sense, the only source from which it can actually come.

Sometimes people of “liberal” or “progressive” persuasions accuse traditionally-minded Catholics of so overemphasizing the transcendent and divine aspects of worship that we neglect the immanent and human aspects—that God gave liturgy to us for our benefit (“the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath”), and that it is a communal activity that expresses and builds up our social bond with one another.

Now, there is no question that liturgy is a public and communal action, and that it redounds to our benefit; God is already absolutely perfect and unchangeably good in every way and cannot be improved by anything we do for Him. It is good and fitting for us to pray to God as a people and to be conscious of our neighbors as fellow citizens of the household of God. (All the same, the public character of the liturgy consists not in any number of people being present, but because of the action of Christ the High Priest as Head of His Mystical Body that extends through time and space; this is why even a “private Mass” offered by a priest alone is still a public and corporate act.) This being said, we must make sure that our grasp of the meaning of community is sufficiently in tune with the real nature of the Church.

First and foremost, when we worship we are in the presence of God and of His angels and saints. Reverence, solemnity, and majesty belong to worship precisely because it is no mere human gathering, but a momentary opening up of our world to the life and grace of the heavenly Jerusalem. We are joined to all the saved who have worshiped in the past, with all who worship in the present (whether next to us in the pew or anywhere else in the world), and, in a way hidden in God’s foreknowledge and predilection, with all who will worship for ages to come. It is not just “our” worship, the action of this particular local community; it always has a cosmic, universal, transtemporal dimension to it. (Read more.)

 From Virgo Potens:

The central act of Catholic worship is what we’re doing right now. The Mass. Now you know that I'm like a broken record, I don't come up with a lot of original stuff so I’m constantly droning on and on about how the Mass isn't about you, it’s about God. You've heard that from me a million times. What the Mass is, is the self sacrifice of Jesus to His father on Calvary re-presented in ritual form. That ritual form is the perfect act of the virtue of religion, whereby we pay to God the worship that is His due and it is perfect because it is God Himself in the person of the Son, who pays worship to the Father. 

That is why whenever we come to Mass, even if we don't receive Communion, our participation in it is still the perfect act of worship. It is the most pleasing thing we can ever offer to God, because we are offering Him His very own Son. Jesus died on the cross and that sacrifice of propitiation was completed, which is why the priest who stands in the person of Christ at the altar receives the entire contents of the host and the chalice to symbolize the consummation and completion of the sacrifice. You know even if there were a million people at Mass, the priest has to consume the sacrifice, the victim even if not one other person receives. If I drop dead after the consecration, eventually get around to calling the funeral home, but before then another priest has to come in to complete the sacrifice. In that sacrifice the symbolism of its completion is by the consuming of the elements by the priest.

There is a priest who celebrates the Latin Mass somewhere else in the diocese and I won’t say who he is but he got the flu and he was sicker than a dog and he was like, “I have to say Mass. I can’t do this.” So right after the consecration he literally just faints because he was so sick and so of course everyone was all kind of flustered because Father is laying on the ground in front of the altar and he’s grabbing on to the altar saying, “I have to finish the sacrifice! I have to finish it.” So he was like fighting people off of him so that he could finish the Mass and then go home and go to bed for several weeks.  (Read more.)