Celtic Rite - Office and Liturgy - The Mass

The Mass

The Bobbio and Stowe Missals contain the Irish ordinary of a daily mass in its late Romanized form. Many of the variables are found in the Bobbio book and portions of some masses are in the Carlsruhe and Piacenza fragments besides which a little information is found in the St. Gall fragments, the Bangor Antiphonary, the order for the communion of the sick in the Books of Dimma, Mulling, and Deer, the tract in Irish at the end of the Stowe Missal and its variant in the Leabhar Breac.

The Bobbio book is a complete missal, for the priest only, with masses for holy says through the year. The Stowe Missal gives three differing forms, a fragmentary original of the 9th century, the correction by Moelcaich and the Mass described in the Irish tract. The pieces said by the people are in several cases only indicated by beginnings and endings. The original Stowe Mass approaches nearer to that of Bobbio than the revised form does.

Moelcaich's version is a mixed mass, Gelasian, Roman or Romano-Ambrosian for the most part, with much of a Hispano-Gallican type underlying it, and perhaps some indigenous details. It is evident that Roman additions or substitutions were recognized as such.

In the Bobbio book the Masses throughout the year seem to be Gallican in arrangement up to the Preface and Gelasian Roman afterwards. They contain at their fullest, besides Epistle, Gospel and sometimes a lesson from the Old Testament or the Apocalypse (the Prophetia of the Ambrosian Rite), the following variables:

1. Collects, sometimes called Post Prophetiam, sometimes not named.
2. Bidding prayer, sometimes called by its Gallican name, Praefatio. This is followed by one or more collects.
3. Collect post nomina.
4. Collect Ad Pacem.
5. Sometimes secreta, but whenever this title is used the mass is wholly Roman and has no Praefatio, Post nomina or Ad Pacem, but only one collect preceding it.
6. Contestatio, in one case called "immolatio missae". This is the Praefatio in the Roman sense.

Here the mass ends, with apparently no variable post-communion, though these are given in the three masses in the Stowe. The masses are: three for Advent; Christmas Eve and Day; St. Stephen; Holy Innocents; Sts. James and John; Circumcision; Epiphany; St. Peter's Chair; St. Mary; the Assumption (this and St. Peter's Chair are given in the Martyrology of Oengus on 18 Jan., evidently its place here); five for Lent; In symboli traditione; Maundy Thursday; Easter Eve and Day; two Paschal Masses; Invention of the Cross; Litany days; Ascension; Pentecost (called in Quinquaginsimo); St. John Baptist; in S. Johannis passione; Sts. Peter and Paul; St. Sigismund; Martyrs; one Martyr; one Confessor; St. Martin; one Virgin; for the Sick; Dedication; St. Michael; for travellers; for the priest himself; Missa omnimoda; four votive masses; for the Living and the Dead; in domo cujuslibet; seven Sunday Masses; for the king; two daily Masses; for a dead priest; for the Dead—sixty-one in all.

The mass in symboli traditione includes the traditio and expositio symboli, that for Maundy Thursday is followed by the Good Friday Lectio Passionis, and the Easter Eve mass is preceded by preces and intercessory orationes similar to those now used on Good Friday, by the benedictio cerei (for which a hymn and a prayer occur in the Bangor Antiphonary), here only represented by Exultet, and by the order of baptism.