The New International Encyclopædia/Missal

MISSAL (ML. missale, from missalis, relating to the mass, from missa, mass). The book which contains the prayers, lessons, and rubrics of the mass in the Roman Catholic Church. Until the Middle Ages the various parts of the service were distributed in separate books, according to the part taken by the assistants; the parts which the celebrant alone recited in the mass and other sacraments were contained in the Liber Sacramentorum, or sacramentary. But when low masses became more frequent, and the celebrant had to say practically the whole service, the parts were collected into one book called Missale Plenarium. These complete missals have been in use since the sixth century. By the twelfth, the Roman liturgy was in use generally throughout Western Europe; but a number of provinces and dioceses had their own missals. The disadvantages of this diversity in liturgical use caused numerous requests to be made to the Council of Trent for a reform in the matter. The Council appointed a commission on the subject in 1562, and as they had not concluded their labors by the last session, left the decision in the hands of the Pope. The commissioners, among whom was Thomas Goldwell, Bishop of Saint Asaph in Wales, were not instructed to compile a new missal, but by examination of ancient manuscripts to reconstruct the Roman missal according to the rites and customs of the Fathers. Pius V. authorized the missal which was the result of their work by the bull Quo primum of 1570, commanding its universal use in places which could not show a prescription of 200 years for their local uses. Thus the older Orders, such as the Carthusians and Dominicans, preserved their traditional rites; and the Ambrosian missal held its ground in the Diocese of Milan. Further revisions took place under Clement VIII. in 1604 and Urban VIII. in 1634; later revisions, as by Leo XIII. in 1884 and 1898, have touched merely matters of detail, principally in the rubrics. Besides these and the tables which are in the beginning of the book, it includes the proper of the seasons, i.e. the service for the Sundays and greater festivals; the proper of saints, arranged in the order of the civil calendar from Saint Andrew’s Day, which regulates the beginning of Advent and thus of the ecclesiastical year; and the common of saints, the services for those days which have no special mass. The central and invariable parts, known as the Ordo and Canon Missæ, come before the service for Easter Day. The older local missals, especially the French and English, are of great interest to liturgical students. No new attempts have been made to construct such books in the Catholic Church except by some French bishops under Jansenist influence about the end of the seventeenth century; these held their own in certain places even as late as the middle of the nineteenth century, when they were all laid aside, largely through the influence of the celebrated scholar Dom Guéranger. Consult authorities referred to under Liturgy; and for the old English missals, Maskell, The Ancient Liturgy of the Church of England, according to the use of Sarum, York, Hereford, and Bangor (3d ed., Oxford, 1882). See also Mass.