What Is the Roman Missal?

For most of Christian history the Mass was the one service nearly everyone attended, and the Missal is the book that tells the priest, line by line, what to pray and read on every day of the year. It is a liturgy, not scripture, but it is soaked in scripture from its first word to its last.

A book of the Mass

A missal is the book containing everything said at Mass: the prayers, the chants, the readings from the Epistles and Gospels, and the directions (called rubrics, because they were printed in red) for what the priest does. The Roman Missal is the missal of the Roman Rite, the form of Catholic worship used in the city of Rome and, from the sixteenth century, in nearly all of the Latin-speaking Western Church.

From many books to one

In the early centuries there was no single book. The priest's prayers were in a sacramentary, the readings in a lectionary or gospel book, and the sung parts in a book of chants. From about the tenth century these were gathered into “plenary” missals, and in the thirteenth century a missal compiled for the papal court was carried across Europe, chiefly by the Franciscans, and became the model for the rest. Even so, every region, diocese and religious order kept its own variations for centuries.

1570: the Missal is fixed

After the Council of Trent, Pope Pius V published a revised Missale Romanum in 1570 with the bull Quo primum, and required it across the Latin Church. Rites that could show at least two hundred years of continuous use were allowed to continue, which is why the Dominican, Carthusian and Ambrosian rites survived. Later popes made small revisions in 1604, 1634 and 1884, with further typical editions in 1920 and 1962, but the Mass it describes stayed recognisably the same for about four hundred years. This is the form often called the Tridentine Mass.

How the Missal is arranged

The Ordinary is the part that stays the same at every Mass: the prayers at the foot of the altar, the Kyrie and Gloria, the Creed, the Offertory, the Prefaces, the Sanctus and, at its centre, the Canon. The Proper is the part that changes. It runs through the Church's year, Advent to Christmas to Epiphany, Septuagesima and Lent, Holy Week, Easter, Pentecost and the long run of Sundays after it, and then through the saints' feasts, month by month. After these come the Commons of Saints, votive Masses and the Masses for the Dead. Each Mass has its own Introit, Collect, Epistle, Gradual, Gospel, Offertory, Secret, Communion and Postcommunion.

A lay missal in English

The priest said the Mass in Latin, so from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Catholic publishers issued “missals for the laity”: the whole Missal with the Latin and an English translation side by side, so the people could follow in their own language. The edition on this site is one of them, the Rev. F. C. Husenbeth's The Missal for the use of the Laity (London, 1853). It is in the public domain, and because it predates the changes to Holy Week in the 1950s, it preserves the older form of those services.

After 1962

The Second Vatican Council asked for the liturgy to be revised, and Pope Paul VI promulgated a new Roman Missal in 1969, with the Mass in the local language. In 2007 Pope Benedict XVI allowed the 1962 Missal to be used more freely, and in 2021 Pope Francis restricted that permission again. This site carries the older Missal as a historical and devotional text; it takes no position on those decisions.

On this site

The Roman Missal has its own shelf in the Library. The English of the Ordinary, the Canon, the Masses for the Dead and the Proper of the Season is being added in order, with the Proper of Saints to follow. It is shown as a text “in historical use by” the Catholic Church and is never counted as scripture, though the Epistles and Gospels in it are Bible readings. The Latin is planned as a later pass.