The Mass: A Literal, Historical, and Dogmatic Explanation of Its Prayers and Ceremonies

L’Explication de la Messe was published at Paris in 1726 in 4 volumes. It was received with great acclamation, and has since become the classic exposition on Holy Mass. There are several translations, among them in Dutch, Italian, and Latin. This is the first English translation, and will consist of 4 or 5 volumes.The first volume contains the explanation of the prayers and ceremonies of Holy Mass in their literal, historical, and dogmatic contexts, based authoritative sources, ancient and modern, in France, the eldest daughter of the Holy Mother Church, and neighboring realms. In it, Fr. Lebrun sets out to explain the true and right worship of the God in Holy Mass, the unbloody sacrifice of Jesus Christ our Lord, and the fount of all graces. He explains the teaching of the Church on every prayer said, the meanings of the gestures made, from the time the Priests prepares to vest, all the way through the acts of thanksgiving. He also traces the historical development of the ceremonies. In his preface, he says: “We cannot even begin to understand the true significance of the words said in Holy Mass, but by their explanation one by one, and that whatever is said ought to be based on the Fathers, on the most ancient of the writers of the Church, and on Tradition.” He also dispels certain errors of those who swam in the currents of naturalism and rationalism, and got mired in the mud of Protestant and Jansenist heresies that mushroomed on the heels of the rebellions against Holy Mother Church.The work is undoubtedly the result of a labor of love. For decades, Fr. Lebrun scoured the public, private, collegial, and monastic libraries throughout Europe, and managed streams of correspondence, in an exhaustive effort to secure documentary evidence of the customs, rites, and ceremonies of Holy Mass. His research notes now occupy yards of shelf-space at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, in Paris. (BnF Latin Mss. 16796–16818). In the 300 years since its publication, reference and other books on the liturgy have imported whole sections of his work, often without attribution. Writing 150 years after his death, Dom Prosper Guéranger said: “We quote Fr. Lebrun’s wonderful book several times. He is the rare liturgists that France has produced of late who is truly worthy of the name. His erudition is equal to his orthodoxy.” (Institutions liturgiques, 2Ed., Paris, 1880, 2:485). Even now, in the 21st century, his work is still deemed the preeminent contribution to the method of articulating the mysteries of Holy Mass and its practical formulations in history. (Xavier Bisaro, Le passé présent, Paris, 2012).The other volumes are scholarly dissertations and notes on the true origins of Christian liturgies, their basis in Holy Scripture and Tradition, and the conclusive written evidence going all the way back to the first four centuries AD. They describe the liturgies of all the churches in the world, the time in which they were written, and how they were spread and preserved, including the liturgies of the five Patriarchies, as well as the Ambrosian, the Gallican, the Mozarabic, the Constantinopolitan, the Alexandrian, the Ethiopian, the Antiochian, the Armenian, and the Nestorian rites. Then they demonstrate the uniformity throughout the world in everything that is essential to the Holy Sacrifice, until it was abandoned by the Protestant sects in the 16th century. Along the way, Fr. Lebrun defends the need for a sacred language in divine worship (Latin for the West, and Greek for the East), and for the august silence during the Canon.