The easiest way to de-banalize your liturgy

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Dec 01, 2025

Let me propose a way to instantly improve the liturgy at your parish. Fear not, beleaguered pastors: it won’t require developing a new skill, arguing with a choir director, or getting in trouble with your bishop. Probably no one will complain, though if someone does, it’ll be a micro-opportunity to practice the virtue of fortitude.

It’s a simple case of “less is more”, that “noble simplicity” which Vatican II encouraged for the Roman Rite. If you do this one thing—or rather, stop doing it—the sense of the sacred and the aesthetic quality of your masses will noticeably improve.

The lectors of my parish (myself among them) recently received an extensive and thoughtful new set of guidelines. I was very happy to see the pastor officially eliminate a practice that had already mostly disappeared in our church, but which has long been a pet peeve of mine. As a 35-year-old Catholic, I know I’m not alone in this—in fact, the person who wrote the guidelines told me that when he was soliciting feedback, he found that nobody under 40 likes it.

The change you can make for your lectors (and perhaps for your priests) is simple: Stop announcing things before they happen. No more quasi-liturgical “Good morning” at the beginning of Mass, no more “the response is…” before the responsorial psalm, no more announcing the page to turn to for the hymn.

Now I don’t mean to offend anyone who does this. The intention of those who started adding these things decades ago was good: to make the Church more welcoming and accessible.

But when examined, these announcements are either redundant, or the information can be conveyed in a less disruptive way. And while it may seem that I am making a mountain out of a molehill here, these tiny little additions really do add up to change the atmosphere of the liturgy from a seamless whole where every element is an act of worship, to something more like a classroom or committee meeting. (And again, unlike changing the music, adding communion rails, eliminating the unnecessary use of EMHCs, or some other big move, this an easy fix.)

If you’re unconvinced, let’s look at each of these little announcements on a case-by-case basis.

Good morning/welcome. Consider what is about to happen once the lay MC finishes doing his or her bit. The first thing the priest will say to the congregation after the sign of the Cross will be “The Lord be with you” or a more elaborate version of the same. Have we really considered what this means? It’s both a greeting and a prayer that actually brings about the reality of the Lord being with us. Doesn’t “good morning” or “welcome” seem a little weak in comparison to what makes the morning good? Worse still, a “good morning” from the priest after the sign of the cross becomes quasi-liturgical.

The celebrant for this Mass is… I cannot conceive of a liturgical reason why I would ever need to know the name of the priest celebrating the Mass. This puts the focus on the priest as an individual personality, which is one of the single biggest obstacles to a liturgical spirit. (If a new or visiting priest wishes to introduce himself, it is less disruptive to do this at the beginning of the homily rather than during the introductory rite.)

The remaining examples take place during the Mass itself, which is yet another argument against them since they add to the Missal promulgated by the Church:

The response is:, Entrance Antiphon:, etc. Quite unnecessary: for the psalm, everyone knows the lector will introduce the refrain. For the petitions, we all know “Lord, hear our prayer”—if you don’t change it, you won’t have to explain it! Giving a split-second warning before you recite the antiphon achieves nothing: the people who want to say it with you will be prepared to do so, while those who aren’t will only be distracted by fumbling with a book instead of listening.

Please stand/sit/kneel. Unnecessary except in unusual circumstances. New people are perfectly capable of being lemmings and following what everyone else in the church does.

Announcing the hymn number. This is easy to handle another way: either have the hymn* in the leaflet or have one of those boards with numbers for the day’s Mass.

Readers may at this point ask a separate but related question: What about the announcements? This is a slightly trickier issue. Ideally, announcements would not happen during Mass, since they necessarily disrupt the liturgy. Even a liberal Jesuit could write: “Having Mass announcements right before the liturgy ends is like having the director come out and stop ‘Hamlet’ three minutes before it finishes in order to tell the audience where the best post-show night spots are.”

Before the Council, announcements were typically given right after or a few minutes before Mass, or during the homily (which, if they must be done during Mass, seems like the least disruptive place to put them). While the General Instruction of the Roman Missal names the moment after the post-communion prayer as a place where “brief announcements to the people may be made, if they are needed”, being distracted from prayer right after receiving communion is less than ideal. I’ll leave it to the experts to determine whether putting the announcements in the homily instead is a real violation of liturgical law (seems unlikely). Regardless, as the GIRM itself says, any announcements during Mass should be brief.

Respecting the intelligence of the congregation and the sufficiency of the rite

When we have been sitting in the church preparing our hearts for Mass, there is something beautiful and solemn about the seamless transition from private to liturgical prayer, as the bell is rung and the priest processes in silence or with sacred song. There is arguably a greater intimacy and sense of belonging in this than in all the welcomes and explanations. We know what we are about—like a band who knows the song and has been playing together long enough that the leader does not need to yell chord changes and directions over the music. Those who are new to the Mass are capable of following our lead; we can respect their intelligence and not make the liturgy like a TV show with too much expositional dialogue.

One arguable flaw in the liturgical reform—and to be clear, I mostly attend the Novus Ordo, so I am not bashing it—is that it eliminated silence from the Mass. The Novus Ordo may have periods of silence, but they are not required by the rite; they have to be added or opted in by the priest, usually as pauses in the liturgical action (rather than the action being carried out silently). The mania for active participation led to a decrease in interior participation: that is, when the laity are expected to be verbally engaged (listening or speaking) for the entire liturgy, there is less opportunity to contemplate what is happening beyond the words.

But whether or not you agree with that critique of the new liturgy, we should ask: Do we trust that the Mass the Church has given us is sufficient, a self-contained act of worship that unites us in communion as one Body of Christ? If so, then let us have the confidence to let the rite—whether the Novus Ordo or the classical Roman rite—speak for itself.

The Mass is, in the end, a mystery. Just like a work of art, when everything is explained—even things that are already obvious—the mystery can lose its allure, especially when the human explanations begin to obscure the divine reality. That is one reason so many walked away from the Mass decades ago. But the rediscovery of mystery is bringing many back, especially the young, who are hungry for something beyond explanation, so surprising that no announcement can prepare us for it, so ancient that no announcement is needed.

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*I’ll add something a bit more challenging: we shouldn’t rely quite so much on hymns, since they aren’t actually part of the Mass. The liturgical texts, including the antiphons, should be given musical priority. Pastors and music directors might consider reducing the hymns down to one or two, perhaps outside of the Mass itself—such as a processional hymn at the beginning and then the seasonal Marian antiphon as a recessional.