1549 K Sun 12 May 2002
At St Patrick's cathedral in Melbourne the celebrant was Father David Cartwright. We were both seminarians at Corpus Christi College, with him being was ordained as a deacon on 7 August 1999.
Despite his relatively recent ordination he was the celebrant at the cathedral today, with Archbishop Hart being at the Bishops' Conference and the Dean of the Cathedral, Father Dowling being in Queensland.
Father Cartwright sat for the Kyrie and Gloria. He did not give a direction "Please sit" as Archbishop Hart has on the last two Sundays. So I was standing and most people were sitting.
Because the celebrant was not a bishop there were some other changes to liturgical laws in the 2002 Roman Missal I needed to think through. According to the 1975 General Instruction of the Roman Missal, n. 21:
"... the people should stand ... from the prayer over the gifts ...".
This meant that the cue to stand was when people finished saying:
May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands for the praise and glory of his name, for our good, and the good of all his Church.
But the 2000 General Instruction of the Roman Missal, n. 43 has changed to:
The faithful should stand ... from the invitatory, Pray that our sacrifice ..., before the prayer over the gifts ...
The 2002 Order of Mass, n. 29, makes it clear that people are to stand at the beginning of the prayer they used to stand at the end of:
Populus surgit et respondet:
Suscipiat Dominus ...
The people are now to stand and respond (surgit et respondet). So the cue to stand is now at the end of the priest saying:
Pray, brethren, that our sacrifice may be acceptable to God, the almighty Father.
So this is what I did today. Others stood for the incensing of the people. But the only instructions for this are for the Stational Mass of a bishop, which I wrote about in Ministers in Masses, n. 241.
For normal Masses I think the people should stand at a different time since 22 March 2002, when the Roman Missal was published. But I have not seen much to inform and educate people of this change.
Copyright J.R. Lilburne, 12 May 2002.