Heaven on Earth

Do you know what the most fantastic thing about Catholicism is? Aside from everything, I mean. The single most stupendous thing about the Catholic faith is the Mass. The Mass is literally one of the most amazing things about my little Catholic life right now. I mean, even the saints were all over it. Padre Pio once said, "It would be easier for the world to survive without the sun than to do so without the Holy Mass." How awesome is that?? He's right, of course, because not only is the Mass the source and summit of our faith, it's also the greatest prayer we can ever offer.

One of the great things about the Mass is that it's the primary vehicle by which we learn Scripture. Protestants have an enormous focus in their faith on straight up reading the Bible, which is great, though it's part of why Catholics have a reputation for not knowing anything about the Bible, or for Catholicism being "unscriptural". The Mass is almost entirely scriptural, though. The parts of the Mass, you know, those parts that you occasionally sing with the cantor in between all the prayers during the Liturgy of the Eucharist, they're all taken right out of Revelation. What you say before receiving Communion ("Lord, I am not worthy to receive You..."), that's straight from the Gospel of Luke. The prayers of Consecration are also from the Gospels, as are the Church's teachings on the Eucharist, around which the whole Mass is centered. There's also that whole "readings" thing, and the Psalms, too.

What a lot of Catholics don't know about the way we do Scripture, specifically at Mass, is that the Lectionary (the book with all the readings in it) is organized specifically so that the readings all match up with each other. Usually the strongest connection is between the First Reading and the Gospel, because the Old Testament, from which the First Reading is drawn, foreshadows the life of Christ, and informs our reading and interpretation of the Gospels and Christ's teachings. Another advantage of the Catholic Scripture Approach is that we have the Magisterium and Tradition of the Church guiding our interpretation of the passages, and our priests are trained in both of those things so they know how to explain what the Holy Spirit has revealed to us in Scripture. Their homilies are meant to be vehicles through which they break down what God is saying through the Bible passages we hear at each Mass, and it also protects us as believers from acting on a gross misinterpretation of the Bible, a la Westboro Baptist Church.

The best thing about the Mass by far, though, is the Eucharist. It's Jesus. It just doesn't get any better than that. No other religion on earth has that type of communion with God. They all have omnipresent gods, but none of them actually eat and drink their gods' flesh and blood. Their gods didn't offer them their own lives to save them from eternal punishment. They didn't give their priests the power to drive out demons, forgive sins, and turn ordinary bread and wine into the life-giving flesh and blood by which the world is saved. Jesus did that with Catholicism, and each Mass is a recreation of those powers and that sacrifice, the glory of which cannot be conveyed by words, no matter how hard I try.


In short, the Mass is heaven on earth, as Pope John Paul II said. No matter what is going on in my life, what sort of troubles I'm having, the Mass is always the greatest source of comfort for me. Christ brought heaven to earth through His incarnation, and with the Mass, He raises earth to heaven. Most of the time we go to Mass, we forget how glorious it really is. The founder of the Fellowship Of Catholic University Students said at their conference last year that what we do at Mass, especially receiving Jesus in Communion, is so sublime that we should be floating through the whole thing, but so often we're barely even paying attention. There is nothing remotely like the Mass on all the earth, and it basically is a foretaste of the Beatific Vision in heaven, and we should all be aware of that.

The Mass is the most beautiful, awesome, glorious, amazing thing we will experience this side of heaven. Am I getting this across well enough? I know this is a lot of rambling, but I don't know any other way to express how truly blessed we are to have been given the Mass. It's amazing that we get to experience heaven now, and then we (hopefully) get to experience it for eternity. Who really appreciates that fully? Absolutely glorious. Love it.