A Real "Handful": Praying the Our Father at Mass

IT STARTED WITH A SIMPLE QUESTION...

A few weeks ago, one of our Café friends asked the question of whether we are allowed to extend or raise our hands in prayer during the recitation or singing of “The Our Father” during Mass. Strangely, I had never given this question much thought. I went with the currency.  When I was newly ordained, my congregation was about one thousand Catholic college students who were singing the Our Father, as we had “guitar Masses” most of the time. I have no recollection of what my students did with their hands during the Our Father. I do remember, though, at Christmas and Holy Week in the 1970's helping the friar confessors at our downtown shrine in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in the Fall River Diocese. It seemed that the students at the Catholic high school there were used to holding hands during the Our Father at Mass—a fairly common practice from place to place. But the Bishop chewed them out for the practice during a school Mass one day and created something of a hurt feeling mess, about the last thing you should do with youthful congregations.
 
Over the past weeks I have attempted to track down the official Church teaching on how to manage your hands during the Our Father at Mass. Bear with me here as we undo this gordian knot.
 
The first formal Council statement on the reform of the Mass is, not surprisingly, the Vatican II Decree on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium [1963]. I have a link to the English translation here. I think many Catholics would be surprised to discover what the Council taught and did not teach about the Mass. As is the case with the other fifteen documents of the Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium is something of a compromise between those devoted to past history and practice, on the one hand, and those calling for a new vision for the Church on the other. It is not unusual to find statements in the same documents that seem to contradict each other. Sacrosanctum Concilium, for example, states that no priest should take it upon himself to change any part of the Mass on his own. [Of course, there was a seven-year gap between SC in 1963 and the release of the new Vatican II Missal or Mass formulary of 1970. This was definitely a limbo phase.]
 
On the other hand, SC also had this to say to priests: “Pastors of souls must therefore realize that, when the liturgy is celebrated, something more is required than the mere observation of the laws governing valid and licit celebration; it is their duty also to ensure that the faithful take part fully aware of what they are doing, actively engaged in the rite, and enriched by its effects. [SC 11, Italics mine.] Thus began a generation of experimentation in which priests and lay Catholics alike engaged in newer forms of celebrating Mass and overhauling Catholic life in general. I remember as a high school seminary senior our priest/class moderator would offer Mass for us as a class in a small chapel where we could stand around the altar with him and pass the consecrated hosts to each other as well as the chalice of consecrated wine. That was radical for 1965, a long way before lay ministers of the Eucharist were formally approved in the 1970’s. Even my seminary itself began to pull back the strict and formal daily discipline—a little bit, anyway. We were allowed to go home for Easter [1965+] and Thanksgiving [1967+].
 
The years immediately after Vatican II felt like a lifting of burdens and an opportunity to express one’s inner personhood in the life of the Church. It was a time when lay male lectors became a common staple at the Mass—altar girls, women lectors, and lay ministers of the Eucharist would follow as the age passed into the 1970’s. Those of my generation recall the Charismatic Movement, where lay prayer meetings inspired members to speak in tongues. Many bishops tolerated these changes; some did not. Many lay persons welcomed “the changes,” and many did not.
 
After the world’s bishops left Rome in December, 1965, the conclusion of Vatican II, the general plan called for each national conference of bishops to meet in synods to determine which new procedures and policies would be approved, and which traditional practices and laws would remain in force; these conclusions, in the form of requests, were sent to the Vatican Curia or papal office for ultimate approval or rejection. This procedure included examination of the translation of two critical texts: the Bible and the Roman Missal. All of us Catholics have familiarity with the Vatican’s approval of the New American Bible or NAB in 1970, and of its revision, the NABRE in 2011. The NABRE, or New American Bible Revised Edition, is the translation we use at Mass in the United States today.
 
Approvals of these translated texts went smoothly compared to translations of the Mass rite itself from its official Latin text to English and other tongues. My best read is that the popes who followed the Council, notably Popes Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI, were seriously concerned that not just rubric discipline but the very doctrinal integrity of the Mass itself was threatened by years of experimentation, much of it unauthorized. Consequently, the end of the twentieth and the beginning of this century is a story of a partial return to uniformity, as in “no priest should take it upon himself to change any part of the Mass on his own.” Coupled with this was a renewed emphasis upon the unique role of the priest at Mass; there was to be no confusing the role of the priest with the role of a non-priest during Mass or other sacrament.
 
Some variation of this 1997 Vatican directive appears or underscores all liturgical directives: “Neither may deacons or non-ordained members of the faithful use gestures or actions which are proper to the same priest celebrant. It is a grave abuse for any member of the non-ordained faithful to "quasi preside" at the Mass while leaving only that minimal participation to the priest which is necessary to secure validity.” [Instruction on Certain Questions Regarding the collaboration of the non-ordained faithful in the sacred ministry of priest. Vatican City 1997, Section 6, para. 2] The fear of the popes during this era seemed to be the diminishment of the unique role of the priest in the Church. Put another way, the role of the priest was reemphasized as the official representative who offers Christ back to His Father in the name of all the Faithful. He, he alone, raises the praises to the Father at the Our Father with extended hands, or so the argument goes. Any infringement in which a lay person assumes a role assigned only to the priest during Mass is strictly forbidden. The contrast of priest and laity, spelled out clearly in some quarters of Catholic journalism regarding the Our Father, is not universally held, however.
 
BUT GETTING BACK TO THE HANDS….
 
What does all this legislation have to do with what I do with my hands during the praying of the Our Father at Mass? Sitting here in the shadow of Disneyworld, I attend the same 5 PM parish every week [except when in Ireland, LOL]. I hold my wife’s hand through much of the Mass and quite frankly never gave the matter much philosophizing. My wife’s presence next to me, coupled with my own reflections on The Lord’s Prayer, is plenty enough for this boy.
 
When the question was posed to me several weeks ago, I did look around to see what the “common practice” was here at home. It is safe to say that my parish Mass has adopted a number of stances during the Our Father, none of them outlandish and many seem to engage the worshippers. I should point out that there are three main postures in play. [1] Some persons stand and pray the Our Father aloud with hands folded. [2] A cluster or pew of people hold hands while reciting the Lord’s Prayer. [3] Individuals raise their hands/arms heavenward to various degrees while praying the Lord’s Prayer. [I realize I left out a fourth group, the parents who brought young children to Mass to instill in them the practice of common prayer and love of the Eucharist. After Mass I try, when I can, to thank them for enriching God’s Church and to encourage the little ones to come back soon.]
 
As I noted earlier, Church leaders seem to have less angina about handholding during the Our Father. Commentators do point out that public handholding can be distressful for introverts, those fearful of Covid and other infections, and those who would prefer the older, pre-Vatican II style—when all rubrics were devoutly uniform. It is true that multigenerational families in attendance have the added advantage of familial closeness. Affection for the hand-holding ritual is not universal but it is not forbidden, either. Since the priest celebrant never holds hands during Mass, there is no “lay overstepping” issue in play.
 
It is the laity’s praying of the Our Father at Mass with hands open and/or raised that creates controversy. The Latin Missal, the mother ship, instructs the celebrant [and only the celebrant] to pray with raised, extended hands 29 times during each Mass at assigned times. There is no instruction that the laity do likewise. Hence, the praying with open/extended arms has been designated a “priestly” rite in itself, not to be imitated by the laity.
 
The priest's Latin command to pray with extended hands is orans. Wikipedia defines this word: “In Christianity, orans (from Medieval Latin orans, meaning "one who is praying or pleading") refers to a posture of prayer where a person stands with elbows close to the body and hands outstretched sideways, palms up. This position is rooted in Scripture, notably 1 Timothy 2:8, and was common in early Christian worship. It symbolizes supplication, submission, and the outline of the cross, and is depicted in early Christian art, including catacomb frescoes and icons."
 
If there is anything we should be doing in common—during Mass and the 167 other hours of the week—it is begging for the Lord’s food, submitting ourselves in contrition for our sins, and outlining ourselves with the sufferings of Christ on the Cross. My thought is: defining the celebrant at Mass as the only ritual officiant to extend his arms and pray thusly is overreach. Orans includes the spirit of submission! How can one logically argue that the laity would be "overreaching" when our open arms are empty and we are pleading for bread and forgiveness?
 
This may be one of the times when the governing Church, collectively, might best serve the universal Church by stepping back from an ill-advised rubric. In fact, that strategy may already be in play. The Latin Missal says nothing about the lay faithful’s prayerful position of extended armshands. A handful of U.S. bishops have issued instructions to their dioceses to catechize against extending hands/arms during the Our Father at Mass: Lincoln, Nebraska; and Columbus, Ohio, to cite two. However, the American bishops as a whole [the USCCB] have not forbidden hand-holding or the extended arms of supplication during the Our Father. The USCCB site offers no directive I could find. Italy itself has no prohibition of either stance.

AND SO:
 
It is for each of us to determine what attitudes and postures we bring to this critical juncture of the Mass. No one should be forced into contacts which are uncomfortable for them. Nor should anyone feel inhibited from extending one’s arms to embrace the words that Jesus used as the prime formula of prayer for the Meal that gives us Life. We cherish unity over uniformity.