Admittedly, my prior post  (raging or quibbling, depending on your viewpoint) did not attract much comment.  But that wasn’t the expectation in writing about key verses being left out (or added) in the liturgy.  I don’t go looking for them; they drop on me as both unwanted and repugnant.  Why write?  Perhaps only to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”  Thank you, D.T.

That said, here, then,  is the next “Irony”, one pointed out to me by friends, who left it to fester in anticipation of my pen, uhh …  keyboard.  At the EF (Latin) Mass last Sunday, we heard the beautiful Corpus Christi readings.  The Epistle was 1 Corinthians 11: 23-29.  Surprisingly (because many times the readings are very different), the Second Reading in the Novus Ordo was 1 Corinthians 11: 23-26. Seeing this juxtaposition, the question comes to mind: “After (presumed) centuries of  reading verses 27-29 in the Corpus Christi liturgy, why does the Novus Ordo drop the last three verses?  Are the words redundant? confusing? mistranslated?  Hardly.

After Paul’s assertion that what he received from the Lord he also handed on to us, and Paul’s specific quote of the words of consecration, with Christ’s command to do the same in remembrance of Him, Paul adds the three verses which are dropped in the Novus Ordo Reading:

From the NAB (which would be the translation to be used in the Ordinary Form of the Mass), these are the three omitted verses:

27. “Therefore whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will have to answer for the body and blood of the Lord.

28.  A person should examine himself,— and so eat the bread and drink the cup.

29. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment — on himself.” 

For all the railing today about lack of catechesis, about Synod attendees who would argue for unreconciled adulterous sinners to receive Holy Communion, and with the decline in Mass attendance due to lack of even ‘discerning’ what is the essence of the Mass, it boggles the mind that those three verses are omitted in the Sunday reading.  One can only hope that celebrants, all without the power to change the readings, at least had no doubt about a subject for preaching.  Or did they?

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