Some Reflections on a Confirmation Mass

Last night, I was Master of Ceremonies at our parish Confirmation Mass. It was my first, but hopefully not my last, MC gig. My reflections on last night are bound to be a little rambly, but I wanted to be sure to record as many of my impressions as I could.

The MC role at Mass is somewhat different from what we in the 21st Century associate with an MC. I don’t introduce anybody. I don’t tell any jokes or witty anecdotes. In fact, the MC shouldn’t speak at all during the Mass, except to give the Celebrant and the Altar servers instructions. And if you’re doing your job correctly, you won’t actually speak a word then, either.

If fact, if the MC does his job correctly, no one will really even know he’s there.

The MC’s job is to organize and rehearse the proceedings and ritual of each Mass, and in a Confirmation Mass celebrated by an Archbishop, there are a lot of fiddly little details. It’s like the original liturgical dance (and incidentally the only one of which I personally approve, for what that’s worth).

We rehearsed the Altar servers and ran drills. For our full dress rehearsal, Travis Nguyen (the gentleman normally in charge of the servers) graciously accepted the rôle of stand-in Archbishop, complete with folded newspaper miter. I set up a series of hand signals with the servers, so they would always be where they needed to be and doing what they needed to be doing.

We had six servers in that tiny church – Cross bearer, miter bearer, crozier bearer, book bearer, thurifer, Holy Water bearer – and several did double duty as actual servers for the Mass and candle bearers. It was, as I said, a complicated dance.

Add to this the Confirmands and their sponsors – beautifully catechized and themselves drilled in their part in the Rite by their hard-working teacher Laura Grubb – and the Jesuit Superior over at Bellarmine, Rev. John Fuchs, S.J., who happily agreed to take Fr. Sacco’s part in the Mass at the last minute, and you’ve got a lot of balls up in the air.

In the end, all the preparation work paid off; the Confirmation Mass was beautiful, and it went off without a hitch – or at least without any hitch that anybody noticed except for me and the Archbishop.

The Altar servers were magnificent; they remembered to keep their eyes on me, and they took every cue. Their discipline and dedication speak highly of them, and highly of Travis’ leadership as well.

Archbishop Sartain is himself an extremely gracious and likeable man, a real mensch. I very much enjoyed my time chatting with him, and he has a great way of putting people at ease. Every time I’ve heard him speak in a liturgical setting, he’s made a plea for vocations. More on that in another post.

I’ve been taking liturgical training from the Archdiocese’s Liturgical Ministers Institute for several years now, though my actual MC training continues to be rescheduled vaguely into the future. One can hardly blame them – the new translation of the Missale Romanum is going live at Advent, and they’ve been busy prepping for that transition. It did kind of leave me hanging, though.

Fortunately, as I mentioned in a previous post, the Archdiocesan Liturgy Office steered me to the Pastoral Assistant for Faith Formation over at Saint John Bosco Parish in Lakewood, Brian Guillot. He whipped me into shape pretty quickly, and for that I remain grateful.

I continue to be amazed at the number of dedicated people involved in preparing a liturgy of this scope at our little parish. Now multiply that by the millions of individual parishes throughout the Church, and you start to get some idea of the scope of the Universal Church.

Wow.