The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass — Volumes I–II

Gihr's whole book in one file: the proof that the Mass is a true sacrifice, then the rite prayer by prayer in Latin and English.

This EPUB carries both of Gihr's volumes in one file. Volume I settles what the Mass is. It begins with what a sacrifice is at all, follows the question from the offerings of the Old Law to the Cross, and then shows from Scripture and the Fathers that the Mass is that same sacrifice offered without blood. Gihr is just as exact about what a Mass obtains, and why one said for a single soul does more for that soul than one said for a thousand. The last hundred pages walk up to the altar: the stone and what is sealed inside it, the chalice, the six vestments and what each asks of the priest, the five colors, the beeswax, the Latin.

Volume II is the rite itself, from the foot of the altar to the last Gospel. Every prayer is printed in Latin with the English beside it, and then Gihr says where it came from and what the Church means by it: why the Kyrie is the one prayer still said in Greek, why the Creed entered the Roman Mass in 1014 as a coronation gift to an emperor, why the priest stops turning to the people from the Preface on and says the whole Canon in a voice only he can hear. Eleven hundred notes carry the sources.

Gihr wrote for priests, so that no priest would say Mass from habit, and arranged the book so that an educated layman could read it with profit. Read Volume I through for the doctrine, then keep Volume II beside your missal and read the section on a prayer before the Mass at which you will hear it.

About this edition

Both volumes are set from the 1902 English translation of the sixth German edition published by B. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau and St. Louis. The wording of the historical text is preserved in this newly typeset edition. EPUB edition.