A brief history of the Roman Missal

The Roman Missal is a book containing the prayers, chants, and instructions for the celebration of Mass in the Roman Catholic Church.

In the earliest centuries of the Catholic Church, there were no books containing prescribed prayers, texts or other instructions for celebration of faith.

At first, collections of prayers developed gradually for use in particular locations, and those collections were contained in booklets.

Over centuries these were combined into larger collections.

Eventually large, organized collections of prayers were assembled into "sacramentaries."

These contained some, but not all, of the prayers of the Mass.

The earliest of these sacramentaries were attributed to Pope Leo I, "Leo the Great" (440-461), and Pope Gelasius (492-496).

The first true liturgical books which could be called "missals" were found in monasteries beginning around the 12th and 13th centuries.

A missal contained not only the prayers but the biblical readings, the chants and the rubrics for the celebration of Mass.

Because the faith of the church comes through prayer, there was a need for consistency in the words used during Mass.

However, it was not until after the Council of Trent when Pope Pius V in 1570 published an edition of the Missale Romanum that the text was in mandatory use throughout the Latin Church.

Once translated and approved by Vatican officials, it was published in modern languages for use in churches all over the world.

Since that time, to accommodate the ongoing evolution and development of the Liturgy -- words spoken during holy services -- at least eight new editions of the Missale Romanum have been published.

The most recent was released in 2002 by Pope John Paul II.

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