Prayer Before Mass

Most High and Glorious God, I am unworthy to approach you in any way. But my trust in your mercy softens my fear of your judgment.

From the very knowledge of my sins and my wretchedness, those things which render me unfit to offer you sacrifice, comes the awareness of my need for the healing and strength that flows from your Sacrament. And my consciousness of this dire need overcomes my fear of committing sacrilege by presuming to offer the Sacrifice.

For the Sacrifice I offer you isn't my own, but the Sacrifice of your Son, who, through the consent of our most Blessed Mother, has joined to his divinity my humanity, letting it be baptized in the Jordan, broken on the Cross, and raised into the new creation of the Resurrection.

By this Mass that I offer to you, and by the Holy Communion with which you nourish me, may this sick old man--already drowned in baptism--die more definitively, and may the new creature be born anew, again for the first time, ready to give his body, his self, for your people.