We all know that the mass is the centre of our lives, that it is the most important thing in the life of the Church; but often we have to make a real effort to see this. It is not the obvious proposition it ought to be. We even have to make an effort to show that the Church really thinks this, rather than simply saying it for effect. What began as a common meal, feeding the people of God both with physical food and with the food of scripture, has become a largely silent ritual performed by one man with his back to the people in a dead foreign language. The bread which we eat has been carefully manufactured to look as little like bread as possible, and there has grown up a tradition that one should, out of reverance, avoid chewing it. Clearly there are reasons why all this should be so, some of them better than others, but looking at our modern liturgy from a distance shows why it is so hard to believe the truth about it.