A
AustinGM
Guest
On my journey to becoming a Catholic I had considered Orthodoxy for quite some time but for various reasons that I will not divulge here at the moment I did not become Orthodox. I do however still have several elements of Eastern spirituality and ideas implanted into me from my long consideration. One of these is the preparatory and thanksgiving prayers for Holy Communion. I have never really found anyone that advocates for the use of them other than the occasional priest who will use one of them from the missal or some other random one as a sort of meditation after he has purified the sacred vessels or amongst the various Catholic saints and writers that advocate for there usage but I have never really been confronted by someone in person as I was in an Orthodox church that I almost had to dogmatically pray them before and after Holy Communion. Is this just my own experience or are there groups of people in certain parishes who do pray them before and or after Holy Mass? I was also mislead by the Orthodox (amongst other things as if they are the determiners of what we believe like a lot of Protestants as well but I digress) to believe that this practice does not even exist in Catholicism, I have however found that it does exist (as mentioned in the context above) but I have just not experienced it in-person as so to say. I am sometimes frustrated by the lack of the preparatory and thanksgiving prayer/s of the priest in certain missalettes as when I sometimes forget my own prayer books I revert to using these prayers for the foundation of my preparatory and thanksgiving prayers a long with the readings and antiphons as meditations. Does anyone else do this or is this too much of a private devotion that I should take it up with my spiritual director?