I wasn’t sure since I’m just getting back into “being Catholic”. So when you read it you just read everything except the consecration?
You can read whatever you want in your hand Missal. They all include the words of consecration (“Hoc est enim Corpus meum… Hic est Calix Sanguinis mei…”), and there is no problem with you reading those words. It would be inappropriate for you to say those words aloud during the Mass, just as it would be inappropriate to say any of the priest’s parts aloud during the Mass, but yes you can certainly read them, because that is what they are there for. It is quite appropriate for you to be aware of the sacred action, and if it means reading along with a Missal, then do that if you like. Many people do so.
Now, this “praying the Mass” thing. This has become somewhat of a slogan for the use of the sung Propers at Mass. For a while now (like over a hundred years) it has been semi-common to replace the music that the Church prescribes for Mass with random hymns. The Church assigns three “Proper” chants to every Mass: Introit, Offertory and Communion. They are said to be proper to the Mass because every Mass has different chants in these places. They are almost always taken from scripture and set to a melody, and we call the whole collection of chants, Proper and Ordinary (unchanging parts of Mass), Gregorian Chant. Like I said, for a while it has been common to replace the Proper chants with random hymns, and the result is your average parish “four hymn sandwich.” Recently, within probably the last ten years or so, there has been a movement to stop replacing the Propers with hymns. One of the popular slogans of this movement is “pray
the Mass,” with “the” stressed. This refers to the fact that the Propers are actually THE text of the Mass assigned by the Church, while hymns are just random songs that replace them and are
not technically “the Mass,” so to speak. I’m not sure if this is what you were thinking, but this is how this phrase is most commonly used, I think.
