It’s not? I understand some things the Priest says is not to be heard anyway, but I want to hear something. How else am I supposed to participate when I don’t even hear what the priest, who represents Jesus Christ is saying? Am I just supposed to follow the movement?
Right – you follow along in your missal, keeping track of where you are by watching the movements of the priest from one corner of the altar over to the other, etc. You can see why many people would find other things to do during Mass like say the Rosary.
I was at a mass last night and it was sung, but I did not hear the last Gospel. So I was reading it in my Missal (my new Roman Catholic 1962 missal- yay!) and I thought I saw a movement out of the corner of my eyes, and it was the priest kneeling at the 'Et verbum caro est". So I was fumbling to genuflect.
Although it is a pious practice for the congregation to genuflect along with the priest during the Last Gospel, it is not required by any rubric. It is actually an ahistoric practice: the Last Gospel was originally a private devotion for the priest to say as he was
walking back to the sacristy. Eventually, it got encrusted onto the Mass and by the time of the standardization of the Roman Rite in 1570 it actually appeared in the Missale. But it is, at its heart, still a private devotion of the priest, and has nothing to do with the congregation, who are free to engage in their own private devotions.
This is why the priest does not proclaim or sing it, and also why it is not said by the deacon like the liturgical Gospel is, nor from the ambo. At a sung or high Mass, the Last Gospel
must be said silently, and the permission (not a requirement, either) to say it out loud at low Mass only dates from the era of the liturgical reforms of the 1920s.
