The God Googler, Mike Hayes, posted this snip from a mass, featuring a sung eucharistic prayer, and asked “What do you think of this?”

Well?

On the one hand, I like a chanted eucharistic prayer very much; it’s not done often in the U.S., and it takes a certain facility with music to pull it off, but when it’s done well (and I’ve seen it prayed that way a handful of times, very effectively), the result can move you to tears.

But this seems something altogether different — the priest actually has musical accompaniment, making it feel more like a performance than a prayer. It seems to call too much attention to itself. (I often find it distracting, as well, when the priest or deacon chants the gospel. Often, the sense and meaning of the scripture gets lost and is hard to follow.)