A proper understanding of the Consecration.

Jean de Joinville, who was a close friend of King St. Louis, wrote that while on Crusade he took ill with a severe cold and fever and was confined to bed. His priest who was sick with typhus like much of the camp, came to his tent to say Mass. "It came about that he fainted when he reached the Consecration. When I saw that he was about to fall, I jumped out of bed, just as I was in my shirt, and, without putting on my shoes, I took him in my arms and told him to make the Sacrament slowly and softly and said that I would not leave him until he had quite finished. He came back to his senses and made his Sacrament. And he completed the singing of the Mass and afterward never sang it again." This sublime act illustrates that to the 13th century knight the Mass was the central element of his life while in our own time our first thought would be to call an ambulance. Is it any wonder that today at Mass I was distracted by two teenagers talking and looking at messages on their cell phone, even during the Consecration.