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The Mass is the central act of Catholic worship. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1997) describes it as “the sum and summary of our faith” and “the source and summit of the Christian life” . It is also central to the sense of Catholic identity. A “practicing” Catholic is in effect a Mass-going Catholic. Why does the Mass mean so much to so many? Instructed Catholics who continue to understand the Mass as the Church has taught them to understand it can no doubt answer the question in terms that would satisfy a catechist, but their actual experience of Mass is more varied and more complex than any statement of formal doctrine recognizes. Children of various ages experience the Mass differently from each other and from adults, while adults themselves discern very different meanings in the impressive rite with which they have been familiar since childhood. When “cradle” Catholics (those raised as Catholics) attend Mass, however, they at some level of consciousness experience it as the same Mass they first knew as children and are therefore reminded of the relation between their earlier and their later selves. Neither theology nor psychology alone can adequately explain this power of the Mass to engage the imagination of the child and to retain or even strengthen its hold on the mind of the adult. Since the Church claims to speak with authority of the divine nature, while psychology speaks from its observation and experience of our human nature, a dialogue on the meaning of the Mass should prove instructive, although the question will inevitably be construed somewhat differently by the participants on either side. For the purposes of a specifically psychoanalytic reading, the question will take the form, “What does the Mass mean at the more archaic as well as at the more recent levels of our mental life?”