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Sean and others who don't follow the lay missal, what do you do? Pray the rosary?

I prefer to watch the action at the altar: If I was on Calvary, I would not be reading a book about what was happening.  I would be looking at the cross.  So that's what I do at Mass.

I will concede that if I was a newbie, a missal might be useful, but after decades of study, I know what is happening liturgically/theologically, have many of the prayers memorized, etc.

Along with mental prayer?

The entire watching is a meditation, of uniting myself with the sacrifice.

Words get in the way.

I'm very interested how people used to pray Mass besides praying the rosary.

There are really only two reasons to attend Mass:

1) The public practice of the virtue of religion, whereby we worship God in compliance with the Commandment/precept of the Church;

2) To receive grace.

Regarding this latter reason, one should do whatever best disposes oneself to the efficacy of the graces received.  That is surely what God wants.

For some, perhaps that is in fact best achieved by reading the missal.  For others, the Rosary.  For others still, meditating on Calvary, etc. etc. (and it is because of the prevalence of private devotion that bells were introduced to draw the attention of the faithful back to the altar at the consecration in the first place).  So I reason from this that, if by ringing bells, She is drawing our attention away from our private devotions and back to the altar, the Church wants us to watch the action of the Mass, and to meditate upon the sacrifice.

When Dom Beauduin introduced the hand missal, his primary reason for doing so was to institute a uniform worship among the faithful, so that by entering into the prayers of the Mass, the faithful would all be worshiping in the same way (in addition to a "more conscious worship" achieved at the expense of the mystery safeguarded by Latin, which was an incremental first step in horizontalizing the liturgy by removing the dignity of Latin).

Quite simply, while its perfectly fine to read a missal if it unites you more closely to the sacrifice than other devotions, the collectivism implicit in this method is contradicted by the praxis of the Church for 1900 years: There is no theological reason justifying this uniformity (and that such a desire is not the mind of the Church is proven by recalling that there are no rubrics for the faithful attending Mass).  This abusive collectivism gradually instilled -even within trad circles- the defective notion that if you were not following along in your hand missal, you were not fully "participating" in the Mass, which is nonsense.