Intercessions For Mass Liturgical Press

Getting Intercessions Right for Mass Liturgical Press

I spent three years running our parish's bulletin and liturgy prep through a variety of layouts and fonts before I figured out what actually works with our particular press setup. The short version: it's finicky, but once you nail the workflow, it saves a lot of time. Most of the headaches come from people treating the Intercessions For Mass Liturgical Press like a standard document printer. It isn't. This is a specialized typesetting and printing workflow designed for the Prayer of the Faithful (General Intercessions) as they appear in liturgical booklets, bulletins, and mass orders. It's not a standalone software program. It's more of a formatting standard that certain press services — like Liturgical Press themselves and a handful of regional Catholic printers — know how to handle. The intercessions go through a specific column layout, with a certain point size, margins, and spacing that differ from regular text blocks. If you've ever tried to fit them into Word and ended up with ragged right edges and orphaned lines, you've already felt the friction. The reason this exists is simple: these texts are longer than most people realize. A typical Sunday set has four to five petitions, each ranging from two sentences to a full paragraph, and they need to read cleanly when someone is glancing at them during Mass. Haphazard formatting makes them harder to follow. Proper typesetting gives each petition enough breathing room so the lector can land on it without squinting.

The Practical Workflow

Start with your intercession texts in a clean, simple format. No bold, no italics, no weird font changes. Plain text only. Put each petition in its own paragraph with a blank line between them. Number them if your pastor prefers that — some do, some don't. Then you feed that into your layout tool or hand it to whoever is running the press job. If you're working directly with Liturgical Press's ordering system, they accept submissions through their online portal and will handle the typesetting for you. Turnaround is usually about a week to ten days for standard orders. If you're running an in-house press like an HP Indigo or a Xerox Color CQ 900, you'll want to set up a template with the proper column width — typically around 3.5 to 4 inches for a standard 8.5 by 11 inch page. The font I've had the best luck with is something like Minion Pro or Source Serif Pro at 10.5 or 11 point. Times New Roman works but looks cheap, and Garamond can be hard to read in smaller print runs.

A Problem I Hit That Took Me Weeks to Solve

One Sunday, about two years ago, I realized that the intercessions for a particular weekday Mass were getting cut off on the press run. The printer was using a slightly narrower column width than our template specified — I'm talking maybe a quarter inch less — and one of the petitions had been submitted as a single dense paragraph. It overflowed the last line and got jammed against the next one. The reader at Mass basically tripped over that sentence. The workaround was to switch to a double-column layout for the intercessions and make sure every petition ended mid-paragraph rather than at a natural break. It's not ideal, but it prevented the cutoff issue entirely. After that, I started running a preview at 72 DPI as a proof check before anything went to press, which caught about 90% of these problems early. Still miss the occasional one, but far fewer now.

Things Nobody Tells You Up Front

One counter-intuitive thing: shorter isn't always better for readability here. A single-sentence petition looks tidy but forces you to cram more of them into the same space, which shrinks everything down. Two-sentence petitions with a natural pause between them actually print more cleanly because they create even visual rhythm. The eye moves from one to the next without stumbling. Another thing that catches people off guard: the lectionary source matters more than most realize. If you're pulling intercessions from the Roman Missal or a sanctioned prayer book, those texts are already typeset in the proper format and you can often just copy the layout directly. But if you're writing original petitions — and a lot of parishes do this for special intentions — you lose that built-in typesetting advantage and have to do the spacing work yourself. That's where most formatting problems originate. Also worth noting: the color of the paper stock affects how the text reads. White or cream stock is standard, but if you're running intercessions on a darker or tinted paper, you'll need to bump your font size up by a point or two. I learned this the hard way when we switched to a slightly off-white stock and nobody noticed the text was struggling until after the first batch was printed.

When This Approach Fails Completely

Here's the honest part: if you're doing a large-print edition or targeting a demographic with significant vision challenges, the standard Intercessions For Mass Liturgical Press output won't cut it. The column widths and point sizes that work for a typical 8.5 by 11 bulletin become too cramped for anyone reading with older eyes or low vision. In those cases, the better move is to go with a separate insert or a dedicated wide-format insert that uses at least 14-point type with generous line spacing. It takes more pages and costs more, but it's the only way to make it functional. Another scenario where this whole workflow breaks down: if you're doing a one-off special Mass with completely custom intercessions that don't follow the usual structure, the press templates won't adapt well. There's no flexibility in the margin settings once the template locks in, and trying to force non-standard text into the layout almost always produces ugly results. In those cases, it's cheaper and faster to just use a different format altogether — a simple text block in the bulletin works fine for rare occasions.

Where to Get the Materials

For ready-made intercession sets that are already formatted for liturgical press, Liturgical Press sells them directly through their website. They also have bulk ordering for diocesan-level programs if you're coordinating across multiple parishes. If you want free resources, the USCCB website has a section with approved intercession texts, though they don't come pre-formatted for press — you'll still need to handle the typesetting yourself. Some parishes also share templates on forums like r/ CatholicLiturgy on Reddit, though those are community-maintained and you should verify the formatting before sending anything to a professional printer. If you're doing this in-house with your own equipment, the main cost driver is paper stock and ink. A standard run of 500 bulletins with intercessions on both sides will cost somewhere between $40 and $80 depending on your printer and paper choice. Not cheap, but manageable if you're batching the work monthly rather than doing each Sunday separately.