The name “Mass” comes from the final dismissal: Ite, missa est: Go, it is a dismissal. Jungmann explains: “it is puzzling indeed that, as a matter of fact, it has been designated by a separating , a going apart . Such, however, appears to be the case in regard to the word which both in Latin and in the modern languages of the West has practically supplanted all other names, the word missa , ‘Mass.’ For today there is no doubt at all as to the original and basic meaning of the word: missa = missio = dismissio . It meant, in late Latin, a dismissal, the breaking up or departure after an audience or public gathering.”

As Jungmann explains it, though, this is not a mere “prosaic announcement” that the Mass is at an end, but “a definite ecclesiastico-religious act, a dismissal in which the Church once more drew her children to herself with motherly affection before sending them on their way with her blessing.” During the time of Hippolytus, the catechumens weren’t simply sent out, but sent out with hand-laying, and Jungmann says that “thus it continued for centuries both in the Mass and outside.” Thus missa is not merely a dismissal but “became a designation for the concluding blessing, and then for the blessing in general.”

The word could be used in both a narrow and wider sense: “In a sense the priestly praying was always a sort of missa , for it always drew down God’s favor and blessing upon all who bowed down before Him in adoration; but especially was this true where Christ’s Body and Blood became present through the word of the priest. So the name missa was gradually appropriate to the Eucharist, not (for a long time) exclusively, but at least by preference.” This attachment meant that even when there was no one to dismiss, the mass was the missa, the sending out of blessing.