Amongst a pile of old schoolbooks that my parents brought round this week, was a little book called "Holy Childhood", presumably my dad's as a child. It harkens from the 1950s and the era of the Latin Mass (R.C.) when the priest faced away from the congregation, and the service was conducted in an ancient language that the common folks couldn't understand. This book gave kids something to do while all this was going on: it described each point in the service with sections describing what you'd be seeing, what it meant, and what to be praying while it was going on.
Here's the introduction, and a selection of illustrations from parts of the mass. When one considers the level of detail these things went to, it's not surprising that the generation before me was
so indoctrinated that even now they can't pull away from it.
(Large images: right-click => open image in new window.)
