In the Catholic liturgy at the dismissal, the Latin phrase used is "Ite, missa est." The usual translation for this is "Go, it is the dismissal."
My question is, what is the meaning of "Missa est" taken on its own? If you remove "Ite", does the meaning become simply "It is the dismissal"?
Good question! Literally, īte means "go, all of you", as a command or instruction. But missa est is less straightforward.
One explanation is that it's the perfect passive of mittō, meaning "it is dismissed" (with "it" implied to be the congregation). Another is that missa is a Late Latin form of Classical missiō "dismissal": missa est would then be "it is the dismissal". Some authors translate it as "mission" ("[go,] there is a mission"), but this is a later adaptation.
It's also possible that missa "dismissal" from spoken Vulgar Latin ended up being borrowed back into written Latin to mean "Mass": this phrase is where the noun "Mass" comes from in English, after all. In this case, missa est would mean "this is the Mass", saying that Mass has concluded. This version isn't mutually exclusive with the other one.
