Faith

A collection of new and old Roman Missals is pictured in the library of St. John's Seminary in Boston. Pilot photo/Gregory L. Tracy

Formed in Christ

Friday, March 27, 2026Faith

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This original Eucharistic Prayer did not simply fall out of the sky into our present Roman Missal. It had inspiration, especially from Eastern liturgical traditions ...

Father Robert M.
O'Grady

The work continued with the project of making available more Eucharistic Prayers for the new Roman Missal.
The committee members were very sensitive to the existence of many Eucharistic Prayers in the Eastern Churches, both Catholic and Orthodox.
An Eastern Eucharistic Prayer is more frequently called an anaphora -- the plural is "anaphores" -- and they are extensive in number and languages.
Eastern Christians have, through their history, regularly celebrated the liturgy in the vernacular.
The Roman Missal numbers our Eucharistic Prayers I, II, III, IV, while in the East, they are identified by the name of a saint. So, among those prayed in Eastern Churches are "The Divine Liturgy of Our Father among the Sts. John Chrysostom," "The Divine Liturgy of Our Father among the Sts. Basil the Great," "The Divine Liturgy of St. James," and "The Liturgy of Addai and Mari." This latter prayer is interesting because it does not have a narrative of the institution, but it is nevertheless used in the Chaldean Catholic Church.
These are just a few of the prayers, but the most common ones, in Eastern Churches.
Since the East maintained the vernacular in its liturgy, you could encounter the "Chrysostom" liturgy in a great variety of modern languages: Arabic, Greek, Russian, Romanian, and Ukrainian, to name some of them. Likewise, the prayer of Basil could be prayed in those and other languages.

Several other Eucharistic Prayers would be prayed in Syrian or Arabic.
This is all introductory to the search for a fourth Eucharistic Prayer for the Roman Missal.
Initially, the committee wanted to take one of the prayers, that of Basil the Great, and bring it into the Roman Missal with a bit of tweaking and translation into Latin, since the "typical," that is official, versions of Roman Catholic liturgical texts are composed and published in Latin and then translated into the various vernaculars.
The impetus was that we would have a prayer that would bridge the divide that had existed since 1054, when the Eastern and Western Churches hurled excommunications at each other. These mutual excommunications had been lifted jointly on Dec. 7, 1965, by Pope St. Paul VI on behalf of the Western Churches, and by the late Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras on behalf of the Eastern Orthodox Churches.
Once they settled on Basil's Prayer, they set to the "tweaking." What was clear early in the process was that this tweaking would have to be much more than a "snip here, and a clip there." Trying to make the Eastern Prayer look more Western and maintain its similarity to an Eastern Prayer would simply not work.
Rather than scrap the concept altogether, the team decided that taking Basil's Prayer as a model but composing a whole new text would be better.
Doing this would also allow some sections of other prayers to serve also as models for sections of the new Eucharistic Prayer. They would not be copied and pasted, rather they would inspire an author or a team of authors to compose an original text for the new prayer.
While a team oversaw the final editing before it was presented to Pope St. Paul VI for his approval, one anonymous author was entrusted with the responsibility for the composition. This was not an uncommon procedure regarding original texts. An author from Group X was chosen or perhaps volunteered, and having heard what was sought, went to work. Usually, along the way, the text was reviewed by some members of the team and finally by the whole team, which thus became the "author" of the text presented to the pope.
It is good to have this very summary background before we move next week to look at this Eucharistic Prayer more carefully.
While this is an original composition, all prayers are also original compositions, even the "Our Father." Someone composed it somewhere; in the case of the "Our Father," we know who composed it, thus it is "The Lord's Prayer." This original Eucharistic Prayer did not simply fall out of the sky into our present Roman Missal. It had inspiration, especially from Eastern liturgical traditions, as we have seen. It also resembles other Western Eucharistic Prayers in its style and format.
For several reasons, we do not offer this prayer frequently. One is its length. Even within the prayer, there are long phrases and sentences that we can grasp when reading it, but are not so easily grasped when hearing them. Another is that it requires a sense of the whole stretch of salvation history, which it beautifully presents. It might be easier understood if it were prayed more often, so we could enter the details of our sacred history.
Next week, we will look at the details of what is now our Eucharistic Prayer IV.