Our Father

   This is certainly a time for prayer. I was going to make this  more substantive, but I realized that Holy Week is fast approaching and I need to study for Tenebrae during the "Triduum" of Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday, not to mention our choir's part in the long Holy Thursday blessings, processions, High Mass, Good Friday Solemn Liturgy, Holy Saturday Vigil High Mass, etc.,etc.

   Tenebrae means darkness. It once was chanted before dawn. It consists of dirges, supplications and Psalms of Sorrow from the Old Testament. There are only three or four of us who will be singing the liturgy (in Gregorian Chant) on the three mornings at 8am.  The antiphons, psalms, responses, can be challenging - and they are long. I need to copy from a website on the computer, which makes them easier to read and follow. The chant tones are not all the same and require some real concentration. Whew!

   The sacred liturgy for Holy Week gives the choir a real workout. We only have one or two practices, due to distance, work time, and so on.  It's a concentrated effort for the seven of us who make up our little choir.
Anyway, I had to get at it today, along with running errands for the chicken population.  So - just a little information about the Pater Noster, or Lord's Prayer.

   Why don't Catholics end the Lord's Prayer with: "for Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever" before the Amen?

   In the Greek was added "for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory." some of the old Greek liturgies contain the words and they thence slipped into Matthew 6:13.  They are not in Luk 11:4, or in any of the old Latin copies, nor in the most ancient of the Greek texts.

   The Fathers prior to St. John Chrysostum, who explained the Lord's Prayer, did not mention those words. They are not found in Tertullian, St. Cyprian, St. Jerome, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, in the Vatican Greek copy nor in the Cambridge Manuscript.  It seems they were a pious conclusion, or doxology, with whith cthe 4th century Greeks began to conclude their prayers, much as the "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost" was added to the end of each Psalm prayed. They may, it seems, have been written into the margins of some copies and afterwards, by some transcribers put into the text itself. They do appear in the protestant King James Bible.

  So, by keeping to the original translations, Catholics omit the doxology at the end of the Our Father.

AMEN