The correct Our Father

[Elzee]

Does the Church allow the Our Father to be said with the ‘thine is the kingdom…’ etc. part at the end? Our Sunday School teacher wants to recite the Our Father with her class but add that part on to the end like they used to do in her Protestant Church. Is there an official church teaching on what the Our Father officially is?

 

[John_Russell_Jr]

Hi Elzee,

You can add that part on. I don’t like the protestantisation of the Church much. But this is OK. The prayers at Mass must not be changed though. I think much of Vatican II was about preparing for the homecoming of our separated brethren. So don’t worry about it.
In Africa the faithful have been given the freedom to mingle their traditional culture with their Catholic liturgy and worship. This seems to have only happenned there, but. The Church did this for the benefit of souls, and the number of Catholics has grown from 50 mln to 100 mln in recent times. A little compromise is Ok, but one should not compromise on all things. Nor go to far.

 

[theMutant]

The part you reference is called the Doxology in the Catholic Church. It is not actually part of the prayer Jesus gave to us but is actually a separate prayer. Within Protestantism, it is customarily said as part of the Our Father. In the Mass, it is also said after the Our Father but there is an invocation by the priest between the two. If you want to say them together in your prayers, there is no reason not to do so.

 

[Verbum]

Elzee,

Just to add a bit of information, the doxology you speak of is not part of the Lord’s prayer as found in the critical editions of the Bible, that is editions that take into account the best manuscripts and the relationship between them. It is thought that it was slipped into the text because of the fact that it did, in fact, follow the Lord’s Prayer in the Liturgy.

Following the Protestant Reformation, the manuscripts used to do Protestant translations contained the doxology and that is why they adopted it as part of the Lord’s Prayer.

Verbum

 

[Ignatius]

Elzee:

Does the Church allow the Our Father to be said with the ‘thine is the kingdom…’ etc. part at the end? Our Sunday School teacher wants to recite the Our Father with her class but add that part on to the end like they used to do in her Protestant Church. Is there an official church teaching on what the Our Father officially is?

Actually the part you mention was not originally in the scriptures. It was accidentally added by the protestants because it was part of the old Catholic Liturgy. So they got it from us.

 

[Church_Militant]

It is part of one of the two texts of the Our Father in the KJV Bible, and is one of my favorite “chops-busters” (so to speak) for those who wanna live and die by King James. The doxology is not in the original text and the really funny part is that for a bunch of folks who tell me it’s THE Bible I ask then why is that in their transaltion, when it’s actually taken from the Didache. A non-canonical NT book that was considered righteous, but not inspired by the early church. How it got included bt KJV translators is beyond me. It has pretty much always been liturgical, but never canon. That’s why it is said separately from the Our Father during Mass.
I hope this helps,
Pax vobiscum,