Canon of The Mass - History of The Canon

History of The Canon

For more details on this topic, see History of the Roman Canon.

Little is known of the liturgical formulas of the Church of Rome before the second century. In the First Apology of Justin Martyr (circa 165) an early outline of the liturgy is found, including a celebration of the Eucharist (thanksgiving) with an Anaphora, with the final Amen, that was of what would now be classified as Eastern type and that was celebrated in Greek.

Latin's use as a liturgical language seems to have occurred first in Africa (the Roman province corresponding approximately to present-day Tunisia, where knowledge of Greek was not as widespread as in Rome). On the basis of the uncertain attribution to him of a treatise found among the writings of Saint Cyprian, it is sometimes said that Pope Victor I (190-202) may have been the first Pope to write in Latin. A further supposition leads some to say he was the first Pope to use Latin in the liturgy. The burial inscriptions of the Popes suggest that the change of language for the papal Mass was somewhat later: the inscriptions begin to be in Latin with that of Cornelius (d. 253). But Latin may have been used in the liturgy for some groups in Rome earlier than that, just as, to judge from a quotation in Greek from a Roman oratio oblationis of 360, other groups will have continued to use Greek even later in that cosmopolitan city. (See volume I, page 65 of the original text of Josef Jungmann's work that has been translated into English as "The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development".) "The first Christians in Rome were chiefly people who came from the East and spoke Greek. The founding of Constantinople naturally drew such people thither rather than to Rome, and then Christianity at Rome began to spread among the Roman population, so that at last the bulk of the Christian population in Rome spoke Latin. Hence the change in the language of the liturgy. ... The liturgy was said (in Latin) first in one church and then in more, until the Greek liturgy was driven out, and the clergy ceased to know Greek. About 415 or 420 we find a Pope saying that he is unable to answer a letter from some Eastern bishops, because he has no one who could write Greek."

"The Roman Canon is not in its primitive form" but has many "awkward transitions" that show that it is "evidently an abbreviated and transposed version of a more ancient eucharistic prayer". "At least in its final form it is not structured as a single unitary prayer. Since 1474 it was printed in paragraphs, marked with initial letters and divided by rubrics (so that some pre-Vatican II missal users took it to be a set of discrete prayers). Several of the paragraphs had a conclusion – Per Christum Dominum Nostrum – with interpolated Amens. The Prayer thus appeared as a series of discrete prayers, and one can understand the force of the remark of Thomas Cranmer's chaplain Thomas Become, when he described it as a 'hotch-potch... a very beggar's cloak, cobbled, clouted and patched with a multitude of popish rags'".

Some of the prayers of the present Roman Canon can be traced to the Eastern Liturgy of St. James. Several of the prayers were in use before 400 in almost exactly their present form. Others (the Communicantes, the Hanc igitur, and the post-consecration Memento etiam and Nobis quoque) were added during the following century (see Jungmann, page 71, and Hermanus A. P. Schmidt, Introduction in Liturgiam Occidentalem, page 352).

After the time of Pope Gregory I (590-604), who made at least one change in the text, the Canon remained largely unchanged in Rome. Not so elsewhere. The 11th-century Missal of Robert of Jumièges, Archbishop of Canterbury, interpolates the names of Saint Gertrude, Saint Gregory, Saint Ethraelda and other English saints in the Communicantes. The Missale Drummondiense inserts the names of Saint Patrick and Saint Gregory the Great. And in several Medieval French Missals the Canon contained the names of Saint Martin and Saint Hilary.

Pope Pius V's imposition of the Roman Missal in 1570 restrained any tendency to vary the text of the Canon. According to one source, in 1604 Pope Clement VIII, as well as modifying some of the rubrics, altered the text of the Canon by excluding a mention of the king. In the early nineteenth century, the king was mentioned by name in England within the Canon. Although other parts of the Missal were modified from time to time, the Canon remained quite unchanged, apart from this variation, from 1570 until Pope John XXIII's insertion of a mention of Saint Joseph immediately after that of the Virgin Mary.