The Our Father: the Lord’s Prayer in Full, Line by Line

The text above is the one English-speaking Catholics learn as children and say at Mass, in the Rosary and at the end of the day. The Catechism prints it at the head of its whole treatment of the prayer (CCC 2759), and Vatican News gives the same words. “Who art” and “thy” are older English, kept because this is a prayer said aloud together, and a prayer said together changes slowly.

The Catechism calls it “the summary of the whole gospel”, a phrase it takes from Tertullian (CCC 2761), and St. Augustine said you will find nothing in all the prayers of Scripture that it does not contain (CCC 2762). It has two names because it has two sides. “The Lord’s Prayer” says who gave it: Jesus himself, who is both “the master of our prayer” and its model (CCC 2765). “The Our Father” is its first two words, and says who it is addressed to.

This is the question page one of every search for this prayer asks, and the honest answer has three parts.

It is not in the oldest copies of the Gospel. Luke’s Gospel never had it. In Matthew, the earliest Greek manuscripts end the prayer at “deliver us from evil”; the line appears in the later, Byzantine copies, which is why Bibles translated from them, such as the King James Version, print it in Matthew 6:13. The World English Bible that this site quotes follows those copies and prints it too (below). St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, the Bible of Western Catholic prayer for centuries, did not have it, and so the Catholic form ends where the oldest Gospel text ends.

It is very old all the same. The Catechism says so plainly: “Very early on, liturgical usage concluded the Lord’s Prayer with a doxology.” The Didache, a Christian manual from around the end of the first century, ends the prayer with “For yours are the power and the glory for ever”, and the Apostolic Constitutions add “the kingdom” (CCC 2760). In other words, the churches sang a line of praise after the prayer, and in time some copyists wrote that line into the Gospel itself.

Catholics pray it at every Mass, in its liturgical place. Since the Missal of 1970, after the congregation says the Our Father, the priest does not say “Amen”. He continues with a short prayer called the embolism, which begins “Deliver us, Lord, we pray, from every evil” and ends looking for “the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ” (CCC 2760 calls it the development of the last petition, “awaiting our blessed hope”). Then everyone answers with the doxology: “For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours, now and forever” (CCC 2855).

The prayer is in two Gospels. In Matthew it comes in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, right after Jesus warns against praying to be seen and against “vain repetitions” (Matthew 6:7). Matthew 6:9–13, in the World English Bible, Catholic Edition:

⁹Pray like this: “‘Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy. ¹⁰Let your Kingdom come. Let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. ¹¹Give us today our daily bread. ¹²Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors. ¹³Bring us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For yours is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen.’

— Matthew 6:9–13 (WEBC)

In Luke the setting is different: Jesus has been praying, and when he finishes, one of his disciples asks, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John also taught his disciples” (Luke 11:1). Luke 11:2–4:

²He said to them, “When you pray, say, ‘Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy. May your Kingdom come. May your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. ³Give us day by day our daily bread. ⁴Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves also forgive everyone who is indebted to us. Bring us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’”

— Luke 11:2–4 (WEBC)

The oldest text of the Lord’s Prayer we have is the Greek of Matthew and Luke. That is not a translation of a lost original; it is what the evangelists wrote. Jesus himself spoke Aramaic, and the Gospels keep one of his Aramaic words for God: Abba, “Father”, which Mark records from the garden of Gethsemane (Mark 14:36) and St. Paul says the Spirit cries out in us (Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6). The Catechism spends a whole section on that single word (CCC 2779–2785).

The Catechism’s last section is a commentary on this prayer, one article per phrase. Here is each line, what it asks, and where to read more. The paragraph numbers are the Catechism’s own.

“Our Father” (CCC 2777–2793). To call God “Father” at all is something the Mass introduces with the words “we dare to say”, the “filial boldness” of children (CCC 2777). And the word is “our”, not “my”: it “does not express possession, but an entirely new relationship with God” (CCC 2786), and it makes every one who prays it a brother or sister of every other.

“Who art in heaven” (CCC 2794–2796). Heaven here “does not mean a place”, but a way of being; not that God is far off, but that he is majestic, and close to the humble heart (CCC 2794).

“Hallowed be thy name” (CCC 2807–2815). God’s name is already holy; we ask that it be recognized and treated as holy, in us and in the world (CCC 2807). The first three petitions are about God, not us: “thy name, thy kingdom, thy will” (CCC 2804).

“Thy kingdom come” (CCC 2816–2821). The kingdom has come near in Christ, is present in the Eucharist, and will come in glory at his return (CCC 2816). We are asking for all three.

“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (CCC 2822–2827). The Father’s will, the Catechism says, is that all be saved, and his commandment is that we love one another as Christ loved us, which “summarizes all the others” (CCC 2822).

“Give us this day our daily bread” (CCC 2828–2837). The word translated “daily”, epiousios, “occurs nowhere else in the New Testament” (CCC 2837). It can mean the bread we need for today, and read literally it can mean “super-essential”: the Bread of Life, the Eucharist. The Church hears both.

“And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us” (CCC 2838–2845). The Catechism calls this petition “astonishing”, because its two halves are tied by one word, “as” (CCC 2838). It does not ask us to feel no hurt; it notes that it is not in our power not to feel an offense, but that the heart given to the Spirit can turn injury into intercession (CCC 2843).

“And lead us not into temptation” (CCC 2846–2849). God tempts no one (James 1:13). The Greek, the Catechism explains, means both “do not allow us to enter into temptation” and “do not let us yield to temptation”, and no single English word carries both (CCC 2846). It asks for discernment and the strength to stand.

“But deliver us from evil” (CCC 2850–2854). “Evil” here “is not an abstraction”: it refers to a person, Satan, the Evil One (CCC 2851), which is why the WEBC reads “the evil one”. The petition also asks to be freed from every evil of which he is the author, past, present and future, and so brings “all the distress of the world” before the Father (CCC 2854).

“Amen” (CCC 2856, 2865). “So be it”: our consent to everything we have just asked.

Not in English, and not for the whole Church. What happened is narrower, and it happened in Italy.

In November 2018 the Italian bishops’ conference (CEI) approved a new Italian translation of the Roman Missal. In it, the line that Italian Catholics had said as non ci indurre in tentazione (“lead us not into temptation”) became non abbandonarci alla tentazione, “do not abandon us to temptation”. The Holy See confirmed the translation in 2019, and the new wording entered Italian Masses on the First Sunday of Advent, November 29, 2020. France had made a similar change in 2017 (ne nous laisse pas entrer en tentation, “do not let us enter into temptation”), and Pope Francis spoke approvingly of it in a 2017 Italian television interview, worrying that the old wording could suggest a God who pushes us into sin to watch us fall.

This is the Latin as the Holy See prints it in the appendix of the Compendium of the Catechism, accents marking the stressed syllable. It is the text of the Latin Mass and of Gregorian chant, and the prayer’s old name, the Pater Noster, is its first two words.

Six times in a five-decade Rosary. After the Sign of the Cross and the Creed, the first Our Father is said on the first large bead, followed by three Hail Marys and the Glory Be. Then each decade opens with an Our Father on the large bead, followed by ten Hail Marys, the Glory Be and, in most parishes, the Fatima Prayer. The whole sequence is on how to pray the Rosary, and the Rosary closes with the Hail, Holy Queen.

At Mass the Our Father comes at a precise moment: after the Eucharistic Prayer, and before the sign of peace and Holy Communion. The Catechism explains why it sits there. It gathers up everything the Eucharistic Prayer has asked, and “knocks at the door of the Banquet of the kingdom which sacramental communion anticipates” (CCC 2770). “Give us this day our daily bread”, said minutes before Communion, is not only about food.

For the moment before you begin, when the words are so familiar that they run ahead of the heart. Short enough to say before every Our Father of a Rosary, or once before the day’s first.