The Prayer of Humble Access

This is the prayer a Catholic is most likely to hear and not recognize. It belongs to the Mass — but to a form of the Mass most Catholics have never attended: Divine Worship: The Missal, promulgated in 2015 for the Personal Ordinariates erected for former Anglicans entering into full communion with the Catholic Church. There, immediately before Communion, the priest bows profoundly and says it aloud together with all who are to receive.

Its history is unusual, and worth telling plainly. The prayer first appeared in the Order of the Communion of 1548 — an English insertion into what was still the Latin Mass — and was retained in the Book of Common Prayer of 1549. It is not a translation of anything in the Sarum Use; indeed the Sarum rite did not use Domine, non sum dignus at Communion at all. It is instead a fresh composition woven from older Catholic threads: the Syrophoenician woman of Mark 7, the Liturgy of St. Basil, a Gregorian collect, Our Lord’s words in John 6, and the eucharistic writing of St. Thomas Aquinas. The name by which we know it comes later still, from the heading printed above it in the Scottish Book of Common Prayer of 1637.

For four centuries it was prayed outside the visible unity of the Church. Then, under Anglicanorum coetibus (2009), whole communities of Anglicans were received into full communion and permitted to bring with them what was true and good in their patrimony. The Prayer of Humble Access came home with them — in the 1662 wording, unrevised — and is now prayed at Catholic altars.

That is a fact worth sitting with. A prayer composed in the very century of the rupture, by the hand most associated with it, is now offered in the Catholic Mass. It says nothing that a Catholic cannot say and everything a Catholic ought to feel: that we come to the altar on no merit of our own, that we are not fit to gather the crumbs beneath it, and that the Lord whose nature it is to have mercy will nevertheless give us his Flesh to eat and his Blood to drink, so that we may dwell in him and he in us.

The famous line about the crumbs is not a figure of speech the compilers invented. It is the Syrophoenician woman’s answer to Our Lord, when He tested her by saying it was not good to take the children’s bread and cast it to the dogs: “Yea, Lord; for the whelps also eat under the table of the crumbs of the children” (Mark 7:28). She does not dispute the comparison; she accepts it and asks anyway, and Our Lord grants her request for the sake of that answer. That is the posture of this prayer exactly. What follows the crumbs is the promise: “He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, abideth in me, and I in him” (John 6:57).