The Roman Canon and the Anaphora of Addai and Mari

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In the sacristy of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, a priest prepares to celebrate Mass using the Roman Canon — a text whose essential structure has remained unchanged since the pontificate of Gregory the Great in the late sixth century. On the same morning, in a Chaldean Catholic church in Baghdad, a priest prepares to celebrate using the Anaphora of Addai and Mari — a Eucharistic Prayer whose origins may reach back to the apostolic mission of the first century, predating even the composition of the Roman Canon by several hundred years. Both prayers are Catholic. Both are valid. Both confect the same Eucharist. Yet they are radically different in form, in structure, in theological emphasis, and in historical origin. A comparison of these two great Eucharistic Prayers illuminates, as perhaps nothing else can, the extraordinary antiquity and diversity of the Church’s eucharistic tradition.

The Roman Canon — known since 1969 as Eucharistic Prayer I — is the ancient Eucharistic Prayer of the Roman Rite, in use in substantially its current form since at least the fourth century, with its essential structure stabilized no later than the pontificate of Gregory the Great (590-604). It is unique among the world’s great anaphoras in several structurally distinctive ways.

The Roman Canon’s most distinctive structural feature is the placement of its intercessions. In virtually every other Eucharistic Prayer in Christendom — Byzantine, Alexandrian, West Syriac — the intercessions come either before or after the entire anaphora. In the Roman Canon alone, the intercessions are split: the Memento for the living and commemoration of the saints come before the Consecration, and the Memento for the dead and further commemoration come after. This creates a structure in which the Eucharistic Prayer literally wraps around the Consecration — the living and dead present before and after the moment when Christ becomes present on the altar.

The Roman Canon is also distinctive for its repeated, explicit use of sacrificial language. The words oblationem, hostiam, sacrificium, and their cognates appear more than twenty times in the Canon’s relatively brief text. This is not redundancy; it is theological insistence. The Mass is a sacrifice. The Canon will not let the hearer forget this.

The Anaphora of Addai and Mari is the Eucharistic Prayer of the Chaldean Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East. It is named for Addai and Mari, disciples of Thomas the Apostle, traditionally credited with bringing Christianity to Mesopotamia in the first century. Whether or not this attribution is historically exact, the anaphora preserves liturgical material of extraordinary antiquity.

The anaphora’s most theologically remarkable — and historically controversial — feature is this: it does not contain an explicit Institution Narrative. The words of Jesus at the Last Supper (“This is my body… this is my blood…”) are alluded to but not quoted verbatim within the prayer. This made the Anaphora of Addai and Mari a subject of intense scholarly and ecclesiastical debate for most of the twentieth century.

The question of the anaphora’s validity without an explicit Institution Narrative came to a head in 2001, when the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity issued a document permitting, under specific circumstances, Chaldean Catholics and Assyrian Christians to receive Communion at each other’s liturgies — which meant implicitly recognizing the validity of the Anaphora of Addai and Mari as a consecratory prayer despite the absent Institution Narrative.

This decision is significant far beyond the Assyrian question. It established that the Institution Narrative, as a discrete formulaic element, is not the sole formal cause of a valid Eucharist — a point of considerable importance for ecumenical theology and for understanding the diversity of the Church’s eucharistic tradition.

Placing the Roman Canon and the Anaphora of Addai and Mari side by side illuminates several truths that are not easily visible from within any single liturgical tradition.