For Thine

Fr dear Fr: Why do Catholic Christians hive off the end of the Lord’s Prayer, the concluding doxology “for thine is the kingdom” and so on, is this not a liberty?

The relevant doxology is a “doxology” or a “doxologia von leitourgia” or a liturgical formula of the worshipping 2nd generation community and appears at the end of the Prayer as recorded by Matthew in his Jewish friendly gospel, but it does not appear in the more primitive gospel of Luke where the form there is regarded by scripture scholars to be more pure, and a more reliable guide to what Jesus actually revealed when he was instructing his disciples as to methods of prayer. So the concluding doxology is assumed by those scholars to be a church interpolation rather than the ipsissima verba Christi - the actual words of Christ, something added as a gloss to the Prayer in early centuries but at a later date. Scripture scholars define this question. When Henry VIII was translating this prayer from the Latin he did not think about interpolation theories since the school of study called Formesgeschichte was not yet born. He imported the doxology from Matthew simply because he thought it sounded nice. A superficial king doing things with sacred things. As Archbishop Foley used to say in that other place, “I am a sacred person, this is a sacred object, and we are doing a sacred action” - he was in no need of catechesis about such things requiring a pure and simple heart, and one thing history records without too much rancour was that Henry had a somewhat divided and distracted heart what with so many girls coming and going at the royal courts of Thornbury and Hampton. Diseases can distract the mind. “Earthly hearts may change and falter, earthly hearts may vary.” Such a sacred subject requires a simple undivided heart, keen on the Lord’s affairs, and not given overly to the affairs of mankind. Amen to this.