The Pater Noster: let it be

The Pater Noster is the Our Father in Latin, the prayer the whole church says together at a modern-rite Latin mass. It is also a grammar lesson: nearly every verb in it is a command, and it uses all three of Latin's ways of giving one.

The text

This is the liturgical text, the one said at mass:

Pater noster, qui es in caelis,

sanctificetur nomen tuum.

Adveniat regnum tuum.

Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra.

Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie,

et dimitte nobis debita nostra,

sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris.

Et ne nos inducas in tentationem,

sed libera nos a malo. Amen.

Older missals spell coelis for caelis, and the current Roman Missal spells cotidianum: the same words. At the modern-rite mass no Amen follows, because the priest goes straight on with the next prayer; in the 1962 Missal he says it quietly.

The text is Matthew 6:9-13 with one word changed. The Clementine Vulgate, the Church's standard Bible from 1592, reads the same apart from the adjective in verse 11:

Quotidianum (daily) is the older Latin. Jerome put supersubstantialem in Matthew but kept quotidianum in Luke 11:3, and the liturgy kept the older word. Modern critical editions of the Vulgate differ from the prayer in a few more small details.

Pater noster, qui es in caelis

Pater is a third-declension noun, so its vocative is the same as its nominative. Noster (our) follows its noun, the usual Latin order, and the two words give the prayer its name.

Qui es keeps the verb in the second person: you who are. Traditional English who art does the same; who is would turn God from someone spoken to into someone spoken about.

In caelis is plural, in the heavens, as in the Greek. The next line has the singular in caelo.

Let it be: three jussive subjunctives

The everyday imperative only orders the person you speak to. To say let something happen about a third party, Latin uses the present subjunctive on its own: the jussive.

Each has its subject in the nominative:

• Sanctificetur nomen tuum. - Let your name be made holy.
• Adveniat regnum tuum. - Let your kingdom come.
• Fiat voluntas tua. - Let your will come about.

In a prayer these shade into wishes, and some grammars call them optative: may your name be hallowed. The form is the same.

Fiat comes from fio, become, happen, be done, the verb in fiat lux, let there be light. Nothing in the Latin says who does the hallowing or the doing.

Sicut in caelo et in terra has no verb at all: as in heaven, so also on earth. Here et means also, and heaven comes first.