The Pater Noster: the Our Father in Latin, Word by Word

If you go to a Latin mass, the Pater Noster is the one prayer the whole church says aloud together, and it is the one most people can already recite without understanding a syllable of it. That is not a criticism, it is an advantage. The sounds are already in your head, so the grammar has something to stick to.

The text is Matthew 6:9-13 as Jerome rendered it around 383, with one word borrowed from Luke, and it has been in continuous liturgical use since the fourth century. It is also, by accident, one of the best short grammar lessons in Latin. Nearly every verb in it is a command, Latin has three ways of giving one, and the prayer uses all three in about forty words.

The text

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 print coelis and coelo: same words, older spelling habit. Some editions print cotidianum, which is in fact the better Latin; the qu- spelling is a medieval tidy-up that stuck.

Pater noster, qui es in caelis

Pater is vocative: you are addressing him, not describing him. Third-declension nouns make life easy here, because their vocative is identical to their nominative, so there is no ending to learn. Noster is the possessive adjective, masculine, agreeing with pater, and it sits after its noun, which is the neutral Latin order. English reverses it, and the whole prayer is named for that reversal.

Qui es is the relative pronoun plus the second person of sum: you who are. English cannot really do this. We say who art in heaven only because the King James translators kept the construction alive; ordinary modern English forces you into who is, which quietly changes God from someone being addressed into someone being talked about.

In caelis is in plus the ablative plural of caelum. Plural: in the heavens. That is a Hebraism carried through Greek, and the very next line drops back to the singular in caelo. Latin was not being careless. It was being faithful.

The three jussive subjunctives

Here is the spine of the prayer.

Latin has an imperative, but the imperative can only order the person in front of you. There is no imperative for let his kingdom come, because his kingdom is not being spoken to. For that, Latin uses the present subjunctive on its own in a main clause, and grammarians call it the jussive subjunctive. It is not a wish, a hope or a maybe. It is an order issued about a third party.

Watch what that does to the sense. Sanctificetur nomen tuum is not your name is holy, an observation, and not may your name be holy with fingers crossed. It is closer to let your name be treated as holy, with nomen (neuter nominative) as the subject of a passive verb. Somebody is being told to do the hallowing, and the Latin politely declines to say who.

Fiat is worth its own second. It is from fio, which supplies the passive of facio: be made, become, happen. So fiat voluntas tua is let your will come about, not let your will be done by someone. Nothing in the Latin nominates an agent.

Then sicut in caelo et in terra, with no verb at all. Latin drops est and its relatives constantly and the reader is expected to cope. The familiar English says on earth as it is in heaven; the Latin says as in heaven, also on earth, in that order, with heaven first. The pattern is being described, not requested twice.

Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie

The object comes first, which is emphasis: it is the bread we are asking about. Panem is the accusative of panis, with nostrum and quotidianum agreeing with it in case, number and gender, which is why they all end -um and none of them ends -us.

Da is the singular imperative of do, and it belongs to a tiny club. Most first-conjugation imperatives are just the stem (libera, ora, ama), but do, dico, duco and facio clip theirs to da, dic, duc and fac. Learn those four and you will never be caught out.

Nobis is dative, the person receiving. Hodie is an adverb, from hoc die, on this day, worn down into one word.

Dimitte, and what it is doing to whom

Dimitte is the singular imperative of dimitto, literally send away. Debita nostra is the neuter plural accusative of debitum: debts, things owed. Not trespasses, not sins. The metaphor is an accounting one, and it is a metaphor the Greek makes too. Trespasses reached English through Tyndale and the Book of Common Prayer and has been in our ears so long that the Latin sounds mercenary by comparison.

The second half repeats the verb in the first person plural indicative, dimittimus, with debitoribus nostris in the dative: you forgive a thing (accusative) to a person (dative). And et here is not and. It is also: sicut et nos dimittimus is as we too forgive. The prayer is drawing a comparison, and the small word carrying it is the one an English speaker skips.

Et ne nos inducas in tentationem

The third command type. Latin does not negate an imperative with non; for a prohibition it uses ne plus the subjunctive. Inducas is second singular present subjunctive of induco, so the line is and do not lead us into... with the whole negative sitting in that two-letter word.

Tentationem is the accusative of tentatio after in, which takes the accusative for motion into and the ablative for position inside. And tentatio is not temptation in the modern sense of a chocolate biscuit. It is a trial, a testing, the sort you are put through, and the Greek peirasmos means the same. Read the line as do not put us to the test and it stops being theologically peculiar.

Sed libera nos a malo: libera is a plain first-conjugation imperative, a takes the ablative, and malo is the ambiguity the whole prayer is famous for. Neuter malum and masculine malus have the same ablative. Evil, or the evil one. Latin cannot distinguish them and neither could the Greek. In the traditional Roman rite the priest chants the prayer alone and the congregation's only spoken line is the answer to this one: Sed libera nos a malo.

Saying it

At mass, use ecclesiastical pronunciation. It is the Italianate system the Church has used for centuries, everyone around you will be using it, and a prayer said in chorus only works when the chorus agrees. Classical pronunciation, which the audio on this course speaks, is for reading Cicero.

Four rules cover almost everything: c before ae, e, i, oe and y is ch in church Latin and k in classical; gn is ny; ti before a vowel is tsee; and v is v in church Latin but w in classical. Everything else in this prayer is said the same way in both.

Where to go next

The prayer has now taught you the vocative, the ablative after in, the dative of the person, four irregular imperatives, ne plus subjunctive for prohibitions, and the jussive subjunctive three times over. That is a genuine slice of the language, not a party trick.

If you want the machinery behind it rather than the recitation, the subjunctive article explains how sanctificetur and fiat are built, the cases article explains why panem and nobis and malo all look different, and the Latin course starts from the top and gets you reading. The Ave Maria is the natural next text: shorter, and it turns almost entirely on one adjective that takes the ablative.