Why are the Catholic and Protestant versions of the Lord’s Prayer different?

Can you believe that there are only two more weeks of Lent? How is the prayer, fasting, and almsgiving going? The good thing is that we still have some time. We can easily get back into prayer and one of the greatest prayers we have is the Lord’s Prayer.

So why are the Catholic and the Protestant versions of the Lord’s Prayer different? For most of us who have prayed the Lord’s Prayer or Pater Noster with someone from a Protestant background and are sometimes surprised that when we stopped at “deliver us from evil”, the Protestant went on “for thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever and ever.” We sometimes do not know what to do when they do this, is it okay to continue with them, of course, is it ok to say Amen and stop, of course.

We know the words because they are familiar. We say a version of it every time we go to Mass, it is called a doxology, which is a short phrase or song that gives glory to God. Within the Mass and after we pray the Our Father, the priest says “Deliver us, Lord, we pray, from every evil, graciously grant us peace in our days that by the help of your mercy, we may be always free from sin and safe from all distress as we wait the blessed hope of the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.” We respond with that doxology “For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and forever.” This section was not in the Tridentan rite Mass, which is the liturgy that was used from before the Council of Trent in 1569, or previous liturgies. The doxology was added to the liturgy post-Vatican II. This liturgy was established in 1970 and then updated a few years ago with some fixes in the translations. It is the liturgy that we are currently using.

There are two places where Jesus gives us the “Our Father,” it is in Matthew 6:9-13 and in Luke 11:2-4. Both the Catholics and the Protestants take the prayer from the Matthean version, because the Lucan version is a shorter one. The reason for this could be that Jesus taught the prayer at different times for a different audience. In some of the oldest texts of the bible the doxology is not used, there are different theories how it got added to the biblical texts from different other sources including in a non-biblical text called the Didiche, which is a catechism or teaching document that was attributed to the Apostles themselves. Another of the main reasons is very simple; some people believed that the prayer should not end in evil, or the evil one, as it does. So, the doxology that we say at the Mass was included in the prayer itself. Since the original prayer was written in Greek, there is also another translation thing that happens, changing the word trespasses to debt, this is more of a translation difference. No matter what, the Lord’s Prayer is still the prayer that Jesus himself taught us and one that should be prayed daily, if not multiple times a day.

God bless,
Fr. Ken