THE EUCHARISTIC PRAYER OR ANAPHORA

Introduction

1. What is a Eucharistic Prayer?

The Eucharistic Prayer is also known as the anaphora, a Greek term used in the Byzantine rite meaning "a raising up," and thus "an offering." It is the responsibility of the presiding minister to pray the Eucharistic Prayer, in dialogue with the gathered people. According to the General Introduction to the Roman Missal, the "principal elements" of a Eucharistic Prayer are eight in number. The order in which these elements are disposed varies according to the type or family to which any given anaphora belongs.

1. The first is the Thanksgiving, which always opens with a dialogue between the president and the assembly, inviting all to join in the prayer. The thanksgiving is more commonly known as the Preface, a term referring to a public act of praise; the word does not mean something which precedes, like the preface of a book, for example. Prefaces are fixed or variable in content.
2. The preface concludes with the whole assembly singing a great song of praise and adoration, the Sanctus or Holy, Holy, in which present worshippers are united to the heavenly assembly.
3. After a more or less brief transitional passage, the first part of the Invocation of the Spirit, or Epiclesis, is prayed, calling on God the Father to send the sanctifying Spirit upon the gifts of bread and wine in order to transform them into the sacrament of the body and blood of the Lord Jesus. The goal of the prayer is that the assembly that partakes of the gifts be itself transformed into the ecclesial body of Christ. In the current Roman liturgy, these two phases are reflected in the two distinct prayers of Invocation, separated by the Last Supper narrative and the memorial.
4. There follows the recounting of the story of the Last Supper, known as the Institution Narrative. The repeating of the Lord's words over the bread and wine has been understood as a consecratory act in the Latin Church, and it is emphasized by the showing of the sanctified elements to the people and accompanying gestures of reverence. At this point the people speak or sing an acclamation referring to the Paschal Mystery being realized in the celebration.
5. Fulfilling the Lord's command to "do this" in memory of him, the Church makes explicit the character of its Eucharist as a Memorial (in Greek, anamnesis), referring in particular to the decisive events of his death and resurrection and his ascent to heaven. This part of the prayer expresses the will of the assembly to be united with the self-offering of Christ, and so is also known as the Oblation.
6. Just as the Lord's Paschal Mystery was completed in the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost, so the Eucharistic Prayer asks the Father to send the sanctifying Spirit upon the people who participate in the sanctified gifts, bringing them into union with God in Christ and uniting them to one another. This is the second part of the Epiclesis. In Eastern Christianity, the epiclesis is usually found at this point, but is generally not divided as it is in the present reformed Roman rite.
7. Celebrating the memorial of the Lord's saving love, the gathered Church is led to pray ardently for its full realization in human history. The Intercessions have always played an important part in the Eucharistic Prayer; they embrace both the living and the dead, and contain an expression of the Church's desire to be one with the saints in the eternal Kingdom.
8. The prayer discourse returns at the end to the note of praise with the final Doxology, a brief Trinitarian act of praise which, in the Roman tradition, strongly accentuates the mediating role of Christ.

2. The New Eucharistic Prayers of the Roman Rite

Although the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy did not explicitly envisage the reform of the Eucharistic Prayer, on May 23, 1968 Pope Paul VI approved three new eucharistic prayers for the Roman rite together with eight new prefaces. On November 1, 1974, the Congregation for Worship presented on an experimental basis two prayers for Masses of reconciliation and three prayers for Masses with children. Meanwhile the collection of prefaces in the Roman Missal had increased to more than eighty. Thus the Roman church enriched its eucharistic euchology (or prayer-book) by adopting the practice of the Eastern churches of having a number of eucharistic prayers rather than a single one and by adding considerably to its own practice of having variable prefaces for the Roman canon and for Eucharistic Prayers II and III.

The creation of the new Roman eucharistic prayers was greatly influenced by the anaphoras found in the liturgies of the Eastern churches. The anaphoras in the Eastern churches are divided into three large families:

• the Antiochene or Greek West Syrian
• the Alexandrian or Egyptian
• the Syriac East Syrian or Chaldean

The division into families results from the placement of the component parts in the anaphora, especially the Intercessions thus:

While the Roman canon (now Eucharistic Prayer I) is unique in its kind, it does show affinities with the Alexandrian mode of distributing the various elements of the prayer.

The new eucharistic prayers of the Roman rite, however, take a different path; they tend to follow the Antiochene structure rather than the Alexandrian model, since they group the intercessions just before the doxology. At the same time they retain an element of the Alexandrian structure, namely the presence of two epicleses, one before and one after the institution narrative.

The principal model on which the new Roman prayers were based was the Egyptian anaphora of Basil (or Alexandrian Basil, as it is called) which follows the Antiochene pattern. What we now know as Roman Eucharistic Prayer IV is an adaptation of the spirit and structure of this prayer. It is meant to illustrate a fully developed eucharistic prayer and is recommended for use on especially solemn occasions. It is particularly noteworthy for its preface which praises God for creation and for its long postsanctus prayer that relates the history of salvation.
Eucharistic Prayer II, on the other hand, is very closely modeled on the Eucharistic Prayer of Hippolytus, with some modifications and additions to bring it into line with current practice. Hippolytus (c.170-c.236) was a Roman presbyter of some importance; the prayer has come down to us in a document called The Apostolic Tradition.