Eucharistic prayer

The Anaphora is the most solemn part of the Divine Liturgy, or the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, during which the offerings of bread and wine are consecrated as the body and blood of Christ. This is the usual name for this part of the Liturgy in Greek-speaking Eastern Christianity. In western Christian traditions which have a comparable rite, the Anaphora is more often called the Eucharistic Prayer. When the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church had a single Eucharistic Prayer (between the Council of Trent and Vatican II in 1962) it was referred to as the Canon of the Mass.

"Anaphora" is a Greek word (ἀναφορά) meaning a "carrying back" (hence its meaning in rhetoric and linguistics) or a "carrying up", and so an "offering" (hence its use in reference to the offering of sacrifice to God). In the sacrificial language of the Greek version of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint, προσφέρειν (prosphora) is used of the offerer bringing the victim to the altar, and ἀναφέρειν is used of the priest offering up the selected portion upon the altar (see, for instance, Leviticus 2:14, 2:16, 3:1, 3:5).

To describe the structure of the Anaphoras as it became standardized from the 4th century, we can look at the structure of the anaphoras in the Antiochene (or "West Syrian") family of liturgies, which display an order and logic that finds no equal elsewhere. This structure is still valid, with some significant variations typical of each rite, for the Catholic Church, Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Church, while it was modified, both in the pattern and in the underlying theology, during the Protestant Reformation. Beginning with the Oxford Movement of the 1840s and after the Liturgical Reform Movement of the 1950s, a systematic examination of historic anaphoras began and this in turn has caused the reform of many Eucharistic prayers within mainline Protestant denominations.

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