This Saturday, the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Leo XIV presided over Holy Mass at the Pontifical Parish of Saint Thomas of Villanova. And once again, at the central moment of the celebration, it was not the Roman Canon that resounded—the anaphora that venerates the “ever-glorious Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus Christ, our God and Lord” at the head of her communion of saints—but Eucharistic Prayer III, the formula drafted in the sixties of the last century. It is the latest piece in a series that, reviewed with the official booklets in hand, paints an unmistakable picture. In the liturgical year 2026, none of the great solemnities of the Roman calendar celebrated by the Pope has known the Canon.
The litany of absences
The booklets published by the Office for the Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff leave no room for interpretation. Eucharistic Prayer III on Mary, Mother of God, January 1. Prayer III at the Presentation of the Lord, February 2. Prayer III on Palm Sunday. Prayer III at the Easter Vigil—the “mother of all vigils”, including ten adult baptisms. Prayer III on Easter Sunday itself, celebrated in Latin in Saint Peter’s Square. Prayer III at Pentecost. Prayer III on Saints Peter and Paul, also in Latin, with the blessing of the pallia. Prayer III at the three major events of the trip to Spain: Corpus Christi before more than a million faithful in the Plaza de Cibeles, the inauguration of the Tower of Jesus Christ at the Sagrada Família, and the Sacred Heart at the Gran Canaria Stadium. And Prayer III, now, at the Assumption of the Virgin.
Easter, Pentecost, Corpus Christi, Peter and Paul, the Assumption: these are, alongside Christmas, the summits of the Roman liturgical year. On none of them did the papal liturgy choose this year to resort to the prayer that for more than fourteen hundred years was the sole prayer of the Roman Rite, the one prayed by Gregory the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and all the saints of the West, the one that the Council of Trent defended as “pure of all error” and Vatican II commanded to be preserved.
The absences are all the more striking given that the Canon was, so to speak, waiting on each of those dates. For the Easter octave it retains its own proper Communicantes and Hanc igitur—“celebrating the most sacred night of the Resurrection…”—unique texts that no other anaphora possesses and which this year were proclaimed neither at the Vigil nor on Easter Sunday. For Pentecost it retains another proper Communicantes, likewise unheard. On Saints Peter and Paul, the Canon mentions both apostles twice, in the commemoration of the saints and in the Libera nos; preference was given to the formula that subsumes them into a generic “apostles and martyrs”. And on Marian solemnities, no prayer gives the Mother of God the prominence that the Canon accords her, venerating her “above all” (in primis) as it opens the procession of Roman apostles and martyrs.
The exceptions that prove the rule
To be precise: the Roman Canon has not entirely disappeared from the papal altar. It resounded on three days of 2026. On Holy Thursday, twice over—at the Chrism Mass and at the Mass in Coena Domini at Saint John Lateran—that is to say, on the sole day of the year for which the Missal reserves proper Communicantes, Hanc igitur, and Qui pridie for it, to the point of making its omission almost unthinkable. And, surprisingly, at the Mass of the Sacred Heart celebrated in Spanish at the Port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife on June 12.
The day before, at the Gran Canaria Stadium, the Pope had celebrated the same solemnity of the Sacred Heart with Prayer III. Same feast, same preface, same trip, twenty-four hours apart: two distinct anaphoras. Its sporadic appearance suggests rather that the choice of the Eucharistic prayer in papal Masses does not respond to any liturgical logic, but to ad hoc decisions in which the Roman anaphora has ceased to hold its proper place: not even the one assigned to it by liturgical law itself.
Disregarding the guidance of the Missal?
The General Instruction of the Roman Missal, in paragraph 365, does not merely present four prayers in a showcase: it guides their use. Of the Canon it says that it “may always be used,” but notes that its use is particularly appropriate on days with proper Communicantes or Hanc igitur, on the feasts of the apostles and saints mentioned in it, and on Sundays. Eucharistic Prayer III is recommended for Sundays and feasts; Prayer II, owing to its brevity, for weekdays and special circumstances. Turning Prayer III into the sole formula for the highest solemnities violates no rubric—it should be stated clearly: there is no liturgical abuse here in a technical sense—yet it effectively reverses the hierarchy established by the Missal itself, treating the legislator’s guidance as a dead letter.
Lex orandi, lex credendi
Someone might object that this is a dispute among specialists. It is not. The Roman Canon is not merely one prayer among four: it is the historical expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite, already substantially attested in the time of Saint Ambrose and fixed by Saint Gregory the Great. Its language is persistently sacrificial—“these gifts, these offerings, these holy and unblemished sacrifices”; “a pure victim, a holy victim, a spotless victim”; its structure links the altar of earth with the altar of heaven; its double litany of Roman apostles and martyrs anchors every Mass in the concrete Church of Peter. None of this is decorative: it is prayed doctrine.
In the Roman Canon operates the axiom attributed to Prosper of Aquitaine: legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi—let the law of prayer establish the law of belief. What the Church prays shapes what the Church believes; and what it ceases to pray, sooner or later, it ceases to believe with the same depth. If the anaphora that expresses the sacrificial character of the Mass with the greatest density is effectively removed from the most visible celebrations of Christendom—those followed on television by millions of faithful at Easter, Pentecost, the Assumption—no decree is needed for the sacrificial dimension to gradually fade from the consciousness of the Christian people. Disuse is enough.
Papal practice does not create a legal norm, but it exercises a paradigmatic function that no one can underestimate: what the Pope routinely celebrates ultimately defines, de facto, what the entire Church perceives as ordinary and preferable. For centuries, the ordinary element of the Roman Rite was the Canon; today, on the great solemnities celebrated by the Successor of Peter, the ordinary element is its absence. Neither at Easter, nor at Pentecost, nor on the Assumption. Will we have to wait until next Holy Thursday—when the proper texts make it little short of inevitable—to hear once again, in a papal Mass, the most ancient and venerable prayer of the Latin Church?
