Fractio Panis: A History of the Breaking of Bread in the Roman Rite. By BARRY M. CRAIG.

Abstract

At the Second Vatican Council a bishop asked for ‘true ritual, true bread, true wine, gesture significant in itself, words which supply clear significance’. There is a certain irony that the breaking of the bread, which seems to have become a short-hand reference to the eucharist in the first generations of the Church, was for many centuries effectively invisible within the celebration. Barry Craig takes us through the history of the fraction from the Jewish origins into the increasingly ritualized and expansive ceremonial of the established Church when the fraction and communion were increasingly distanced from the eucharistic prayer by various devotions, often associated with the perceived need for careful preparation for communion. The Lord’s Prayer of course was a very early addition. While in some churches, as in the East, it came before the fraction, in Rome, the centrepiece of Craig’s study, it came afterwards until Pope Gregory I moved it to directly after the eucharistic prayer.