The Glory Be

The first half names three and joins them with and. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost receive the same glory in the same breath. The grammar is the argument. The earliest Christian doxologies gave glory to the Father alone, or to the Father through the Son and in the Holy Ghost, and Fortescue records that Arian teachers leaned on exactly those prepositions. Naming the three in parallel takes the prepositions away.

The second half is a claim about time. Glory did not begin when someone first thought to offer it. As it was in the beginning reaches back behind creation. World without end reaches forward past anything you can picture ending. The prayer says your praise is joining something already underway.

Adrian Fortescue, who wrote the article on doxology for the 1909 Catholic Encyclopedia, records that the parallel Trinitarian form became universal in the fourth century as a protest against Arian subordination, the teaching that ranks the Son under the Father as a creature.

The Latin sicut erat in principio went further. Fortescue argues that the words first referred to the Son, so the sense of the second half was as he was in the beginning, so is he now and so shall he be for ever, and he calls in principio a clear allusion to the opening words of John's Gospel. Saying it refused to treat Christ as a latecomer to God's own life.

In 529 the Second Synod of Vaison, in Gaul, recorded that the clause was already used at Rome, in the East, and in Africa, and ordered it said in Gaul as well. Fortescue notes that the synod was mistaken about the East. The words have never been used in any Eastern rite, and Greek Christians complained about their use in the West. Orthodox worship still ends the doxology now and ever and unto ages of ages.

You may have knelt beside someone who landed on for ever while you were still saying world without end. Neither of you is wrong. Two English endings are in use, and they come from different centuries.

The older ending reached English through the Book of Common Prayer. The 1662 text, which the Church of England still publishes in full, sets it as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Catholic and Anglican books carried that wording for four hundred years, and the Holy See still prints it in English in the Compendium of the Catechism.

When the Liturgy of the Hours was translated after the 1970 revision, the United States edition ended on for ever instead. Msgr. Charles E. Pope has written that the committee found the shorter form smoother, that some members judged it closer to the Latin, and that a coming retranslation is expected to restore the older wording. The bishops of England and Wales never dropped it, and their liturgy office still prints world without end.

The two endings run together until the last few words, so you cannot hear the difference coming. Let the room finish, then follow it. The prayer survives a mismatched ending.

This page describes how Christians pray the Glory Be. It carries no ecclesiastical approval, and the AI on this site is software. It is not a priest, and it has no authority to settle a question of doctrine for you or for your church.

One Glory Be closes each decade, said after the tenth Hail Mary. A five decade Rosary therefore holds five of them. Many customs add one more after the three Hail Marys at the opening, which brings the count to six.

In his 2002 letter on the Rosary, John Paul II called the Gloria the high point of contemplation and suggested that groups praying aloud sing it, giving proper emphasis to the Trinitarian shape of all Christian prayer. The Rosary spends ten beads inside a scene from the life of Christ, and the Glory Be is where the scene opens out.

The short prayer many people add next, beginning O my Jesus, comes from the Fatima apparitions of 1917. The same letter describes that concluding prayer as varying with local custom, so a Rosary without it is complete.

Fortescue traces the habit of closing a rite or a hymn with a short verse of praise back to the synagogue. Ending every psalm with this particular verse is a Western habit. Cassian, who died around 435, calls it a special custom of the Western Church, and a medieval tradition credits Pope Damasus with introducing it on the strength of a letter later shown to be spurious.

By about the seventh century the form we know had spread across Western Christendom, with one holdout. The Mozarabic Rite in Spain kept its own wording, ordered by the Fourth Synod of Toledo in 633. One canticle keeps its own ending too. Fortescue records that the Benedicite, the song of the three young men from Daniel 3, has a doxology of its own, the only alternative one left in the Roman Rite.

The 1662 rubric is exact about the body as well as the words. Here, all standing up, it says, before the opening doxology, and it directs the verse to be repeated at the end of every psalm through the year and at the end of the Benedicite, Benedictus, Magnificat, and Nunc dimittis. The Benedicite exception did not cross the Channel.

Lutherans sing it after the psalm and after the Nunc Dimittis. Methodist hymnals set it to music for the close of a responsive psalm reading. If you grew up Protestant and assumed the Glory Be was Catholic property, there is a fair chance you have sung it several hundred times under the name Gloria Patri.

The doxology is a joyful verse, so the Roman Rite sets it down when the church is grieving. Fortescue records that it is dropped on the last three days of Holy Week, and that in the Office for the Dead its place is taken by the verses beginning Requiem aeternam, eternal rest, and Et lux perpetua, and perpetual light.

That silence is worth noticing. A church that says this verse hundreds of times a month stops saying it beside a coffin and through the days of the crucifixion, then picks it up again on the far side. If you have ever found yourself unable to praise, the calendar already has a season shaped like that.

No verse contains it. The prayer is the church's own composition, built out of habits of speech the biblical writers already had. Paul ends arguments this way constantly, at Romans 11:36, at Galatians 1:5, at Ephesians 3:21.

The three names in parallel come from the command to baptize at the end of Matthew, which Fortescue calls the example that set the pattern of naming the three Persons in parallel order.

Even world without end is scriptural English. The King James Version uses that exact phrase to close Ephesians 3:21. Behind it sits the Greek eis tous aionas ton aionon, which Fortescue calls a common Hebraism meaning simply for ever. The line sounds strange today because English moved on.

Try it as punctuation. Read one psalm, out loud if you can, then say the Glory Be. The psalm may be furious, or exhausted, or grateful and a little embarrassed about it. The doxology puts whatever you just prayed back into God's hands without asking you to tidy it first.

It also works when you have nothing. On a night when you cannot assemble a sentence of your own, four borrowed lines are enough to have prayed. Millions of people have said them in exactly your state, half awake and short on words, and the prayer was not waiting on their eloquence.