The other meaning of the word liturgy, which is now common in all the Eastern Churches, limits it to the supreme official service to the sacrifice of the Holy Eucharist alone, which we call the Mass in our rite. This is practically the only sense today in which Leitourgia is used in Greek or in its derived forms (e.g. Arabic al-Liturgy) by an Eastern Christian. When a Greek speaks of the “Sacred Liturgy,” he means only the Eucharistic ministry. For the sake of clarity, perhaps it is also better to keep the word in this sense, at least when we speak of Eastern ecclesial affairs; Not to mention the Byzantine canonical hours as liturgical services. Even in Western rites, the word “official” or “canonical” will work as well as “liturgical” in the general sense, so that we too can only use the liturgy for the Holy Eucharist. These sample sentences are automatically selected from various online information sources to reflect the current use of the word “liturgy.” The opinions expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us your feedback. is sometimes used to include any form of public worship, but more strictly, it refers to the form of observance of the Eucharist. As the development of the simple form of its institution in primitive ecclesiastical liturgies took various forms, and it was only gradually that certain distinct types began to assert themselves: namely, the Roman, attributed to St. Peter, in Latin, and spread throughout the Roman Catholic Church throughout the world; the Ephesians, attributed to St. John, embraced in corrupt Latin the ancient Scottish and Irish forms that can only be heard in a few places in Spain today; the Jerusalem attributed to St.
James, in Greek, in the form of the Greek Church and in translation of the Armenians; the Babylonian, attributed to St. Thomas, in Syriac, always by the Nestorians and Christians of St. Thomas. Thomas uses; and the Alexandrian, attributed to St. Mark, in Coptic jargon Græko used among the Copts; These all contain some common elements, but differ in order and in minor parts; the Anglican liturgy is taken from Roman literature; other Protestant liturgies or forms of service are mostly modern in nature and come from sources of Sacred Scripture. The liturgy has everything to do with how people pray in public. In fact, this name comes from the Greek word leitourgia, which means “public service, worship of the gods”. In Christianity, the liturgy is a special service to the sacrament of the Eucharist. But each religion has its own form of liturgy or a fixed way of performing certain rituals of worship.
The liturgy is the usual public ritual of worship performed by a religious group. The liturgy can also be used to refer specifically to the public worship of Christians. [1] As a religious phenomenon, the liturgy represents a community response to the sacred and participation in the sacred through activities that reflect praise, thanksgiving, remembrance, supplication or penance. It is a basis for building a relationship with God. Subscribe to America`s largest dictionary and get thousands of additional definitions and advanced search – ad-free! The different Christian liturgies are each described under their own names. (See ALEXANDRIAN LITURGY; AMBROSIAN LITURGY; LITURGY OF ANTIOCH; CELTIC RITE; Clementine liturgy, treated in CLEMENT I; RITE OF CONSTANTINOPLE; GALLIC RITE; LITURGY OF JERUSALEM; MOZARABIC RITE; RITE SARUM; SYRIAN RITE; SYRO-JACOBITE LITURGY.) In this article, they are considered only from the point of view of their relationship with each other in the most general sense, and it relates what is known about the growth of a solid liturgy as such in the early Church. The Jewish liturgy are the prayer recitations that are part of the observance of rabbinic Judaism. These prayers, often accompanied by instructions and commentaries, can be found in the Siddur, the traditional Jewish prayer book.
In general, Jewish men are required to pray three times a day in certain periods (zmanim). Whereas, according to most modern Orthodox authorities, women only need to pray once a day, as they are usually freed from time-related obligations. Each public prayer requires the presence of a minyan, a college of 10 adults. And yet, the whole series of actions and prayers did not depend only on the improvisation of the celebrant bishop. While scholars were once inclined to conceive of the ministries of early Christians as vague and indefinite, recent research shows us a very striking uniformity in some salient elements of service at a very early stage. The trend among students now is to allow something like a regulated liturgy, which seems to be largely uniform in capitals, even in the first or early second century. First of all, the basic scheme of the rite of the Holy Eucharist was given by the account of the Last Supper. What our Lord did then, the same thing He commanded His disciples to do in remembrance of Him. It would not have been a Eucharist at all if the celebrant had not at least done what our Lord did the night before his death.
Thus, everywhere from the very beginning, we have at least this unified core of a liturgy: bread and wine are brought to the celebrant in containers (a plate and a cup); He places them on a table on the altar; He stands before her in the natural attitude of prayer and takes her in his hands, grace as our Lord did, pronounces again the words of the institution, breaks the bread and gives consecrated bread and wine consecrated to the people in communion. The absence of the words of the institution in the Nestorian rite is not an argument against the universality of this order. It is a rite that developed quite late; the parental liturgy has the words. The word liturgy (/lɪtərdʒi/), derived from the ancient Greek technical term (Greek: λειτουργία), leitourgia, which literally means “work for the people”, is a literal translation of the two words “litos ergos” or “public service”. At its origins, these were the often expensive offerings made by the rich Greeks in the service of the people and therefore of the polis and the state. [2] Through the Leitourgia, the rich bore a financial burden and were rewarded accordingly with honor and prestige.
