Memento, Domine

Where the Memento Comes in the Mass §

At a Mass where the priest uses the Roman Canon, there are two short pauses inside the Eucharistic Prayer, one before the consecration and one after. Those are the two Mementos.

The first follows the prayer for the Church, the Pope and the bishop, and asks God to remember the living:

Memento, Domine, famulorum famularumque tuarum N. et N. ... et omnium circumstantium, quorum tibi fides cognita est et nota devotio, pro quibus tibi offerimus: vel qui tibi offerunt hoc sacrificium laudis, pro se suisque omnibus: pro redemptione animarum suarum, pro spe salutis et incolumitatis suæ: tibique reddunt vota sua æterno Deo, vivo et vero.

Remember, Lord, your servants, men and women, N. and N., and all who stand here, whose faith you know and whose devotion is known to you; for whom we offer you, or who offer you, this sacrifice of praise, for themselves and all who are theirs, for the redemption of their souls, in hope of their salvation and safety; and they render their vows to you, the eternal God, living and true.

Roman Canon, the commemoration of the living, as the Holy See printed it for the Mass of 18 May 2025, p. 72 (the omitted words are a rubric). Latin · Our translation.

The second comes after the consecration, and asks God to remember the dead:

Memento etiam, Domine, famulorum famularumque tuarum N. et N., qui nos præcesserunt cum signo fidei, et dormiunt in somno pacis. ... Ipsis, Domine, et omnibus in Christo quiescentibus, locum refrigerii, lucis et pacis, ut indulgeas, deprecamur.

Remember also, Lord, your servants, men and women, N. and N., who have gone before us with the sign of faith and sleep the sleep of peace. To them, Lord, and to all who rest in Christ, grant, we pray, a place of refreshment, light and peace.

Roman Canon, the commemoration of the dead, as the Holy See printed it for the Mass of 18 May 2025, p. 80 (the omitted words are a rubric). Latin · Our translation.

We quote both prayers as the Holy See printed them in the booklet for the Mass that began Pope Leo XIV’s ministry, on 18 May 2025, not from the typical edition of the Missale Romanum (2002), which we could not open from an official source.

Memento is the Latin for “remember”, said as a request.¹ It’s the good thief’s word on the cross in the Latin Bible, “Iesu, memento mei” (Luke 23:42), and it’s what St. Monica asked of her sons as she was dying: “I simply ask you to remember me at the Lord’s altar wherever you are” (Catechism, 1371).

What the Missal Says About the Names §

Both prayers leave a place in the text, “N. et N.”, for names. Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, writing about the 2002 Missal, notes that the letter is an “abbreviation for nomen, ‘name’”.²

In the English Missal, after “N. and N.” in the prayer for the living: “The Priest joins his hands and prays briefly for those for whom he intends to pray.” In the prayer for the dead, after “the sleep of peace”, he “joins his hands and prays briefly for those who have died and for whom he intends to pray” (The Roman Missal, Eucharistic Prayer I, 85 and 95, as the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales publishes it). The Holy See’s booklet for the Mass that began Pope Leo XIV’s ministry gives the same pause in Italian: “Si prega brevemente per coloro che si vogliono ricordare,” one prays briefly for those one wishes to remember (18 May 2025, p. 72).

When several priests concelebrate, the Missal’s instructions say it is appropriate to give each commemoration to one of the concelebrants, who says it alone, “with hands extended, and in a loud voice” (General Instruction, 220 and 223).

That is as far as the texts we could open go. They leave the choice of whom to pray for with the priest, and none of them says whether the names at “N. et N.” are to be spoken aloud or held in silence during that brief prayer.

Are the Names Said Aloud? §

Fr. Zuhlsdorf reads the two N.’s, with the Eucharistic Prayer now said more audibly, as a sign “that priest may speak the names aloud if he so desires.”² Fr. Edward McNamara, a professor of liturgy in Rome, is more reserved. “Specific names of the deceased should not be habitually mentioned during the Eucharistic Prayer,” he wrote in 2009; they belong there “above all” at a funeral or “a significant anniversary of death.” For the living, “With the exception of the pope and bishop, living people are mentioned only on rare occasions,” such as the godparents at a baptism.³ The Archdiocese of Grouard-McLennan in Alberta lets a priest announce a Mass’s intention at the beginning of Mass or in the Prayer of the Faithful “[but never in the Memento for the Dead in the Eucharistic Prayers]”.⁴

One online Catholic dictionary says the Memento of the dead “is always made silently”.¹ The English wording it quotes (“especially those for whom we now pray”) is not the one in the Missal now (Eucharistic Prayer I, 95).

On one point the law is plain. No one, “even if he be a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 22 §3), so a priest names people only where the prayer leaves a place for them. McNamara applies this to the prayers for the dead: the special formulas, found above all in Eucharistic Prayer III, are used only when a Mass for the Dead may be celebrated, and no priest may add such formulas on his own.⁵

So whether you’ll hear a name in the Canon depends on your priest, and on any norms your diocese has given him.

Whose Names May Be Said There? §

The Roman Canon names the Pope and the diocesan bishop (General Instruction, 149). The Holy See limits who else may be named there. Public prayer for other Christians, living or dead, may be offered “during the litanies and other invocations of a liturgical service, but not during the Eucharistic Anaphora,” and “Ancient Christian liturgical and ecclesiological tradition permits the specific mention in the Eucharistic Anaphora only of the names of persons who are in full communion with the Church celebrating the Eucharist” (Ecumenical Directory, 121).

That limit is on the name, not the Mass. “It is open to a priest to apply the Mass for anyone at all, the living as well as the dead” (canon 901, our translation). So a Mass can be offered for a grandfather who was a Methodist, and his name can be said in the Prayer of the Faithful, which we read as one of those invocations, but not in the Canon (the harder cases, one at a time).

A Name Said and a Mass Applied §

If you asked for a Mass on your mother’s anniversary and didn’t hear her name, the Mass was still offered for her.

“Separate Masses are to be applied for the intentions of those for whom an individual offering, however small, has been given and accepted” (canon 948, our translation), and the parish writes the intention in the Mass book, with the Mass once it is said (canon 958). None of the canons on Mass offerings (canons 945 to 958) asks for the name to be spoken. “There is no requirement to mention the priest’s intention at the Mass,” McNamara writes, and “the Mass intention refers above all to the intention of the celebrating priest who took upon himself the commitment to celebrate for a specific intention when he accepted a stipend.”⁶

In 2025 the Holy See told bishops and pastors to make plain to everyone the difference between a Mass applied for a particular intention and “the simple remembrance ... at certain moments of the Eucharistic celebration,” and it called asking for, or even accepting, an offering for such a remembrance gravely illicit (decree of 13 April 2025, Art. 4 §§2 to 3). The decree doesn’t mention the Memento. In our reading, a name the priest remembers there, when the Mass was not asked for that person, is that kind of remembrance: a real prayer, freely given, but not the Mass’s intention.

Names at the Altar, From the Diptychs to the Mass Book §

In the early Church, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1909, “it was customary to write on diptychs the names of those, living or dead, who were considered as members of the Church.” A diptych was a pair of tablets joined by rings or a hinge. The names were read out “either from the ambo or from the altar by a priest or a deacon,” the diptychs of the living included “those who offered the Holy Sacrifice,” and “the recitation of the ‘diptychs of the dead’ is still recalled by the Memento.” The same article says the diptychs did not disappear from Western churches until the twelfth century.⁷

One English abbey’s book of names is in the British Library, as Stowe MS 944. It holds “lists of names of brethren and benefactors of the New Minster, Winchester, recorded for commendation to God during daily mass,” and it carries a drawing, from 1031, of King Cnut and Queen Emma presenting a cross upon the abbey’s altar.⁸ Its title is Liber vitae, the book of life, the words St. Paul uses of his fellow workers, “whose names are in the book of life” (Philippians 4:3).

A parish’s Mass book is a humbler thing, and no source we’ve found traces it back to the diptychs. But it does something like what they did: it holds the name of someone to be prayed for at the altar, and records the Mass once it is said (canon 958; how the book is kept). The software that publishes this library is called Memento after this prayer.

If You’d Like Someone Remembered by Name §

Ask your parish for a Mass to be offered for them (how to ask). That is what makes the Mass theirs, whether or not the name is said aloud.

If you’d like the name heard, ask the office how your parish announces intentions. McNamara and the Archdiocese of Grouard-McLennan name the same places for it: the beginning of Mass, the Prayer of the Faithful, or the bulletin.^{6 4} For a funeral or a significant anniversary, you can ask the priest whether he names the person in the Eucharistic Prayer. Don’t be troubled if he doesn’t.

You can also ask a priest, before Mass, simply to remember someone. Fr. Zuhlsdorf tells of a Roman custom of saying “Memento” to a priest about to say Mass, who may answer “Memor ero”, I will be mindful.² That is a remembrance, not a Mass applied, and as we read the 2025 decree, no offering may be asked or accepted for it.