Kyrie

There are other examples in the text of the gospels without the kyrie 'lord', e.g. Mark 10:46, where blind Bartimaeus cries out, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me."

In the biblical text, the phrase is always personalized by an explicit object (such as "on me", "on us", "on my son"),[2] while in the Eucharistic celebration it can be seen more as a general expression of confidence in God's love.

As early as the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great noted that there were differences in the way in which eastern and western churches sang Kyrie.

Kýrie, eléison (Κύριε, ἐλέησον) Christe, eléison (Χριστέ, ἐλέησον) The Kyrie is the first sung prayer of the Mass ordinary and is usually part of any musical setting of the Mass, one exception being the early English school, whose liturgy featured a troped Kyrie that was therefore proper to the day.

Polyphonic settings can be found in five (or four) movements, calling for alternatim performance, i. e. alternating with Gregorian chant or with organ versets.

[6] Louis Bouyer, a theologian at Vatican II, claimed that there was a distortion of the Eucharistic spirit of the Mass over the centuries, so that "one could find merely traces of the original sense of the Eucharist as a thanksgiving for the wonders God has wrought.”[7] The General Instruction of the Roman Missal (GIRM) notes that at the Council of Trent "manuscripts in the Vatican ... by no means made it possible to inquire into 'ancient and approved authors' farther back than the liturgical commentaries of the Middle Ages ... [But] traditions dating back to the first centuries, before the formation of the rites of East and West, are better known today because of the discovery of so many liturgical documents" (7f.).

This is explained by Mark R. Francis of Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, speaking of the Kyrie: Its emphasis is not on us (our sinfulness) but on God’s mercy and salvific action in Jesus Christ.

For example, “you were sent to heal the contrite,” “you have shown us the way to the Father,” or “you come in word and sacrament to strengthen us in holiness,” leading to further acclamation of God’s praises in the Gloria.

It means enlarging the scope of prayer, so often narrow and selfish, to embrace the concerns of the whole Church and, indeed – as in the Our Father – of God.”[9]In the New Dictionary of Sacramental Worship, the need to establish communion is reinforced as it quotes the GIRM to the effect that the purpose of the introductory rites is “to ensure that the faithful who come together as one establish communion and dispose themselves to listen properly to God's word and to celebrate the Eucharist worthily” (GIRM, 46, emphasis added).