Known in Latin as Adoro te devote, this text was written not for congregational singing but as a private devotion during the later Middle Ages, when Eucharistic piety was turning ever more toward adoration of Christ’s body in the Sacrament. Manuscripts have attributed it to Thomas Aquinas since around the time of his canonization, and though some scholars suspect his name was attached merely to help the poem circulate, no other author is ever named, and hymnals generally accept the traditional attribution. James Russell Woodford’s 1850 English translation made the crucial change that let the poem enter public worship: he turned every first-person singular pronoun into the plural, "I" and "my" becoming "we" and "our," and trimmed the original seven stanzas to four. Lutheran editors later reworked part of the second stanza, since the Latin original addressed the consecrated bread itself rather than the Savior, and reclaimed the stanza’s language of "memorial" to confess not a bare recollection but Christ’s own promise to give His body and blood again in the Sacrament. The tune, ADORO TE DEVOTE, a seventeenth-century French chant, reached English congregations through Ralph Vaughan Williams’s 1906 English Hymnal.
Sung at Our Saviour
2026