The Lord’s Prayer in Māori, with English

The Lord’s Prayer in Māori begins E tō mātou Matua i te rangi ‘O our Father in heaven’, the Our Father of the English prayer. This guide prints it in full as a Catholic prayer book printed at Ōtaki in about 1910 sets it out, with the traditional Catholic English beside it, then takes it line by line and word by word, with help saying the long words. It is an early Catholic text: today’s Catholic wording, used at Mass, begins the same way but differs in places, and the page shows you where to find it. A short history of Catholic prayer in Māori, and where the prayer is said, close the guide.

Updated 22 October 2026 · 10 min read

Tap 🔊 to hear an example. Māori examples play Papa Reo, the te reo Māori voice made by Te Hiku Media from recordings of native speakers.

The Lord’s Prayer in Māori and English

This is the prayer exactly as page 2 of Ko etahi karakia mo nga turoro o te Hahi Katorika prints it, with the printer’s spelling, which marks no long vowels, and its own punctuation. From here on the page calls it the Ōtaki text:

E to matou Matua i te rangi: kia whakatapua to ingoa. Tukua mai to rangatiratanga. Kia whakaritea to hiahia, i te whenua, penei me i te rangi.

Ho mai ki a matou aianei ta matou taro o nga ra katoa. Kia wareware koe ki o matou hara me matou hoki e wareware ana ki nga hara o te hunga e kino ana ki a matou. Kaua matou e tukua ki te whakawainga engari whakaorangia matou i te kino. Amene.

And the traditional Catholic English, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops print it:

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.

The title means, word for word, some prayers for the sick of the Catholic Church: tūroro ‘sick person, patient’, as Te Aka spells it today, and Hahi Katorika, the Catholic Church. It is a booklet of 19 printed pages in Massey University Library’s Bagnall collection, and it gives the Lord’s Prayer twice in full, in the morning prayers and again, word for word, in the evening prayers.

Today’s Catholic wording

The prayer said at a Catholic Mass in te reo Māori today is worded differently in places. It is headed Ko te Patere and opens E to mātou Matua i te rangi, kia whakatapua tōu ingoa, almost exactly as the Ōtaki text does, but the lines about bread and forgiveness, among others, are not the same. It is a text authorised by the New Zealand Catholic Bishops Conference, which does not allow its material to be republished without permission, so it is not printed here: the whole prayer is in the Catholic Diocese of Palmerston North’s booklet Parts of the Mass in Te Reo, page 18. If you are learning the prayer to say it at Mass, learn it from there.

The Lord’s Prayer line by line

The left column is the Ōtaki text as printed. The middle column re-spells each line with the long vowels marked, as Te Aka Māori Dictionary spells each word today; those macrons are Te Aka’s, not the Ōtaki printer’s. The right column is a literal reading built from Te Aka’s meanings, with the traditional English line it matches.

Two places read differently from the English. Where the English asks God to forgive our trespasses, the Ōtaki text asks God to wareware ‘forget’ our sins, and the next line says that we too are forgetting the sins of others; Te Aka gives wareware only as to forget, be forgetful. And where the English has those who trespass against us, the Māori has te hunga e kino ana ki a mātou: Te Aka’s first sense of kino followed by ki is to dislike, hate, ill-treat, so it is the people who treat us badly. The bread line uses ngā rā katoa ‘all the days’ for daily.

Word by word

Every meaning below is Te Aka Māori Dictionary’s, with the spelling Te Aka uses. Several of the verbs are in their passive form, which Māori makes by adding an ending; Te Aka lists the endings each verb takes.

The two words for our are not a misprint. The prayer says tō mātou Matua ‘our Father’ but tā mātou taro ‘our bread’: Māori has two kinds of possession, and Te Aka’s note on tā gives the rule, that the a form is used when the possessor has control of the relationship. Nobody chooses their father; we do have charge of our bread. The full system is in Māori possessives: a and o.

How to say the Lord’s Prayer in Māori

Every letter keeps its sound, so once you know the sounds the prayer can be read aloud as written. The Māori pronunciation guide covers them all; these are the ones this prayer tests:

• wh, in whakatapua, whakaritea, whenua and whakaorangia: in most dialects today close to an English f, as Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington’s pronunciation guide puts it. Not w.
• ng, in rangi, rangatiratanga, ngā and whakaorangia: the ng of singer, one sound, never n-g.
• r, in rangatiratanga and whakaritea: a soft rolled r, in Victoria’s words.
• Every vowel is said. whakatapua is wha-ka-ta-pu-a and whakaritea is wha-ka-ri-te-a; whakaorangia keeps both the a and the o of whaka-ora. rangatiratanga is ra-nga-ti-ra-ta-nga, six short syllables.
• Long vowels. The Ōtaki text marks none, but mātou, āianei, ngā, rā and āmene each have one, and a long vowel is held about twice as long as a short one.

For the current Mass wording, the National Liturgy Office of the New Zealand Catholic Bishops Conference publishes an audio pronunciation guide for priests, part by part through the Mass, including one recording for the Communion Rite and Our Father, on its Te Miha page.

Where the Lord’s Prayer is said

• Morning and evening prayer. In the Ōtaki booklet it is part of Ko te karakia o te ata, the morning prayer, which opens with the sign of the cross, and again in Ko te karakia o te ahiahi, the evening prayer, each time followed by the Hail Mary.
• Prayer for the sick. The same booklet, made for the sick, has a short instruction asking for prayers for the sick of the village, followed by the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary given only by their opening words, E to matou Matua i te rangi…
• At Mass. In the Palmerston North diocese’s booklet the priest introduces it and everyone says it together. It does not end with Amen there: the priest goes straight on into a prayer of his own, and the people answer with an acclamation that begins Nōu hoki te rangatiratanga, for the kingdom is yours. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that sequence: the Roman Missal develops the last petition, and the assembly’s acclamation follows.

The Catechism also explains the prayer’s shape. Luke’s Gospel gives a brief text of five petitions and Matthew’s a longer one of seven, and “the liturgical tradition of the Church has retained St. Matthew’s text”, which is the text above.

A short history of Catholic prayer in Māori

Catholic prayer in Māori is as old as the Catholic mission. Bishop Jean Baptiste Pompallier arrived in the Hokianga in January 1838, and Te Ara records that Māori soon named the Catholic faith Pikopo, from episcopal, of a bishop. None of his missionaries knew Māori when they left France, but, as his biography in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography puts it, Pompallier was quick to learn it.

• 1839–1847: printed prayer books. Pompallier’s early works included prayer books or catechisms: the first in 1839 (8 pages), the second in 1842 (96 pages) and the third in 1847 (570 pages). Te Ara says the mission distributed its first printed books in early 1840, and a year later imported a printing press, which produced a large quantity of prayer books, hymnals and sections of the New Testament in Māori. The printery survives in Russell as Pompallier House.
• 1844: Ōtaki. Ōtaki, where the Ōtaki booklet was printed, was one of the mission stations Pompallier founded, in 1844.
• From 1886: the Mill Hill missionaries. Te Ara notes that after the New Zealand wars James McDonald was for many years the sole Catholic missionary to Māori, and that from 1886 the Mill Hill missionaries ministered among Māori Catholic communities in the Auckland diocese.
• 1909. The National Liturgy Office says its Māori Sunday readings still come from a Bible history issued in 1909 as the official Māori text for the Catholic Māori Mission. The prayer book on this page is dated to about the same time, circa 1910.
• 1944 to 1988. Wiremu Te Āwhitu became the first Māori Catholic priest in 1944; Te Rūnanga o Te Hāhi Katorika ki Aotearoa, the National Catholic Māori Council, was set up in 1984; and Max Takuira Mariu became the first Māori Catholic bishop in 1988 (Te Ara).
• Today. The bishops’ liturgy policy, approved in 2015, asks that te reo Māori in the National Liturgy Office’s publications be printed with macrons and signed off by its Māori translation team, and it names NZCBC-authorised texts in te reo Māori as a reference.

The waiata sung from 1 Corinthians 13, faith, hope and love, is set out in E Toru Ngā Mea.

Going further

Not every karakia is a Christian prayer. The traditional ones used to open and close meetings, which name no god at all, are explained in karakia for meetings, and the hymns sung in Māori, from church to state occasions, are in Māori songs everyone knows. Most of the words in this prayer are everyday Māori: matua, ingoa, whenua, taro, rā and katoa all come early in our own free te reo Māori course, along with the possessives and the passive endings the prayer uses.

Sources

1. Ko etahi karakia mo nga turoro o te Hahi Katorika (Otaki: Frank Penn, circa 1910), Massey University Library, Tāmiro, CC BY 3.0 NZ
2. Catholic Diocese of Palmerston North: Parts of the Mass in Te Reo (Ko te Patere, page 18)
3. National Liturgy Office (NZ Catholic Bishops Conference): Te Miha
4. National Liturgy Office: Kaupapa Māori (approved by the NZ Catholic Bishops Conference, March 2015)
5. New Zealand Catholic Bishops Conference: Terms of Use
6. Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 2759–2760 (Vatican)
7. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops: Our Father
8. Te Ara: Rory Sweetman, Catholic Church, page 1: first Catholic missionaries
9. Te Ara: Hirini Kaa, Ngā hāhi – Māori and Christian denominations, page 3: Catholic Church
10. Dictionary of New Zealand Biography: E. R. Simmons, Pompallier, Jean Baptiste François
11. Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington: Te reo Māori pronunciation guide
12. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: tō
13. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: mātou
14. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: matua
15. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: rangi
16. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: whakatapu
17. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: ingoa
18. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: tuku
19. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: mai
20. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: rangatiratanga
21. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: whakarite
22. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: hiahia
23. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: whenua
24. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: pēnei
25. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: homai
26. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: āianei
27. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: tā
28. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: taro
29. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: katoa
30. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: wareware
31. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: hara
32. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: hoki
33. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: hunga
34. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: kino
35. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: kaua
36. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: whakawai
37. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: engari
38. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: whakaora
39. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: āmene