The aim of these reformers [i.e. the mid-20th century pastors who revised the liturgies] was certainly not, as has sometimes been alleged, to restore what is discovered from the past as normative for the present and to eliminate from modern practice all later developments as inauthentic....As a very obvious example of the desire not to put the clock back to the fourth century absolutely but to include what appeared to be appropriate later developments, we may point out that the text of the eucharistic prayer of the Apostolic Tradition has in no instance been adopted verbatim an any church today. On the contrary, various additions and amendments were made to it, as, for example, the near universal insertion of the Sanctus. All modern revisers have similarly believed it to be important to include a penitential unit within their eucharistic rites, in spite of the fact that such a thing is never found in the oldest texts that we possess.
