The Te Deum Laudamus, we praise you, God, is one of the oldest and most widely used hymns of praise in the Latin liturgical tradition, sung at the close of the monastic office of Matins on Sundays and feast days and used to mark occasions of major thanksgiving in the life of the church for well over a thousand years. Its authorship was traditionally assigned in a popular legend to Ambrose and Augustine composing it together, spontaneously and in alternating verses, at Augustine's baptism in 387, a story modern scholars do not accept as historical.
In the early twentieth century the liturgist Dom G. Morin proposed Niceta of Remesiana as the hymn's real author instead, building his case chiefly on a cluster of manuscripts of Irish origin that preserved the Te Deum alongside other works connected to Niceta, and the English scholar A. E. Burn developed the argument further in his study of Niceta's life and writings, for a time making Niceta the leading scholarly candidate for the hymn's authorship.
Later scholars, including Cagin, Wagner and Blume, challenged the strength of this manuscript evidence, and current assessments describe the case for Niceta as suggestive rather than demonstrated, leaving the Te Deum's true authorship formally unresolved even though Niceta remains the most frequently proposed specific candidate. This entry accordingly treats the ascription to Niceta as the strongest but still unproven scholarly hypothesis rather than as settled attribution.