Adrian Porter sj
Music & Liturgy 49.3 (November 2023)
The collects or opening prayers of the Mass give us a compressed summary of the theology and action of the liturgy of the day “through which the celebration finds expression.”[1]
In the Roman tradition, these prayers are known simply as ‘orationes’ or pronouncements addressed to God by the priest on behalf of the people in a public manner.[2] As such, they are always general in what they ask for – graces that apply to the whole people of God gathered before the altar in the sacred assembly. In their particular manner of doing so, they unfold the mystery of salvation, God’s action in Christ, in its many and mysterious facets, according to the feast day or liturgical season.
The Gallican tradition[3] refers to these prayers as ‘collecta’ indicating that the phrases of these prayers deployed at the beginning of the Mass have the function of collecting together and announcing the principal themes of the day. As such, they are a unique literary form, “highly sophisticated and stunningly concise literary compositions that overflow with surplus of meaning . . . prayer[s] of petition expressed in a single, carefully crafted, concise, prose sentence having somewhat elevated rhetorical style . . . their considerable riches and beauty continue to unfold as they are prayed not only year after year, but even hour after hour in the Offices of a single liturgical day. And as they are repeated again and again, the desires they express will hopefully take deeper and deeper root in those who pray them.”[4]
Together with the readings, and especially the prefaces[5] of the eucharist, the collects are an important place to look if you are preparing the liturgy. The collects are indispensable in the preparation of the homily,[6] but also in putting together introductory remarks to the Mass,[7] in writing the bidding prayers (and especially the introduction to the bidding prayers), in the choice of music texts, and, perhaps too, they may inform any reflection that appears in the parish newsletter.
All celebrations of the Mass are, of course, the same and constant memorial of Christ’s death and resurrection – “the culmination both of God’s action sanctifying the world in Christ and of the worship men and women offer to Christ and through him to the Father in the Holy Spirit.”[8] But the different liturgical seasons and particular feast days, invite us to view this central mystery[9] of our salvation from diverse perspectives which, in their turn, initiate us ever more deeply into the variety of expression of God’s presence and action in Christ. With a little study and attention, the extraordinarily terse and dense phrases of the collects, most of them very ancient, open up new vistas and provide new language with which to speak about God. This is to do theology in the liturgical setting – our prayer shapes our belief and vice versa.[10]
The collects of the four Sundays of Advent set out, in this unique style, the central themes and perspectives of the liturgical season which opens the Church’s year:
- On Advent Sunday I, the collect speaks of running out to meet the coming Christ and possession of the coming Kingdom of heaven. The same eschatological pericope is taken from the three synoptic gospels warning us to “Stay awake!” to meet the coming of Christ.[11]
- On Sunday II, John the Baptist cries in the wilderness, “Prepare a way for the Lord.”[12] The collect picks up John’s theme and tells of heavenly wisdom and the mercy of God.
- We hear the prophetic teaching of John[13] on Sunday III and the collect speaks of the ways in which we will attain joy if we faithfully await the Messiah to whom John testifies.
- On Sunday IV, both collect and gospels tell of the coming of Christ in his incarnation.[14]
After the Second Vatican Council and its key constitution on the revision of the liturgy,[15] those who worked on the new missal[16] chose not to retain the Advent collects of the missal which the Council of Trent mandated and published in 1570, some of which dated back to the eighth century and beyond, but replaced them with other, equally ancient, texts.
The 2010 English retranslation of the third typical edition of the Latin missal (2000) has restored much of the density and depth of the theological content of the Latin collects and has better revealed the way in which these ancient prayers understand the specifically liturgical context of teaching the two comings of Christ – in his incarnation and in his second coming at the end of time. But this new translation also presents a new challenge: the density of Latin thought and expression rendered into the vernacular has made many of the collects much more difficult for the priest to speak and for the people to apprehend.
Two solutions suggest themselves: either we can race through these prayers, tacitly resenting the change, or we can try to make them true to the tradition of the Roman oratio. This can be achieved by preparing the texts in advance (both getting under the skin of their meaning and thinking carefully about their phrasing), speaking them slowly and enunciating in such a way that people have time to latch on to their multiple and densely-packed meanings, and allowing that brief pause to let the import of the prayer sink in before beginning the fixed Trinitarian conclusion (“Through our Lord Jesus Christ your Son . . .”) to the people’s assent in the Amen.
A fault and criticism of the 1971 translations was that they often reduced, or even omitted, the theological content of the collects. For example: “Taking the essential Christian word ‘grace’ out of the key seasonal prayers is a symptom of the deeper doctrinal weakness that is evident in not a few of the [pre-2010] ICEL texts. As others have noted, this is a kind of Pelagianism, the heresy that we save ourselves by our own efforts, not through the grace of God. What we do is what matters, not so much what God does. This led to the mentality that ‘we make the liturgy’ so liturgy is no longer primarily a gift to us from God through the Church; rather, something we fabricate, our work, what we ‘create’.”[17]
So, whatever their shortcomings,[18] the 2010 translations at least restore some of the theological content of these prayers and reclaim something of a tradition and liturgical heritage which was in danger of being lost. This is surely to be welcomed.
Advent I
Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God,
the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ
with righteous deeds at his coming,
so that, gathered at his right hand,
they may be worthy to possess the heavenly Kingdom.
The liturgy of the first Sunday of Advent retains its ancient focus on the end times (in Greek, the eschaton) and the second coming of Christ. The origins of Advent are obscure but it seems that, in the ancient church, it was an eschatological season rather than a preparation for Christmas. Curiously, the expert committee (the coetus) set up by the Council to devise the revised liturgical calendar actually explored the question of whether Advent should be the closing season of the Church’s year (with its focus on the eschaton) or the beginning of the Church’s year (with a focus on the birth of Christ). The vote was two to three with two abstentions.[19]
The text of the collect for the first Sunday of Advent comes from the eighth century Gelasian Sacramentary,[20] adapted for the 1970 missal.[21] This process of using and adapting ancient texts is known as centonization.[22] There is good evidence to suggest that St Gregory the Great (c.540-604) himself centonized a collect for this Sunday from two sources found in, but which significantly predate, the Gelasian Sacramentary and then added some words of his own. The prayer is now used on the Friday of the first week of Advent (“Stir up your power, we pray, O Lord . . .”). Sometimes Roman orationes were used more or less complete with few changes; in other cases, a great deal was changed or a new prayer created with fragments for ancient texts. In all this, the authors of the revised missal guarded against archaeologism (the use of ancient texts solely on the grounds that they were ancient texts). What was important was to use or re-use prayers, or fragments of prayers, that had solid patristic provenance or expressed theological or prayerful concepts in an authentic and attractive way, often alluding to, but characteristically not directly quoting, biblical sources.
The prayers of the first and fourth Sundays of Advent are unusual in their syntax as the verb comes first in the sentence (“Grant your faithful . . .” and “Pour forth . . .”), underlining the urgency of asking before addressing God by name. Urgency is characteristic of the Advent season.
We pray for the “resolve” to meet the coming Christ with good deeds and thereby to merit possession of the heavenly kingdom. Note that, in the original text, it is clear that this resolve comes not from ourselves but from Christ. If we are truly God’s faithful people, then our good deeds should naturally be part of who we are as we run forth to meet Christ at his coming. Our meriting the heavenly kingdom is, as St Paul teaches, “not having righteousness of my own . . . but that which is through faith in Christ . . .”[23] The collect employs a vivid allusion to the gospel of the sheep and the goats[24] as we are “gathered at his right hand” with the sheep.
The phrase “at his coming” reflects the Advent focus on Christ’s first coming at his incarnation, celebrated in the Christmas feast, and his second coming at the end of time. As this collect was originally a postcommunion prayer, it interestingly adds a third advent – the coming of Christ to his people in the sacrament of the eucharist.
A particular change in the way prayers are translated in the 2010 English missal is to revert to referring to God’s people (the congregation here gathered in the liturgical assembly) as “they” rather than “we”. This can still feel strange to those brought up on the 1971 translation but, as well as rendering the Latin more accurately, it makes us ask the question “Do I want to be part of this ‘they’?” It no longer makes the easy, and perhaps presumptuous assumption, that I am one of the runners forth with righteous deeds – the prayer genuinely becomes a petition-prayer, begging this Advent grace for myself.
Advent II
Almighty and merciful God,
may no earthly undertaking hinder those
who set out in haste to meet your Son,
but may our learning of heavenly wisdom
gain us admittance to his company.
The collect for the second Sunday of Advent is also sourced from the Gelasian Sacramentary.[25] It appears in eight other manuscripts dating from the eighth to the eleventh centuries[26] which attest to its use as an Advent prayer.[27] The revisers added “and merciful” to the ancient text (centonization) to underscore the Advent theme of these collects – an all-powerful God achieving his merciful ends through the work of the incarnation.
Again, there is the idea of setting out in haste to meet the coming Christ, as we did the previous Sunday.[28] And we pray that nothing, no earthly preoccupations (opera terreni), hinder our hurrying, so that (introducing a new idea here) we may be schooled (eruditio) in heavenly ways of thinking (sapientiae caelestis). This echoes the epistle for Advent II C: “never stop improving your knowledge and deepening your perception so that you can always recognize what is best.”[29]
This opposition of earthly concerns and heavenly ways is a common theme of collects but here the language is much more direct and memorable – the hindrance of earthly undertakings and the learning of heavenly wisdom. This is precisely the sort of thing that can begin to inform a homily or introduction to the Mass. The effect of this better choice of heavenly things is that it obtains for us admission into the company of Jesus. As we learn heavenly wisdom from the Master, we become his disciples. Christ becomes our way, our truth and our life rather than earthly preoccupations.
Advent III
O God, who see how your people
faithfully await the feast of the Lord’s nativity,
enable us, we pray,
to attain the joys of so great a salvation
and to celebrate them always
with solemn worship and glad rejoicing.
The collect of the third Sunday is the only Advent collect to use the “qui” construction which is the standard way of composing a collect-type prayer: God is called upon (“O God . . .”) and then some characteristic or action identified (using the qui clause, “who . . .”) which makes it clear that an aspect of God’s being or action (“who see how your people faithfully await . . .”) can assist us in the specific thing we pray for (“the joys of salvation” and “celebration” and “glad rejoicing”). This is followed by the fixed Trinitarian formula (as Christian believers in the God who is Three in One we pray to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit) and the people make the prayer their own by acclaiming “Amen”.
This collect was sourced for the new missal from the sixth century Ravenna Scroll.[30] It presents us with the powerful image of God seeing his people, expectantly and constantly, keeping them in view, as they await the feast of the Lord’s nativity.[31] God waits on us. We wait on the coming of the Lord on the feast day. This state of affairs, we pray, will lead us to the joys of salvation and the jubilation of the liturgical celebration.
The themes of joy (gaudia) and jubilation (laetitia) echo the introit of this Gaudete Sunday (“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice.”[32]) and is presumably one of the reasons the compilers of the revised missal recovered this ancient collect and returned it to use in the liturgy.
Advent IV
Pour forth, we beseech you, O Lord,
your grace[33] into our hearts,
that we, to whom the incarnation of Christ your Son
was made known by the message of an angel,
may, by his passion and cross,
be brought to the glory of his resurrection.
The collect for the fourth Sunday of Advent is found in some sixty manuscript sources from the eighth century onwards[34] and was popularized in the Angelus. The prayer was the postcommunion prayer for the feast of the Annunciation[35] in the 1570 Trent missal but was also identified as a collect or prayer for use in Masses of Our Lady especially in Advent.[36] Evidence seems to suggest that this prayer was a true collect which was pressed into service as a postcommunion prayer and has been returned to its original use as a collect in the 1970 missal.[37]
This collect prepares us for the gospel of the day[38] and is comprehensive in setting out the whole mystery of salvation – from the moment of the annunciation, through the incarnation, to the passion and cross, and finally to the resurrection. In this great arc of God’s action in Christ, we are brought to glory. The petition of this collect, that God’s grace is poured forth into our hearts, opens us up to the realization of what is going on, of what God is achieving in us as we journey through the liturgical celebrations of these mysteries. It is a grace that is, characteristically, poured out as “gift for you: a full measure, pressed down shaken together, and running over . . .”[39] This is a good example of the sort of oblique scriptural allusion which abounds in the phrases of these old Roman collects.
Conclusion
The silence the missal recommends between the invitation to pray (“Let us pray”) and the words of the collect is necessary for people “so that they may become aware of being in God’s presence and may call to mind their intentions.”[40] It is difficult to know what intentions the people should pray for if they have not already been told in the priest’s introductory remarks.[41] A brief, silent settling into a prayerful attentiveness to the presence of God can genuinely help a deeper understanding of the collect, always a challenging prayer, such that the people are led to that “full, conscious and active participation in liturgical celebration”[42] that the Council so desired and prized.
These prayers of Advent set out the liturgical-theological store. The collects of the Roman liturgy represent an astonishing treasure house of new and old – the publicly spoken and awe-inspired proclamation across the generations of what God has done for us in Christ. These prayers maybe deserve more attention and more care than they often receive.
Notes
[1] General Instruction on the Roman Missal (2010) n.54
[2] Josef Jungmann sj, The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development (1955) vol.1 p.360
[3] From apostolic times, the Gallican tradition developed independently of Rome in what is today France, Spain, northern Italy and western Germany. These non-Roman rites were largely supplanted by local enthusiasms to adopt the Roman rite and, ultimately, by Charlemagne’s (747-814AD) desire for uniformity of liturgical practice across the empire.
[4] Lauren Pristas, The Collects of the Roman Missals (2013) p.212-213
[5] Preface is not to be understood in its modern sense of a foreword but as an integral but variable part of the eucharistic prayer (the anaphora) – it is a paean of praise (from the Old Latin praefatio meaning ‘praise’).
[6] “The preacher is asked to see the constellation of the readings and prayers of the celebration as crucial to his interpretation of the word of God.” Homiletic Directory (2014) n.16
[7] “The priest himself or some other minister may also very briefly introduce the faithful to the Mass of the day” GIRM (2010) n.124
[8] Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994), n.1325
[9] The use of the word ‘mystery’ needs some explanation so that it is not confused with the modern usage meaning mysterious and unknowable. In the Christian tradition, from apostolic times, ‘mystery’ is used to describe God’s action in Christ for the salvation of the world, something revealed and made plain by Jesus Christ and to be “proclaimed from the rooftops” (Luke 12:3), but unfathomable in its reach and generosity.
[10] A process summed up in the Latin maxim “lex orandi lex credendi” (the law of prayer is the law of belief).
[11] Year A is Matthew 24:37-44. Year B is Mark 12:33-37. Year C is Luke 21:25-28, 34-36.
[12] Year A is Matthew 3:1-12. Year B is Mark 1:1-8. Year C is Luke 3:1-6.
[13] Year A is Matthew 11:1-2. Year B is Mark 1:6-8, 19-28. Year C is Luke 3:10-18.
[14] Year A is Matthew 1:18-24. Year B is Luke 1:26-38. Year C is Luke 1:39-44.
[15] Second Vatican Council (1962-65), Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963)
[16] Published in 1970 (the First Typical Edition) and revised with corrections in 1971.
[17] Bishop Peter Elliott, Hear the difference: the new translation of the Roman Missal (2011) at The Australian Confraternity of Catholic Clergy website www.clergy.asn.au/hear-the-difference (accessed 18.8.23)
[18] And there most certainly remain shortcomings. Many of the translations are beautiful, some require careful preparation to make them work for a listening congregation, and a few are un-speakable. One of the unforeseen but entirely understandable consequences of the new English translations is that more priests now resort to paraphrase than ever seemed to change the texts on their own authority previously.
[19] Coetus 1 (on the liturgical calendar) Schema n.65 de calendario 2 p.11-12 (15 March 1965)
[20] Gelasianum Vetus 1139. The manuscript (c.750AD) is in the Vatican collections. Many of the collects for the weekdays of Advent in the 1970 missal were also sourced from this manuscript.
[21] Cuthbert Johnson osb, The Sources of the Roman Missal in Notitiae 32.17 (1996)
[22] The complexities of this prayer and the subsequent emendations for the 1970 missal are discussed by Lauren Pristas in The Collects of the Roman Missals (2013) p.43-46
[23] Philippians 3:9
[24] Matthew 25:31-46 – a phrase fresh in the memory from the gospel assigned to the previous Sunday, the feast of Christ the King (Year A)
[25] Gelasianum Vetus 1153
[26] It should be noted that these are the extant sources we have in our possession today. The prayers were presumably already in existence and use for many years, perhaps centuries, before the dates of these source manuscripts.
[27] Pristas, p.47
[28] This is an allusion to the parable of virgins in Matthew 25:1-13 but also resonates with John 11:20: “When Martha head that Jesus was coming, she went and met him . . .”
[29] Philippians 1:9
[30] Rotulus Ravenna 25 ver.1356. The manuscript is kept in the Bodmer Stiftung at Geneva.
[31] This phrase is an addition of the 1970 missal. The original manuscript has “qui conspicis populum tuum incarnationem dominicam” – “. . . who see how your people faithfully await the incarnation of the Lord”.
[32] Philippians 4:4-5 – a new testament text that has very ancient usage during Advent.
[33] This is a good example of where the 1971 ICEL missal inexplicably chose to translate the Latin ‘gratia’ as ‘love’ rather than ‘grace’.
[34] cf. Eugenio Moeller et al., Corpus Orationum (1991-99), vol.IV 2748
[35] In the Milanese Rite, the Annunciation is celebrated on the fourth Sunday of Advent – the 1970 missal adopts that idea in making this Annunciation prayer the collect for the fourth Sunday. This is true in a few other places where the revised Roman Rite incorporates texts or ritual from other Catholic but non-Roman rites. Two of the weekday Advent collects are from the ninth century Bergomese Sacramentary (for Advent Week 3 Tuesday and the Mass of 22 December)
[36] Placide Bruylants, Les Orasions du Missel Romain: Texte et Histoire (1952) vol.2 p.156
[37] Pristas, p.54
[38] Year A Matthew 1:18-24 – This is how Jesus Christ came to be born. Year B Luke 1:26-38 – The angel Gabriel was sent by God. Year C Luke 1:39-44 – Of all women you are most blessed and blessed is the fruit of your womb.
[39] Luke 6:38
[40] GIRM (2010) n.54
[41] Experimentally but now discontinued, the 1971 English translation of the missal offer brief summaries of intention before the collect was prayed.
[42] Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963) n.14
Fr Adrian Porter sj is parish priest of Edinburgh Jesuit Church and currently Chair of the Society of St Gregory.